One Small Scene: “Tommy, close your eyes.”

Unlike the romance of a great deal of 1920s gangster dramas, the last remaining Rossetti soldier in The Artemis Club has a pistol pointed to little Tommy Darmody’s head. Richard Harrow, a war veteran turned enforcer has come to rescue the boy, the tin mask covering half a face devastated by injuries sustained in World War 1.

Crouching down, holding the rifle carefully while the man bellows to put it down, in the guttural murmur Richard always speaks due to his condition, Harrow asks Tommy to close his eyes, and a shot after seeing Tommy do so, Richard whips up the rifle with one hand, evaporating the last threat, and we see the small boy running to hug the kneeling man through the bloody windowpane.

The blood on the pane represents what the house has become, what it always was really. Bought with the blood of a wealthy monster, transformed into a whorehouse and place of degradation, oppression and crime. It’s obscured a character who notably is half blind due to injuries, and a child who is rather depressingly already on an arc of childhood trauma. The Artemis Club, an artful 1920s piece of architecture shelters people who are thoroughly repugnant or lost. It was the house of The Commodore, Tommy’s grandfather and a notorious pederast and criminal, who, after being slain by his son has the manor taken by Gillian Darmody, a tragic and twisted figure who, scheming with New York gangster Gyp Rosetti sees the house overrun by thuggish bootlegging hitmen, cleared out from the place with the unexpected attack of the revengeful Richard taking care of the boy and doing as large a job as any to remove the invading gang army from Atlantic City.

The cross of the window’s pane also reminds me of bars, and the place being a place of confinement, the spectre of imprisonment certainly fits given the Prohibition-era story with its focus on criminality and the horrors of war. Harrow faces the struggle of being an introverted individual whom cannot eat properly, drink without a straw, and struggles with an identity crisis and longing for family. Tommy is a child raised in a brothel, struggling to remember a mother who was murdered, and pushed with the criminal legacy of a father who also went to an early grave. The artificiality of the gaudy building each lived in, then at the end are seeking to escape may as well be an arena or prison, somewhere big, imposing and frightening, where bullets are the only way to leave, and kindness is a very fleeting and ephemeral thing indeed.

It’s a sweet hug after an awesome and impractically good headshot. Margate Sands is my favourite finale of one of my favourite shows, and this moment stands out for being warm, a moment you can cheer for while holding the darksome and gothic quality of the whole crime series. 

Reference: Margate Sands, Boardwalk Empire. HBO. Season 3, Episode 12.