Boardwalk Empire/YMMV

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Not many audience members were big fans of Angela, Jimmy's wife, but even the most ardent members of the character's Hatedom were shaken by her brutal death at the hands of Manny at the end of "Georgia Peaches".
• Alas, Poor Villain: Jimmy's death is this to a certain degree. No matter how much of a villain you feel he was in the second season, one has to admit the writers did a damn good job of generating sympathy for a character who, over the course of the season tried to overthrow the main character, was a huge jerk to pretty much everyone around him, proved to be an incredibly incompetent leader and got his poor innocent wife killed because he was too selfish to pay back Manny money he legitimately owed him.
• Base Breaker: The death of Jimmy at Nucky's hand was extremely divisive amongst the fanbase, causing many cries of "Ruined FOREVER" within moments of it airing.
  • Jimmy as a character could be considered to be this. He's either one of the most interesting and compelling characters on the show or he's poorly written and dull.
    • Those who find him interesting are divided in turn over if he is an Anti-Hero or an outright Villain. And then there are the fangirls who drool over him no matter what he does.
  • "Under God's Power She Flourishes" split the fanbase for Gillian; either you think she's a heinous, abusive bitch who ruined her son's life at least twice by exploiting him, or you feel bad for her for continuing the cycle of abuse she herself experienced. Either way, do NOT mention the incest without prepping your fallout shelter.
• Breakout Character: Richard Harrow is the most universally liked and popular character on the show by quite a wide margin. Even people who don't watch the show know who he is.
• Complete Monster: One of Capone's rivals, Charlie Sheridan, is definitely this one. Cutting a ghastly scar into the face of Jimmy's girlfriend kinda gave it away.
  • Manny Horvitz, the Jewish butcher/bootlegger from Philadelphia. Quite possibly the scariest person on the entire show. Manny killing Angela and her lover in Jimmy's house places him firmly in this category.
  • Owen Sleater is pretty callous and brutal, even for being a character on this show.
  • Arnold Rothstein is polite and intelligent but is absolutely ruthless and has no problem ordering murders for his own benefit. It is mentioned he once caused a man to choke to death for his own amusement.
  • Hans Schroeder in the pilot. He's a violent, abusive bastard who mistreats and beats his wife and children and beats his wife so hard she lost a baby. His fate (Being viciously beaten to death and tossed in the ocean) is so well deserved You almost want to shake Nucky's hand.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Like any HBO drama, the music is perfect for the setting. But the opening theme, "Straight Up and Down" by The Brian Jonestown Massacre stands out.
  • "Carrickfergus" over the final scenes in "Nights in Ballygran", as sung by Loudon Wainwright III.
  • "Life's a Very Funny Proposition" (sung by Stephen DeRosa as Eddie Cantor) in "A Return to Normalcy".
• Dull Surprise: Michael Pitt gets accused of this.
  • So does Aleksa Palladino.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Richard Harrow is one awesome guy. The writers have seemingly recognized this: he was upgraded to a regular in Season 2.
• Evil Is Cool: Nearly all of the gangsters in the series are well-dressed, eloquent/witty, and badasses.
• Fan Disservice: Pearl, high on laudanum, comes downstairs in her lingerie to strut her stuff for the johns, while sporting a ghastly facial wound full of stitches.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: Nucky's comment about Margaret naming her son Enoch after him seems humorous at first but becomes a lot harsher at the end of the first season when We find out the full story.
• Growing the Beard: The final three episodes of season two. Killing off three main characters in Angela, the Commodore, and Jimmy, depicting Parental Incest on television, and having one of those deaths be of Jimmy, who is arguably a protagonist was fairly brave.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Watching Nucky's father withering from dementia in Season 2 can be heartbreaking when you consider that actor Tom Aldredge died in mid-2011 and this was, in fact, his last role.
  • Gillian's intentions of raising Tommy herself, as she may be planning to be more than a surrogate mama.
  • This exchange between Nucky and Jimmy in the pilot:

Nucky: I could have you killed.
Jimmy: Yeah, but you didn't. (...) You can't be half a gangster, Nucky. Not anymore.

• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Jimmy's story about a German soldier who spent days trying to untangle himself from a barbed wire fence with two bullet wounds, refusing all of Jimmy's offers to put him out of his misery.
  • Jimmy and Richard scalping a rival. AUGH.
  • Owen Sleater's vicious murder of a rival - by garrotting him right through his fingers, trying to stop the wire.
  • Richard's Ominous Walk before blasting a sawed-off shotgun on a twelve year old, to the face. It is even filmed from the victim's POV.
• Ho Yay: No one?! Really? This troper was instantly smitten by Richard/Jimmy--they start out sharing a Lingering Gaze in the hospital, and then Jimmy brings him along to Atlantic City and bargains with Nucky to get him a job, defending him whenever someone makes a comment about his appearance. Richard, in turn, who has no personal stake in any of the Nucky/Rothstein/D'Alessio madness, immediately starts offering to help Jimmy by offing people left and right. ...OK, so it's dark, but there's something very sweet about the two shell-shocked veterans bonding that way.
  • "What Does the Bee Do" has Angie getting in on the bromance and admitting they're good for each other. And "Gimcrack and Bunkum" made their bond pretty apparent:

Richard: Would you fight for me?
Jimmy: Down to the last bullet.

• • There's also Jimmy and Al, going back to the pilot. They bond over being the low men on the totem pole, then rise through the ranks together. By the time Al drops by Jimmy's house in Jersey in "A Dangerous Maid", playing with Tommy and speaking Italian with Angela, he comes off as Jimmy's ex, complete with tension with Richard.
  • All of Team New York are basically married to each other. There's all of Luciano and Rothstein's interactions in Season 1, with Rothstein treating Luciano like a very well-kept pet. He dresses him, teaches him how to speak, and when Luciano does something wrong, Rothstein's there with a quiet "Charlie, no" and a restraining hand. Lansky and Luciano take over the Ho Yay in Season 2, rarely out of each other's company and always acting as a unit.
    • How you read "some things, Charlie, you just have to swallow" in a non-homoerotic context is BEYOND this troper.
• Magnificent Bastard: Arnold Rothstein. Smart, well-dressed, not above selling out his own men or making deals with enemies for a profit, "allegedly" fixed the World Series, and once made a man choke to death on a cue ball for his own amusement.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Eli killing George O'Neill in an attack of drunken rage.
    • And for those who were not convinced yet, he suggests killing his own brother in the next episode he is in.
  • While Van Alden kicks a lot of dogs, the usually pointed Moral Event Horizon is drowning Sebso in front of a black congregation and then leaving while showing his gun and badge so they'll be too afraid to say anything. Oddly, he only begins to Pet the Dog well after that.
  • Gillian's first one comes in "Peg of Old" when she talks Jimmy into letting the hit on Nucky stand.
  • Manny's comes in "Georgia Peaches" when he murders Jimmy's wife and her lover in cold blood.
  • Gillian racks them up in "Under God's Power She Flourishes". She doesn't give a flying fuck that Angela died, plans to tell Tommy that she abandoned him to party with her friends in Paris, tells Jimmy to kill the Commodore and calls Richard a simpleton (in the guise of throwing a police officer off the trail of Angela's murder). Just to add fuel to the fire, the flashbacks reveal that at Princeton, she had drunken sex with Jimmy, freaking him into joining the army.
  • Nucky's probably comes in "To the Lost", wherein throughout the episode, he reveals himself as The Sociopath, with his affable side appearing to a significant degree to be just a front. This culminates at the end of the episode, in which on the pretext of letting Jimmy take revenge on Manny, instead coldly murders Jimmy as Manny and Eli watch. That Jimmy expected this and was thus committing Suicide by Cop doesn't really make Nucky's actions any better.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Lucy has improved in leaps and bounds between the first season, where she mainly whined and had a lot of sex, and the second season (especially in her pregnancy storyline). That entire storyline rescued not only her, but Van Alden, his wife and the plot device in general.
• The Scrappy: Lucy's not very popular among the Fandom to say the least, though this could change after episodes like "A Dangerous Maid" where she is more exposed^[1] and shows signs of falling into despair.
