That dude who whispered in his ear was Gaston Means. I assume that his part in this setup and negotiating with Mellon was very important.
And as much we've seen about Means - he is the master of manipulating others, he is probably even better than Nucky at this, but they are at the same team in this angle.

There was a conversation between Eli and Nucky where Eli said "you just have to offer them something want" and "you're the man with all the angles". After that conversation Nucky's face expression indicated that he figured something out. I assume Means was the first person he contacted afterwards.

Pretty clear that I have my thumb on the pulse of this show.

Yea, pretty much my point. This was an all T's crossed I's dotted operation put together under great duress by Nucky Thompson, and crew. Those who know the actual history I am sure know what the implications of it all will be. For those like me who don't, I'm not going near a wiki article until this thing is over. Is too good to ruin.

I don't see why Mellon would be understanding or care about Nucky's predicament.

If Nucky is running the distillery I guess he has reason to assume he's insulated and is going to be making some money. He doesn't have the same agreement or level of trust with Rothstein, who he clearly doesn't know at all. What was going to be an investment turned into a liability.

My point is that if Mellon knew Nucky gave the distillery to Rothstein without his approval he'd care more about burning Nucky than Rothstein, no?

It's a minor point I just don't think Nucky was honest with Mellon on what went down.

How would Mellon know that Nucky gave up the distillery? Mellon's phone call seemed to insinuate that the still was hijacked by criminals, in this case AR. Mellon has no prior knowledge of Nucky's war and eventual ticket out of the jam

Nucky lied to Mellon and said it was hijacked in order to burn AR

aside from that being a bit of a stretch, why didn't masseria send both guys back in the box then? im not saying the show is bad, its just more style than substance.

gillian knows the exact amount of heroin to debilitate a man of gyp's size? and then her plan was? and good thing that same amount of heroin also simply knocks her unconscious for a while

we last see richard packing his guns. then we get a montage of gangster violence. what has richard been doing this whole time, just watching the house? for how long- a week? two? whats his plan, just hope that all of the men leave en masse? oh good thing he was there waiting when a truce was called and 32 of the 40 people left.

whats the point of killing masserias men as they drive back to NY? they have peace and presumably dont need another war. whoops.

richard going call of duty while gyp, in his house and with his men, with cover, says run. from one man. okay.

and why do nucky and eli show up at the brothel alone? nucky and elis plan was to take on gyps muscle? by themselves? yes, good thing they allocated their army of men to killing masserias so they could take gyp on themselves. just think, if g.i. richard didnt show up first or our main character would be dead!

gyp is being protected by two men with guns on the beach. oh but gyp is doing an impression of nucky and whoops it was so convincing we forgot that it was gyp we were guarding and let some random just shiv our boss. and rather than shiv gyp and then be told by nucky to **** off maybe we tell gyp that nucky is waiting around the corner in his car and we take those guys with guns and kill him and eli derp derp derp.

and im not even going to tackle the stuff with AR and the distillery. im sure theres some sense to be made of it but mellons actions certainly dont make much sense from what we know about the character.

+1

I'm pretty sure that "exact amount" is "a lot". Even that, may be her plan is stupid, that's the character, not the show. Not every character's actions need to be intelligent or consistent. Something not going the way you think it should doesn't make it bad.

So next season, are they going to bring in another 1 season antagonist?

If so, wouldn't mind it being a good black actor now that Chalky will probably have the club up and running.

If not, a lot of fringe characters will be dying next season.

So much fail. I cant be bothered going through it all now but every single one of your points is either refutable or just ridiculously petty.

because of a decision made by Nucky. Mellon is only in this predicament now because of Nucky. So the question I have is, why has Mellon not gone after Nucky, or at least severed ties with him? Maybe this might still happen.
Although I tend to believe that Nucky still has access to his distillery moving forward because I think he'll be re-paying Capone in booze for his muscle. So I'm quite keen to find out what arrangement Nucky has now secured with Mellon, perhaps with the support of the manipulative Means.

Because Mellon is not aware he is being manipulated by Nucky in order to have AR taken down. Mellon is not aware that Nucky willingly gave up the distillery

yea, i want to be petty against a good tv show. okay.

I think the plan was to drug him, attach him and wait for nucky to kill him.

btw she could have just strangle him with the belt

It's totally valid that all those things took away from your enjoyment of the show, but it's very hard to see what you've wrote and not think that you were looking for things to dislike and/or not really making much effort to attempt to understand why things don't make sense to you.

Or make it look like he died "during"

Maybe he didn't kill the other guy. Wasn't the other guy some kind of prohibition officer?

Like Dids said, "a lot" of heroin is enough. No, Gillian doens't know the exact dose, but anything large enough will incapacitate Gyp long enough for her to kill him.

Why is it unlikely? It seemed pretty clear even after last episode that Richard was concerned with rescuing Tommy; why wouldn't he be scouting out the place waiting for an opportunity?

