As he sleepily watches twin strippers gyrate in his hotel room and cops a fake smile for photos with his costar, Johnny comes to terms with the vapidity of showbiz, which pointedly contrasts with the time he passes in the company of his young daughter (Elle Fanning). But while we get the sense that Johnny is headed toward something, for the most part the movie is content to hang with him as he spins his wheels, soaking up the dimly lit decadence of the place celebrities check into when they want to seem “real.” In a high-ceilinged conference room with a panoramic view of SoHo, not far from where she lives with her husband, Thomas Mars of the French band Phoenix, and their two children, Coppola reflected on the shift from “Marie’s” militant girliness to “Somewhere’s” idle masculinity, why the personal roots of her movies aren’t where many would think, and the importance of hearing a stripper’s hands squeak on the pole.

What was the first piece of “Somewhere” that fell into place for you?

I was living in Paris after “Marie Antoinette.” I took a year off and I had a baby. I was thinking about what I wanted to work on next, and a character came to mind, a simple portrait. I wanted to do something from a guy’s point of view, after “Marie Antoinette” was so girly, just to shift gears. Just looking at lots of stories, the portrait of an actor, the Chateau Marmont, this character came to mind.

“Marie Antoinette” was almost defiantly girly. What interested you about taking on a male point of view?

It’s less familiar, so it was just kind of challenging, intriguing to picture what his experience might be like — the whole thing with his experience being more stripped down and minimal, not in this decorative, girly world. With “Marie Antoinette” I got to really indulge my feminine side. This was a different side of my personality.

Some of the more condescending reviews of “Marie Antoinette” made a facile equation between you and your protagonist, as if you were the flippant queen dousing herself in luxury. Partly that’s because you don’t stand back from your characters and judge them.

I try to take the point of view of the character, so you’re in their world. I try to be empathetic to them, because why would you care about connecting with a character unless you can see things from their point of view. I can see how it’s easier to be sympathetic for a less spoiled, privileged person.

People persistently criticize you for making movies about these kinds of privileged characters. Are you ever tempted to change gears and make a movie about a kid boxing his way out of the slums?

I know those worlds. I don’t think I’d be able to add something to a kid boxing his way out of the slums, because I don’t know that experience. I’ve been around these worlds. The world [of the Chateau Marmont] is familiar to me. It’s not my reality, but I think it relates so much to our fascination today with celebrity culture that it’s fascinating to see another side of it.

You open “Somewhere” with a static shot of Stephen Dorff’s Ferrari driving in circles around a desert racetrack, which not only sets up his character’s personal stasis but keys the audience into the fact that it’s not going to be a movie in which a ton of things happen. It’s been described as a two-hander between him and his daughter, but a lot of it’s about him being alone — a one-hander.

It’s a portrait of him, and then she comes into it for a while and it turns into a kind of buddy thing. What I set out to do is a portrait of this guy at this moment in his life, and right at the beginning I wanted to set up so you know where he’s at and what kind of guy he is.

When did the daughter come into the story? Was she there from the outset?

I started with him, and maybe because I had just had a daughter and I was thinking about how that changes your life and perspective, I was thinking about how would a guy like that deal with having a kid.

You had your second child in May, and the movie premiered in September. Was it mostly done by then?

It was editing, so I finished the movie and then took time off. But I had taken time off when I had my daughter, and I was in that world with her, spending a lot of time at the park with the baby, so I was thinking about that, and trying when I was writing to put in what was in my mind, what was personal to me.

You’re talking about taking time off for your kids, but Dorff’s character doesn’t do that at all. He takes his daughter with him on a business trip to Italy, but it seems as if his career has largely kept them apart.

I feel like he became famous a couple years ago and kind of got caught up in all that and is out of balance, and spending time with her reminds him of parts of his life, or himself.

People have called the movie semi-autobiographical, which seems to be pushing it.

Just because he’s a father and I have a father it’s autobiographical. I don’t really get that. Someone else said, “In your father’s films, they eat food. In your films they eat food.” I was like, “Are you serious?” It’s definitely personal. I put personal memories and experiences of trips with him in the movie. But my childhood was so different.

