I loved HBO’s Boardwalk Empire from the first minute. I thought it was beautifully shot, well written, and had one of the greatest casts from top to bottom of any show I’d ever seen (I don’t know if it’s possible to top a cast led by Steve Buscemi, Kelly MacDonald, Michael Pitt, Shea Wigham, Jack Houston, Michael K. Williams, Gretchen Mol, Michael Shannon, Stephen Graham, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Dabney Coleman among others). I loved how the show could be daring, how no fictional character seemed safe, and how the show would start slowly as each season introduced new characters, themes, and plots, only to pick up at about the midway point and then sprint toward the season finale with each episode being more tense and explosive than the last. I loved that each season wound down with the new revelations and character developments making a second viewing of each episode not only rewarding but almost necessary. And yet for all of that, Boardwalk Empire’s conclusion left me with a bitter taste in my mouth far beyond what I felt for other dramas with divisive finales like The Sopranos, Lost, and (to a lesser degree) the Wire.

Coming into this final season I was upset with the time jump to 1931 and about only getting 8-episodes to say goodbye to the show (which had previously had 12 episodes a season, meaning this year was only 2/3rds of a typical BE season). As the final campaign began there was still a lot to love even if in many cases some of the good things seemed either rushed or too late. For example, the flashbacks showing Nucky Thompson’s rise were very interesting and added a lot of color to certain scenes and character relationships this season, but the flashbacks would have been far better if the scenes had come earlier in the show’s run because they gave us a much deeper understanding of who Nucky was, what drove him to do the things that he did, and how he became the mysterious man we had watched for five-years. It seemed a little late in the game to attempt to add depth to a character who, for most of the show’s run was (regardless of the great acting job by Steve Buscemi) probably the weakest leading man of all the great antihero-centric dramas that sprung up after the Sopranos. Had they come earlier in the show’s run, the flashbacks would have kept Nucky at the forefront of the show, but instead for four-seasons we had watched Nucky fade into the background of his own show and disappear behind more colorful and exciting characters like Jimmy, Arnold Rothstein, Al Capone, Margaret, Chalky White, and – perhaps the show’s most memorable original character – Richard Harrow. My unhappiness with the finale ties to Richard as well as the fact that a show that had done a great job at staying unpredictable began telegraphing its punches so blatantly in the final season.

It was obvious to me from the first second we met ‘Joe Harper,’ that the young would-be protégé hanging around Nucky was likely to be Tommy Darmody, but it seemed too sloppy to me for a show that had always been so precise because the ages didn’t seem to line up (based on my knowledge of history, Tommy would have been 14 at the oldest in 1931). However, that was only a small part of what concerned me with Tommy’s appearance and his pursuit of vengeance against Nucky for what Nucky had done to the Darmody family. Tommy’s knowledge that Nucky had murdered his father and betrayed his grandmother stretched credulity to the breaking point, but another thing that has been gnawing at me ever since we saw Tommy kill Nucky (and get arrested directly after): Richard Harrow’s entire storyline throughout seasons 3 and 4 is now meaningless.

Richard Harrow is probably the most beloved character to come out of Boardwalk Empire. A sniper in the US Army who had half his face destroyed by a bullet during World War I and wore a poorly painted tin mask to cover up his wounds, Richard returned home from the Great War so broken both physically and emotionally that he had lost his moral compass. Richard became close to fellow-soldier Jimmy because good-looking Jimmy – with his toddler son Tommy and pretty young wife Angela – was if anything even more damaged internally than Richard was. After Jimmy’s death at the end of season 2, it seemed that Richard’s role as a character on the show had died too, but instead he became a richer character as he tried to take Jimmy’s advice and ‘come back’ from the horrors he had witnessed, perpetrated, and endured in WWI and beyond. The prime mission in Richard’s life became taking care of the orphaned Tommy and trying to give him a better life, something that he saw would be impossible if Tommy was forced to stay under the care of his manipulative and mentally ill grandmother Gillian. Gillian chose to raise Tommy in a brothel she ran, and in order to free Tommy from that brothel and from Gillian, Richard mounted an assault on the gangsters who had taken over Gillian’s mansion in the season 3 finale and rescued Tommy.

However we found out in season 4 that Tommy was not totally free from his grandmother’s reach. Richard had brought him to stay with his girlfriend and later wife Julia Sagorsky but Gillian was pressing her own claim on the boy and in order to give Tommy a truly clean start, Richard was forced to take on one more mission for Nucky. Richard sent Tommy and Julia to Richard’s sister’s house in Wisconsin, but he struggled with having to kill again and he made a mistake, killed an innocent person, and was himself mortally wounded in turn. He died dreaming of the better life he had built for Tommy in Wisconsin. But the show ended with Tommy coming back and murdering Nucky in front of federal agents, meaning he is going to be arrested for premeditated murder and either jailed for life or even executed. Two seasons of Richard risking everything and eventually losing his life to save Tommy had been thrown away in order to have a neat symmetrical end where Tommy killed Nucky by shooting him in precisely the same place under the left eye where Nucky shot his father.

And now we come to the biggest problem with Tommy’s actions against Nucky: how did Tommy even know Nucky did anything to deserve such vengeance? Not only did Gillian almost certainly never tell Tommy that Nucky had murdered Jimmy, it would have been incriminating because her story to the world was that Jimmy had overdosed on heroin in the bathtub of her mansion. Richard almost certainly never told Tommy about what happened to Jimmy, and those who raised Tommy (Julia, her father, and Richard’s sister and brother-in-law) had no knowledge of Jimmy and almost none regarding Gillian and Nucky. Gillian lost custody of Tommy when he was somewhere around 6 or 7-years-old, meaning that the complexity of Nucky’s betraying the 12-year-old Gillian and giving her to the Commodore (whom Nucky knew to be a pedophile) would be lost on Tommy. And that brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves in any kind of fiction: a character being punished for something that we in the audience know that he or she did but that the other characters in the show (or book, movie, play, or whatever) would absolutely have no knowledge of.

It can be tempting for any writer to turn their story into a kind of morality tale – Nucky did bad things, and therefore he was punished for them; it is a common trope in fiction. However I had thought that with Boardwalk Empire, creator Terrence Winter was aiming higher and trying to give us a great character study and examination of crime in the 1920s-30s. In real life people do bad things all the time and no one ever finds out – although admittedly, most of those things don’t involve murder: people cheat on their spouses, steal from friends/family/strangers, and hurt people and they often get away with it. We in the audience know what Nucky did because we got to be there to watch him do them, but how on earth would Tommy know enough not just to be mad at Nucky, but to leave his home in Wisconsin and travel around 1,000 miles (during the Great Depression no less) with the intent to murder him? Yes it was poetic justice for the audience to see Nucky killed by a Darmody after he had done so many awful things to the family, but in real life there isn’t always such a clear answer and many times people get away with the awful things they do.

I am fine with the fact that Nucky died as I don’t always require happy endings, but the way it happened cheapens the show in so many ways as to leave me angry at the ending of a show I had loved from the beginning. I thought I was watching a character study that refrained from judging the characters for the often grotesque and despicable acts they committed, but at the end it turned into a morality tale that all boiled down to: don’t shoot the son of a 12-year-old girl who you handed over to a pedophile under his eye, or his son will track you down and shoot you under your own eye.