  • The second season is trying hard to get her Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. It gets almost hilarious when you remember that she was probably built as The Scrappy in the season before to justify Margaret's supplantation of her place, and now Margaret is taking a level in Jerk Ass after another instead...
  • Angela hasn't been well received by audiences, either. But see Alas, Poor Scrappy above.
  • Season 2 made everybody pretty much hate Eli, but even more so when he ended up surviving it.
• Shallow Love Interest: Mary, Angela's girlfriend that she sees while Jimmy's forced to flee Atlantic City. All their conversations seem to be about are Paris and how they'll flee there together, dragging Jimmy and Angela's son along, mind you, and be together forever. Really, if it weren't for Girl-On-Girl Is Hot, this little ship wouldn't be worth the screentime it gets. When Mary later abandons Angela the same day they were supposed to elope, Angela goes home and seems to reconcile with Jimmy, though an apologetic postcard from Mary makes her cut her hair out of spite.
• Squick: This is HBO. Sex and violence are the name of the game. If nothing else, Steve Buscemi's O-face'll get ya.
  • Jimmy's mom jumping over, wrapping her legs around and then kissing him. While "wearing" nothing more than panties and pasties.
    • Jimmy and Mommy finally doing it onscreen.
  • Lucky Luciano getting treatment for gonorrhea. It involves sticking needles and various devices with zinc sulfide into "little Lucky".
  • Lucy and Van Alden's sex scene was just wrong, and was extremely hard to watch.
  • Lucy and Nucky's relationship when one realizes that Steve Buscemi is old enough to be Paz De La Huerta's father.
  • Gillian giving birth at thirteen is bad enough but it reaches new levels when you find out the father was the Commodore who would have been fifty-four at the time.
  • The badly-burned Prohibition agent in "Age of Reason".
  • Holy mother of God, the scene in "Peg of Old" when Slater garrotes a guy in a men's toilet, slicing his fingers off as the guy tries to get free. We actually SEE the severed fingers and gushing blood.
    • Oddly, this troper was most disgusted by how dirty that toilet looked, and the fact the guy landed his face on it. Brrrrr!
    • And Nucky gets shot in the hand in the same episode. Fingore all around!
  • Richard blowing Neary's brains out in "To the Lost", complete with a giant close-up of the back of his head.
• Tear Jerker: Nucky's revelation about his son's death and his wife's suicide.
  • Richard's scrapbooking in "21" and his suicide attempt in "Gimcrack and Bunkum".
  • Emily's polio.
  • The end of "Georgia Peaches": Angela sobbing over the body of her lover, pleading for her life with Manny Horovitz, and Manny telling her that Jimmy did this to her before shooting her in cold blood.
  • "Jimmy, I have to leave now. I'm sorry."
    • All of the flashbacks with Angela, when you see how young and innocent they were.
  • "To the Lost" is one big one, in retrospect - Jimmy has been tying up loose ends, making sure his son is provided for, apologizing to Nucky, standing up to his mother, making sure Richard is all right . . . before going on a suicide mission.
    • That not only Jimmy, but Richard, knows whats coming makes the episode even sadder.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The shot of a heavily pregnant Lucy completely nude. That is one damn convincing prosthetic.
  • The show has more computer effects than it looks like at first.
• The Woobie: Richard Harrow. The poor guy cuts pictures of families out of newspapers and glues them into a book because it's as close to actually having a family as he'll ever get.
  • A pregnant Lucy being forced to stay inside and not have contact with anyone because Van Alden is basically paying her to keep quiet about everything.
    • Which is ratcheted up to eleven when she goes through hours of labor by herself. Even those viewers who couldn't stand Lucy probably had the urge to hug her.
    • And is then taken another step further still when it becomes clear that Van Alden never intended to pay her.
  • Angela. Sure, the fandom was quite divided about her in season 1, but only the most cruel could think that she deserved any of what she got in season 2.
  • Van Alden gets a moment of this in "Under God's Power She Flourishes", when he tells the story of his strained relationship with his parents. Apparently he comes by the religious fervor genetically - his father sold their farm in anticipation of the Rapture, they lived penniless for much of Van Alden's childhood, and his father still blames him for their misfortune.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Richard. Jimmy slides into this in season two.

1. ↑ In the other sense of the word