Quote:
Originally Posted by diane_phaneuf
good interview with Terrence Winter here http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-wat...-series-finale
he explains it
Do you recall exactly how you guys came to the decision in season 4 that this was how it would end?
Terence Winter: I don't precisely, but the clearer that the Gillian story became, and that Harrow's ending became, in terms of the legacy of sending Jimmy's son off to live with Julia on the farm, and Gillian's own tragic story — we knew it had to come back to that relationship. Tommy Darmody, growing up hearing stories about this guy Nucky and his father, and not really sure whether this guy Nucky was a good guy or a bad guy, and needing to see for himself seemed to us the most powerful version of it. |
I get the supposed rationale, but to me it seems entirely implausible given the story they put on screen. Tommy was barely old enough to understand these things on the level that would poison him enough to track down and murder Nucky. He was out of Gillian's grasp fairly early, and she made the constant attempt to shelter him as much as possible from that world anyway.
Unless Julia continuously badmouthed a person and world she had no real indicative clue about then really this ending makes no sense. With what we saw on screen over the course of 5 seasons I'm just not buying that Tommy Darmody was broken and corrupted enough to murder Enoch Thompson.
I was also pretty disappointed that they deviated from the fictionalized version of the character. I think it would have been much more poignant to dramatize fact rather than cliche fiction. Granted, I didn't expect Nucky to be murdered...mostly because his real-life counterpart wasn't. I get that it wasn't meant to be the exact same character/person, but it followed history closely enough that to make that kind of deviation was jarring...and not in a good way.
Not a fan of the finale, no matter how hard I tried to be. They did a lot of really great things in that final season. The time shifts, the rounding out of backstories, the resolution of certain characters (in some cases this actually tied to history and furthered the story in creative ways), etc. The final few minutes were, cinematically, very well done, but the context of what was actually happening kind of took away from the emotion and meaning of it.
An A+ show with a B- ending.