#bes5

In Friendless Child Nucky's final, desperate attempt to cling to his power by kidnapping Benny, the actual youngest among his rivals, is contrasted with his first taking Gillian under his care in the flashbacks. We're asked to confront this cyclical exploitation of the younger generation, and understand that we're witnessing both it's beginning and it's end. Friendless Child ends in failure for Nucky. He is forced to give up all his material worth to New York, symbolically preparing him for his death.

The flashback really put things into perspective. Whenever I heard Gillian's story, I thought Nucky was working for the Commodore, and one day King Neptune and his consorts came to town. I always thought he had never seen her before. That she was just some girl that he gave away, and felt bad about it afterwards. But seeing the flashback, that look in Nucky's eyes. How pained he looks. Gillian means something to him, but he does it anyway, and as soon as he gives her up, he hates himself for it. "It'll be a charity," someone said. For a girl who has no one. For a girl that Nucky can't keep with him. Somehow, it's a bit manipulative. That does not excuse Nucky's actions, don't get me wrong. And he's probably thinking about Mabel at this time. His wife he loves so much, who miscarried their first child (I still stand by the idea that was not Enoch Jr), and if he gets a better job, he can help her more (which doesn't happen, so it was all for nothing.) You can feel bad for a character, and still hate what they have done. I hate Nucky for what he did to Gillian, but I feel bad that he felt he had to do it if he wanted to get ahead. 

I start by sharing a segment from the “Inside the Episode”

"The character of Gillian really comes full circle and her involvement with Nucky is such a huge part of this story.  Nucky’s betrayal of the young Gillian was really the act that sent him on the downward spiral that led to the rest of his tragic life. She reached out to him for help in writing that letter.  It took him many weeks to open it and come to her aid, and by the time he does get to the hospital, Dr. Cotton has already performed his surgery on Gillian, and she is of course a shadow of her former self, and it’s too late.

It’s really one of the most poignant scenes in the whole series for me.  Gillian is just an absolutely tragic figure and she and Nucky together are really the tragic couple of this series.  It’s just so, so sad and certainly by the end of this episode it comes completely full circle.”

-Terence Winter

I’m not trying to argue that creator opinions are always most valid or that fiction can’t be interpreted in many ways (you definitely back your points up) but that scene was intended to show her after surgery state. Maybe I’m being nitpicky, but I don’t think I’m misunderstanding anything by seeing it that way.  

The way I see it, Gillian held on as long as she could after seven years in that place.  She behaved, was “a good girl”, so that no parts of her were taken.  She didn’t give up hope of being free, but she was losing it over time.  She got some of it back when she was finally able to write the letter to Nucky.  When she didn’t get a response after weeks she got desperate and sloppy.  We see her at the end of “Friendless Child” trying to make her way out of a door but someone on the staff sees her.  They catch her.  She had the surgery.  In the final scene, she has given up and she has lost herself.

The next part is where I see both sides a little more. I don’t believe that Tommy had contact with her, but I’m not 100% sure.

The scene in “The Good Listener” wasn’t proof enough for me to believe she’s had any past correspondence.  The lady says “No crazy letters to the president, now.” because that is why they don’t allow their patients to have stationary, not because she suspects Gillian herself is up to something.  I don’t think that an “unspoken understanding” between them where she gave Gillian stationary in the past was apparent, and it’s definitely not enough to convince me.

I really like the part where you and goatsandgangsters mentioned that Tommy is Gillian’s pawn because I agree. In “To the Lost” Gillian finds Tommy wearing Jimmy’s dog tags (realizing Jimmy left them for him) and tells him he’s going to be a big man in town someday.  Gillian began actively grooming him to take over Nucky at that point.  Just because they haven’t had correspondence it doesn’t mean that Tommy saying he remembers how she felt about Nucky is only a vague remembrance from when he was a kid. She talked about him a lot.  She was actively planting and cultivating that seed.  It’s a stretch to say that he remembers everything from that age, but in my own experience, my grandpa told me stories when i was a kid that I don’t remember all of but I remember the main ideas.  Especially if they were repeated.  He remembers that Nucky Thompson needed to go, and he was the special boy who was going to overthrow him. 

But seven years is a long time.  I think it is possible that she contacted him, or that he even came to visit her in the hospital before he made it to Atlantic City.  But still, even if he talked to her and saw how she was now and killed Nucky for her, even if she directly told him “Kill Nucky”, that doesn’t prove that she was feigning surgery or mental state in her final scene with Nucky.

I don’t think it cheapens the ending if Gillian wasn’t directly involved, because she was still there. Tommy is the future. He’s youth and he fits he theme the show has spent time with showing that the young will overtake the old.  Gillian was young when Nucky ruined her life, and you can even say that it’s the act that ruined his.  Tommy is also the past. He’s a member of the family that was directly impacted by Nucky’s original sin. He’s Gillian.

As Nucky dies the image of Tommy lashing at him fades and he sees Gillian, young and innocent, but she’s his past, and as gangstergish said, she’s the siren pulling him to death.

She didn’t cause his death directly, she didn’t plan it, but it was for her.  Thematically, it was her.  And as Nucky dies, he realizes it.