The Chateau Marmont in “Somewhere,” the hotel in “Lost in Translation,” Versailles in “Marie Antoinette,” even the cloistered suburban world of “The Virgin Suicides” — it seems as if a sense of place is key to the way you conceive your movies.

It’s one of the starting points. I usually start with a character and then the place follows soon after, but with “Lost in Translation” I started with wanting to do something in Tokyo. I think that’s always a big aspect of it. I wanted to feel like when you go to a movie that you’re in this other place for two hours. It’s part of creating the atmosphere.

What was the calculation as far as how much plot to add? The atmosphere is so lovely and so precisely drawn you almost don’t want anything to happen.

I don’t know. It was just feeling my way through it intuitively, trying to balance this mundane aspect of being with this guy, but also have enough happen that you’re still engaged.

Was that balance there at the script stage, or was it something you found in editing?

When I went back and looked at the script afterward, it’s pretty much like the movie, where usually I move things around in editing more. This one was pretty close. Except for the Chris Pontius Guitar Hero stuff — that was improvised.

The movie is so attentive to detail. I love the scenes where Dorff has the twin strippers come into his room and you hear the squeak of their hands as they pole dance. So often when movies go into strip clubs, it feels like an excuse for some gratuitous T & A, but you don’t present it as that kind of fantasy world. How did you decide to present the scene that way?

I thought about the whole thing of wanting to show it not like in a movie, but more naturalistic. In reality, they’d have to install these poles, and there’d be the squeaks, all the things that make it more like real life. I like that they’re not perfect and slick, they’re awkward and cute. I always like those real-life details, those little moments that you find funny or touching. I try always to avoid movie-like things.

You grew up in and around moviemaking. Is wanting to push away from things being “movie-like” a reaction to that?

I feel like it’s more from watching movies. You see things a lot, the things that are more generally in movies. A lot of movies recently just bombard you with the soundtrack, song after song, so in reaction to that I wanted to see how sparse we could be with the music and use it intentionally. I like trying to show the side of life where you can’t express yourself. In movies, they say all their feelings, but I think in life you’re not always able to communicate what you’re feeling, or you think of it after it’s too late. I try to put in the things I notice from life, and avoid movie clichés.

In Atlantic City, corruption is the normal state of affairs, but when the wheels are properly greased, it stays beneath the surface. It’s only when the waters are muddied that women are gunned down on the boardwalk and apprentice bakers turn up in fishing nets. Nucky Thompson rightly saw Prohibition as a king-sized business opportunity, but the booming business has brought unwanted rivals sniffing around. Now, with an election approaching and the season’s plotlines coming to a head, it’s time to settle scores and cut deals, so everyone can go back to getting rich.

Arnold Rothstein’s war with Nucky Thompson has been more a product of their mutual dislike than conflicting business interests, and with an indictment for fixing the World Series hanging over his head, Rothstein swallows hard and turns to Nucky, the one person he knows who can buy off a high-ranking official in Illinois. The move is suggested to him by Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, who after having found themselves at the wrong end of Jimmy Darmody’s pistol have belatedly realized that backing the D’Alessio brothers was the wrong play. Johnny Torrio organizes a seaside summit, and he brings Al Capone (also of Brooklyn) along to help keep the peace. The last time this group of men were in each other’s company, they were joined by the late Jim Colosimo, whose lack of interest in the liquor business got him killed, a fact Lucky recalls with a crass remark. Al, in his grown man’s hat, tells him to stop acting like a kid.

Rothstein is able to put his animus aside only after a talking-to from his henchmen. On Nucky’s side, the dynamic is reversed. Nucky, pragmatic to the last, quickly sees the wisdom in burying the hatchet, although he makes it hurt, demanding a million dollars in cash from Rothstein as well as the location of the surviving D’Alessios. Jimmy is incredulous that Nucky can put a price on personal insult, but he’s learning that for Nucky, nothing — or at least very little — is personal. As they wait for the election returns to filter in, Jimmy confronts Nucky for acting as the Commodore’s procurer, delivering his 13-year-old mother to the old man and caring for their bastard offspring. What Jimmy took for love was merely duty, or perhaps guilt. Which was it, he asks Nucky. Nucky’s reply is laced with exasperation and contempt: “What difference does it make?”