As a show of strength and a warning to Masseria not to start trouble with Atlantic City again.

A professional soldier armed to the teeth getting the drop on some untrained gangsters is unrealistic?

"Some random?" Tonino is one of Gyp's top lieutenants. They showed him two episodes ago as the guy whose cousin Gyp beat to death with a shovel.

Well, you don't seem to be paying enough attention to recognize who Tonino is, so of course you don't understand what is going on here.

"Paul Openfold" is a pretty great screen name.

Would Masseria have made a deal like that with Rothstein IRL?

[QUOTE=nath;36032831]

A professional soldier armed to the teeth getting the drop on some untrained gangsters is unrealistic?


/QUOTE]

Nath pretty much hit everything, but this is something I feel like people are missing as well. Gyp's men are basically untrained security guards compared to Harrow. This is a microcosm of why Gyp would never beat Nucky as well. Gyp thought it was all about firepower, Nucky showed him that it wasn't.

The harrow scene execution was pretty awful. He walks in the front door with several guns showing, and no one does anything? Are Gyp's men really thinking that there's no chance the house comes under attack? Harrow then shoots a few people close range with what I think is a sniper rifle and while everyone runs around in panic he just watches, putting his hand to his holster and waiting to pull out his pistol until he gets to the center of the room. In the meantime apparently all of Gyp's gangsters... and Gyp himself... are so awestruck that during their gangland war someone would ever fire a gun at them, that they don't fire a single bullet.

I'm not sure when the first bullet is shot back at Harrow because it happens off screen while we're watching Gyp hiding. After that, Gyp stands in the middle of the most open room and picks off people without getting fired back at. Anytime someone does fire at Harrow, they are taking several seconds to aim at close range while Harrow just shoots them. The climbing the stairs scene is awful, because they show Harrow turn a corner then shoot the villains, but then they show the panned out angle and show that the entire staircase is visible from the bottom. Also Harrow keeps putting his gun down, then when he sees someone aims and shoots... just have it aimed already.

Entire scene was just awful and a huge letdown.



In regards to Eli and Nucky walking in by themselves, the pans of the dead bodies and people whispering stuff like "omg what happened" made me believe that the army was there, and everyone was inspecting the house. While I complain that the main characters in this show do too much of the dirty work themselves, I think it's safe to assume that the soldiers went in with Nucky and Eli, and Nucky and Eli are just shown climbing the stairs to save time.

Mellon's involvement makes no sense to me at this moment. Nucky gave Rothstein something which Nucky doesn't own. Everyone in this agreement should have realized that, and no idea why Mellon would help.

Confused by the Lucky plotline as well, need to rewatch that.

Enjoyed the few scenes about the Capone/Chalky Chicago gangsters/black gangsters tension.

The numbers seemed really low for Gyp's men, and was apparently running this whole deal with 9 mean beforehand..well I guess 12 before that guy tried to kill Gyp. WTF didn't Nucky just kill him earlier? I've found it a stretch that Nucky doesn't have any muscle but I guess it's explained by them running off when Masseria backs Gyp. But nine guys... 9. Nine. Nucky has the entire police department, he has all of Chalky's black gangsters, he has friends in New York. Mickey is apparently running a distillery in AC, who runs that?

Nucky couldn't find enough people to kill 9 guys? Also begs the question of why Nucky Owen after Masseria instead of just taking out Gyp.

Some people have said they like Masseria, but he seems like a total tool to me. Every single scene he's in is just him being manipulated into doing things for other people. Then he comes in... in person and gets pissed of when things aren't going well. He hasn't displayed the least big of intelligence or capability to get anything done.

This episode was alright I guess, caused me tilt a bit due to the stuff I mentioned already though. Has nothing on how great the last episode was. I think that this season tried to be too formulaic like they were afraid they would lose the audience. The season would have been much better if the writers didn't feel the need to have a typical storyline progression of build up followed through to a huge climax. This entire episode, and parts of the season, was just forced, and ended up creating a lot of problems. It would have been fine with me if there was no climatic shoot outs and we just followed the characters. This episode was kind of like a break from any character development (which the show excels at)so we could watch some people shoot each other (which the show does incredibly poorly).

/rant

Would have been cool if they showed the two goons that were there when Gyp died after he got shanked with a shocked looked on their faces, maybe guns drawn to Tonino, and him just walking away. Showing they were not incredibly fond of Gyp anymore either, but not enough so to kill him themselves (or fearing some other guy of Gyp's would kill them for it, which would at that point only be those 2 guys themselves).

Like someone said, of course Tonino could have gone there and turned on Nucky and Eli, but he had enough reasons to hate Gyp (his cousin, leaving him at the house with Rambo). Only tiny beef that would be left there is that Nucky & Eli couldn't actually know that Tonino truly hates Gyp by now.