No happy endings on Boardwalk Empire
Even after four years, Boardwalk Empire remains one of TV’s most richly detailed period dramas. The Prohibition-era saga of gangsters, grifters, gunrunners and political gasbags ends one of its grittier, more gut-wrenching seasons this weekend with a finale titled, appropriately enough, Farewell Daddy Blues.
Of Boardwalk Empire’s four seasons to date, this season has also been the hardest to like, in part because of wild shifts in tone from one episode to the next — much of the action took place in Al Capone-era Chicago, 1920s New York and the Florida Panhandle rather than Empire’s original boardwalk setting in a whiskey-soaked Atlantic City — and in part because there was so much death, pain and grief for regular characters fans have been familiar with since the beginning.
Last week’s episode, Havre de Grace, turned on the heartstopping moment toward the end, when hard-luck damselin-distress and increasingly desperate single mother Gillian Darmody, played with a brittle resilience by Gretchen Mol, was revealed as a murderess by a Pinkerton detective (Ron Livingston) who had wooed her and made her believe that all was going to turn out well in the end.
Anyone there from the season’s beginning couldn’t help but sense there was something slightly off about the well-mannered, too-good-tobe-true suitor who swept Darmody off her feet with promises of marriage and security and a life lived happily ever after. And they were proven right last week.
No one lives happily ever after in Boardwalk Empire. (Sunday, HBO Canada, 9 p.m.)
■ There are any number of long-running TV programs that have changed actors in midstream over the years, with different actors playing the same character. Bewitched, Dallas and, more recently, Spartacus, are just three popular programs that survived the transition.
Few series, though, have been so audacious — or original — as to bring back actors to have played the same character in the same episode, where different actors playing the same character meet face-to-face and solve an adventure together.
Doctor Who, that trippy, timeless sci-fi fantasy about a time-travelling eccentric and universal problem-solver, has done it not once but several times — first in 1972, with The Three Doctors, and again in 1983, on Doctor Who’s milestone 20th-anniversary episode The Five Doctors.
Doctor Who’s 50th-anniversary episode, The Day of the Doctor, features just two Doctor Whos, both of them recent: David Tennant, who played the Doctor from 2006 to 2010, and Matt Smith, who has played him most recently and will officially step down in Doctor Who’s Christmas special, to air on Christmas Day.
Happily, The Day of the Doctor also features two of the actresses who have played Doctors’ companions over the years: Billie Piper, who was Rose Tyler in Tennant’s debut season; and Jenna Coleman, who, as Clara Oswald, tagged along with Smith’s Doctor this past season and will return in the new year alongside the next Doctor, Peter Capaldi. (Saturday, Space, 2:50 p.m.; repeated at 8 p.m.)