It’s hard to understand sometimes how Nucky can be so casually cruel, especially to those who have made the mistake of getting close to him. But an answer, or at least part of one, comes to light after Margaret joins her fellow Catholics on a Halloween prayer walk through the cemetery and spies the single gravestone for Nucky’s wife and his six-day-old son. Since leaving Nucky, she’s been staying with Nan Britton, Harding’s tragically deluded mistress, and talking about leaving town, perhaps working in a shop in Margate. But she, who has lost two pregnancies herself, needs to know what happened, so she visits Nucky, and he tells her.

His story begins almost innocuously, with the birth of his frail and sickly son — an image that throws new light on the scenes from the pilot episode of him staring at the premature babies in storefront incubators. Having just been made treasurer, he was preoccupied with his work, and terrified to boot, so he stayed away, never laying hands on the baby until more than a week after his birth. When he finally did take the baby from his wife’s shoulder, he realized that the child had been dead for days, and she’d been caring for a corpse. Doctors said she only needed time to reconcile the loss, and although Nucky knew better, he says ruefully, “I was so very, very busy.” A few week’s later, she slashed her wrists with his razor, lashing out at him with her final act.

That, of course, would explain Nucky’s attachment issues, his rage at Hans Schroeder for beating Margaret until she miscarried, and at her for using contraception, foreclosing the possibility that she and Nucky might have a child. As much as he resents Margaret’s intrusion in his affairs, he’s in love with her, or at least her family, and on some level would like nothing more than being compelled to take Hans Schroeder’s place.

Unfortunately, as the product of an abusive household himself, Nucky compulsively pushes away anyone who gets too close. Jimmy’s naked need for reassurance repulses him, and he recoils at his brother Eli’s assumption that the job of sheriff is his so long as Nucky rules the roost. Nobody gets anything for free, not even his flesh and blood. As soon as Nucky’s mayoral candidate is declared the winner, Nucky gets him to reinstate Eli as sheriff, only a few months after unceremoniously removing Eli from his post to make a show of cleaning house. In Nucky’s mind, that squares things, and Eli should understand that the occasional bump in the road is just the nature of politics. But whether or not Nucky had his law enforcement bait and switch planned from the beginning or not, he never let Eli in on the scheme, leaving him to twist in the wind until Nucky’s power base was solidified once again. Nucky’s actions leave a dangerous seed of resentment behind, one that will surely bear fruit. As the episode ends, Jimmy learns that Eli and the Commodore have been hatching a plan to knock Nucky off his throne, one whose details we’ll have to wait until the second season to learn.

Jimmy takes some of his frustrations out on an unlucky D’Alessio brother’s neck, cutting deep into the flesh and wiping his knife on the man’s shirt as he swiftly bleeds to death. Al and Richard Harrow dispatch the others, allowing Nucky to claim that the perpetrators of the woodland massacre that opened the season have finally been brought to justice. Agent Van Alden had Jimmy pegged for the crime, but he couldn’t make his case, and now he has other problems. After murdering his subordinate — a death we now learn is chalked up to a heart attack in the line of duty — he’s looking to get out of the city altogether, buying into his uncle’s feed business in Schenectady. His wife’s protestations have little effect, although she’s sly enough to remind him that fighting bootlegger’s is “doing God’s work,” but when Lucy Danzinger shows up at his office claiming she’s carrying his baby, he may have found a reason to stay in town after all.

Van Alden may be “Boardwalk Empire’s” most tormented soul, or simply its most flagrant hypocrite, but he incarnates its governing principle that no one’s motives are pure, and that what we imagine as “normalcy” is merely a figment. The Commodore’s long-suffering maid turns out to be the one who was poisoning him, and the woman Angela Darmody took to be her fantasy lover has left her with only a postcard from Paris. They’re all hacking their way through the world, trying to get through life without losing themselves in the process. Good and evil coexist in each person, and even those who know them best know only a piece of them — a law that covers self-knowledge as well. “There’s a kindness in you,” Margaret says to Nucky, as she attempts to reconcile his charitable bent with his most inhumane acts. “How can you do the things you do?” Nucky’s response is both credo and confession: “We all have to decide for ourselves how much sin we can live with.”

Proof of Hardeen’s theorem — or least part of it — is only a few feet away, in the queasy face of Harry Prince (Michael Badalucco), who has just lost his entire fortune to Charles Ponzi. (If you’re keeping track of the timeline, that puts the episode in mid-August, 1921.) Perhaps Harry didn’t want to be swindled, and certainly not ruined, but he wanted something else badly enough to ignore something he knew couldn’t be true. It’s an axiom of the con man’s trade that you can’t taken anyone who isn’t willing to be taken. Self-interest is the most potent form of misdirection.

In many ways, Margaret is less naive about Nucky Thompson than she’s ever been. She’s seen the extent of his corrupt empire laid out in black and white. But knowing the length of Nucky’s reach only served to make her attracted to him. Whether she’s aware of it or not, she’s attracted to his understanding of power, and wants some of her own. Even Van Alden’s unsettled accusations that Nucky had a hand in her husband’s death don’t cause her to deviate from her course. It’s only when she finds Nucky getting slightly too comfortable with Harry’s mistress — now herself destitute after Harry stole back the money she’d been lifting from him — that Margaret sees through to Nucky’s Machiavellian core. He does have genuine affection for her, unless he’s deceiving himself as well, but he’s using her nonetheless, to shore up the women’s vote with an unexpectedly challenging election only a few months away.

Nucky hasn’t been seeing her too clearly, either. When the tensions between them finally give way to a full-blown fight, he counters her (unanswered) accusation of murder by venting his anger over the fact that she’s been postcoitally douching with Lysol in order to avoid getting pregnant (following the advice laid out in “Family Limitation”), a bizarre thing for him to take offense at given that he has no evident desire to marry her or any desire to have a child. (One doubts he raised similar objections with Lucy Danziger.) He’s attracted to Margaret in part because she reminds him of his late wife, but the fact that she’s actively avoiding getting pregnant by him gives the lie to his subconscious fantasy. She won’t be complicit in his illusion.

“Paris Green,” the title of this week’s episode, refers to a brand of rat poison as well as as a prized pigment, a particularly vivid shade of green that could only be achieved with a mixture including large quantities of arsenic. Jimmy’s mother, Gillian, has been slipping the toxic substance into the Commodore’s food, pushing him near enough to death that she can insist his son — that is, her son — come to visit. The powerful father Jimmy alluded to turns out to be Atlantic City’s former power broker, who bedded Gillian when she was 13 and gave his aide Nucky Thompson the job of making sure the child was looked after. The Commodore’s need for reconciliation was great enough to look past the unlikeliness of her suddenly choosing to bury the hatchet, and it nearly costs him his life. Was Gillian trying to kill him, and does she only stop because Jimmy discovers her plan? Or was her goal to force Jimmy and his father to reconnect, knowing there was no other way Jimmy would pay him a visit? Perhaps it started as the former and moved into the latter, as the rift between the Commodore and his protégé grew deeper and she realized he might be looking for a more palatable heir. “The wrong man’s running this town,” the Commodore tells Jimmy when he finally drops by. The notion seems to make Jimmy uneasy enough to vomit, although we later realize it’s due to the arsenic-laced cookie he took from his father’s bedside.

It isn’t greed that’s kept Agent Van Alden from spotting the deception under his nose, but arrogance, and the ease with which he assumes that those who fail to do their jobs as well as he thinks he does his must be simply incompetent. Unfortunately for Agent Sebso, Van Alden is paranoid as well as a megalomaniac, and he’s been stewing over Sebso’s story of shooting a key witness in self-defense for some time. Van Alden regards everything about Sebso as suspect, from his Jewish faith to the ease with which he uses a pair of chopsticks. But his relentless grilling is enough to rattle Sebso’s cool, and when he puts in for a transfer, Van Alden smells weakness. Sebso, looking to get Van Alden off his back, appeals to Nucky for advice. Nucky gives him the approximate location of a bootleg distillery in the woods, but what they find instead is a black congregation in the midst of a riverbank baptism. Seeing a fellow man of god, Van Alden is confrontational rather than congenial, but the pastor’s defense of his faith wins Van Alden’s respect. Van Alden throws Sebso in the water as if to forcibly convert him to Christianity and instill the fear of hellfire that looms so large in Van Alden’s mind. But when Sebso fails to repent, the baptism becomes a drowning. The congregants watch as Van Alden holds his colleagues body under until he stops kicking, unable to act against a white federal agent with a loaded pistol.

Last, and most poignant, Jimmy’s wife, Angela, makes her final plans to run off to Paris with the photographer’s wife, leaving Jimmy a “Dear John” letter and walking out the door with her suitcase in one hand and her son’s hand in the other. But when she gets to their studio, she finds they’ve gone, run off in the middle of the night, presumably with the transatlantic tickets she’s bought. By the time she gets home, Jimmy has read her letter, leaving her alone, betrayed and trapped. Deception requires a willing partner, and she has none.

In the first scene of “The Emerald City,” scarred war veteran Richard Harrow dreams himself whole, reaching out to a woman on a beach. But his face turns to the familiar one-eyed mass as he is awakened by the screaming of Margaret Schroeder’s daughter. Awakenings, rude and otherwise, prevail this week. In Chicago, Al Capone learns that it’s time to stop acting like a punk; first, his boss Johnny Torrio upbraids him for putting explosive loads into his cigarette, and then an elderly Jew at a gangster’s bar mitzvah advises Al to put on a yarmulke, rather than wearing “the cap of a boy.”

In Atlantic City, Jimmy and his family walk by the photographer’s studio and his son points to a picture of the owner and his wife in the window: “That’s mommy’s kissing friend.” The boy means the wife, of course, but Jimmy goes straight for the husband, dragging him out onto the boardwalk and beating him with his own tripod. (Note that Jimmy tells Angela to “ask your son” when she asks what’s wrong, a callback to Jimmy’s fears about his own paternity.) It’s a false wake-up call for Jimmy, but a real one for his wife, and the photographer’s as well. As the photographer mends his broken bone, his wife regales Angela with tales of bohemian, sexually liberated Paris, where two female “kissing friends” can live in relative peace.

With woman’s suffrage finally ratified, Margaret takes Nucky up on his offer to act as distaff power broker, introducing his favored mayoral candidate with an inspirational speech that’s more impressive for its utter disingenuousness. As she takes her seat on the dais, she bathes for a moment in the glow of her accomplishment, but then she spies Nucky at the back of the room, laughing loudly with his political cronies as Nucky’s puppet drones on. That is where real power lies, not in speeches.

Agent Van Alden, meanwhile, is forced to realize just how fragile is his delusional worldview. Still blind to Sebso’s bumbling betrayal — Erik Weiner plays his post-shooting debrief wonderfully, looking like a chagrined child as he says the killing of a key witness will “haunt me the rest of my days” — he feels his tenuous authority slipping away, and so he makes a desperate play for Margaret’s affections. He worms his way into Nucky’s love nest and holds out a photo as if he’s questioning a witness, but the woman he wants Margaret to identify is herself an unblemished teenager taking her first steps on American soil. “When I look at this girl,” he says, crazy-eyed, “I see hope. Yearning. The promise of a new life. The promise of America. What happened to that girl, Mrs. Schroeder?”

The answer is simple: America happened to her. Margaret has managed to reinvent herself, but only by abandoning her ideals, the innocence that Van Alden sees in that long-ago picture. (Considering that he knows that, at 16, Margaret had already had her first miscarriage, he’s deluding himself even there.) When she was naive, she was abused, her unborn baby killed by her drunken brute of a husband. Now, she has power and status and even the vote, but with each week, she sees more clearly the morass of corruption and deceit that makes the country run. Prohibition has strengthened it, and in Atlantic City it doesn’t bother to hide, but Nucky’s trip to the Republican National Convention made it clear that these are only amplifying and not transformative factors. The America of which Van Alden speaks doesn’t exist, and if it did, he wouldn’t be welcome there.

A good part of the information on the D’Allessios is conveyed not by Eli but by his right-hand man, Deputy Halloran, who till now has mostly been seen as a bumbling meathead. But with Eli laid up, Halloran sees a chance for advancement, so he’s on his best behavior. “I’m at your service, now and in November,” he tells Nucky after convincing him to make him acting sheriff; no sooner has he gotten the job then he’s looking to replace Eli permanently. As it turns out, that’s not a bad idea. The question of what the city’s sheriff was doing in an illegal casino at 3 a.m. opens a door Nucky would sooner keep sealed, especially with a squeaky-clean Democrat challenging the city’s obliging Republican mayor. The idea that Eli might have been doing his job is apparently too far-fetched for anyone to believe.

Margaret, meanwhile, is babysitting Harding’s mistress, Nan Britton, who’s being kept on ice until after the election. Nan sees herself as the self-sacrificing woman behind a powerful man, accepting their separation because “the country needs him.” As Margaret puzzles that one over, the camera cuts to reveal an advertisement for the Democratic mayoral candidate — a reminder that Nan’s not the only woman with a man to help.

The question is what Margaret gets out of the transaction. Woman’s suffrage is close to ratification, but the extent to which that will translate into political power is still up in the air. As she and Nan shop for clothes in Belle Femme, Madame Jeunet (Anna Katarina) approaches her erstwhile shopgirl with a request: The payments due to her local alderman have recently doubled, and the financial strain is crippling her. (That, or she just doesn’t care for her dwindling profit margins.) Perhaps Margaret, with a direct line to Nucky, can intervene on her behalf?

Madame Jeunet coaches Margaret on to best way to employ her feminine wiles, telling Nucky that if Belle Femme goes under, she will have no one to make her look pretty. Margaret, however, tries the direct approach, and hits a brick wall. “This is not a suitable topic,” Nucky huffs, collecting his coat. Later, in a moment of postcoital calm, Margaret follows Madame Jeunet’s approach, and the results are markedly different. “That’s why you wanted her to stay in business,” Nucky asks, with the look of an indulgent father. “Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?” Not the most feminist way of getting the job done, but it works, and Margaret claims her payment in the form of a free dress from Belle Femme. No more shoplifting for her: She earned this one. (A more forceful vision of female power appears in the episode’s penultimate scene, in the substantial form of vaudeville legend Sophie Tucker, played by “One Life to Live” regular Kathy Brier. With her anti-flapper physique and sailor’s mouth, she’d make Madame Jeunet green at the gills, but she’s muscled her way to the top of the heap.)

With his territory under siege, Nucky wants Jimmy to come down hard on the D’Allessios, but before Jimmy will take the job, he wants Nucky to understand he’s dealing with an equal and not a disciple. The first condition, he tells Nucky, is that their discussions will be private, man-to-man, with no intermediaries or onlookers. Second, he’s going to make Nucky ask for what he wants, both as a way of forcing Nucky to reconcile himself to the kind of man he is and, although this part goes unspoken, as leverage should their situations diverge again. In other words, Jimmy won’t “take care” of the D’Allessios unless Nucky will spell out exactly what that means. Just because Nucky never pulls the trigger doesn’t mean he’s not a killer, and Jimmy has the power to make him admit it.

Nucky’s getting his protection in place just in time. In New York, Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky formalize their relationship with the D’Allessios and their oily collaborator, Mickey Doyle, signing life insurance policies with Rothstein as the beneficiary just to ensure they don’t mess around. As Rothstein deals with the D’Allessios, the look of disgust never quite leaves his face, but he’s planning a major move into the liquor trade, trafficking in high-end British whiskey rather than the diluted paint thinner that is Mickey’s speciality, and he wants Nucky out of the way. The D’Allessios don’t need it spelled out for them.

Jimmy hasn’t quite connected all the dots, but he does so with an assist from his mother, with whom he’s apparently been discussing more than the care of her grandson. Gillian may admire Lucky’s performance in the sack, but she’s loyal to her son. After she’s satisfied her urges, she slips out of the room, taking Lucky’s gone with her, and leaves her naked beau to Jimmy’s attentions. We know Lucky can’t be killed, of course; he’s got more than four decades ahead of him. But it’s not looking good as Jimmy hustles him down the stairs at gunpoint, during which Lucky lets slip that the D’Allessios are taking orders from Rothstein. Lucky makes the mistake of thinking his adversaries know more than they actually do, and so inadvertently brings them up to speed.

One of the most enjoyable aspect of “Boardwalk Empire” is the extent to which no one gets anything exactly right. They’re always missing a piece of the puzzle, or getting the right answer for the wrong reasons. As Nucky shoves Luciano around a corner, he runs into Agent Van Alden and his hapless inferior, Agent Sebso (Erik Weiner), who’ve been belatedly tipped off to Jimmy’s return to Atlantic City. Van Alden thinks Jimmy is his ticket to Nucky Thompson, so he starts interrogating him about the hijacking-turned-massacre in the woods as well as the murder of Margaret Schroeder’s husband. The trouble is that the first was carried out without Nucky’s knowledge — in fact, much to his displeasure — and Jimmy had nothing to do with the second. Jimmy’s prepared to murder on Nucky’s behalf, but he hasn’t actually done it yet.

Unfortunately for Van Alden, that’s not all he’s wrong about. He’s got Jimmy over a barrel since he flipped the decoy for Jimmy’s hijacking, a card he plays by walking the two men past each other in the hallway. But he doesn’t realize that the apparently bumbling Sebso is working against him, cannily exploiting Van Alden’s contempt for those he sees as inferior. When Sebso says he hid the telegram foretelling Jimmy’s arrival in A.C. to spare them the wrath of their higher-ups — who would rather they be racking up arrests than pursuing a pipe dream — Van Alden buys it, and his alarm bells stay silent when Sebso suggests moving their witness to New York to keep him out of harm’s way. (If you don’t see what’s coming at this juncture, you might want to give your glasses a wipe.) As soon as he’s found a secluded patch of road, Sebso stages an escape attempt and shoots the witness through the heart, after which he chooses a medium-sized rock with which to smash in his own face.

That’s what happens when you trust the wrong people. Just ask Jimmy’s wife, Angela, who’s been counting on her relationship with Mary (Lisa Joyce) and her photographer husband to provide entree into the New York art world. During a drunken canoodle at Angela’s house, Mary’s husband tries to coax her into a threesome. “Everyone in Paris is doing it,” he informs her. Angela demurs, and their get-together is broken up by Jimmy’s unexpected arrival, at which point the husband evidently sees his visions of menage à trois go up in smoke. When he was trying to get under Angela’s skirts, he told her her paintings had “a lyrical quality reminiscent of Mary Cassatt,” but when she goes to see him at his shop, he says she’s a “cheap imitation,” and should expect no word from his (likely chimerical) art-dealer friend. If she can’t offer him sex, then she has nothing to offer.

That just leaves the small detail of an attempt on Nucky’s life. As he’s leaving Sophie Tucker’s performance, one of the D’Allessios spots him and cries out his name as if greeting an old friend, but actually fingering him to a waiting gunman. Nucky’s trusty chauffeur steps in and knocks the shooter off-balance, getting off a shot with his own gun as the man flees, but the would-be assassin’s bullet finds another target, an innocent bystander whose bodily fluids spatter all over Margaret’s newly grafted dress. Turning on the charm may get you a nice outfit, but it won’t stop you from getting blood on it, or getting shot yourself.