Meyer does offer Luciano some sage wisdom before his meeting with Masseria: "Try not to sit near the window." Lanksy and Luciano are both compelling characters, so let's hope they find a reason to get to Atlantic City soon.
To call back to a former HBO drama, Elii is riding the boat like McNulty in season two of "The Wire." As Nucky firmly explains to his brother, "allowing you to simply go to jail is the last gift I'll ever give you."
Eli's surrounded by incompetence and overqualified to be loading liquor trucks. He sees more than Mickey Doyle and his flunkies ever could, but because of his flawed ambition, he's now in a position to do nothing about it.
After a stern call from Arnold Rothstein, who is even funnier when he's mad ("Why am I calling you? Why is this happening?") Mickey sends the booze caravan headlong into the wolf's den of Tabor Heights. Eli scouts ahead to investigate his fear that the local law enforcement is going to have their own personal Alamo against Gyp Rosetti's men.
When he gets there, he sees that it's even worse: Rosetti has managed to buy off (and somehow not irrationally murder) the cops and is setting up an ambush for the shipment. All Eli can do is watch from a distance as his fellow peons get mowed down over 800 cases of booze. Like McNulty, he's gotta get off the boat and back into the game somehow.
Appropriately (and because it's a law of cable drama), we end with a wistful song. Al Capone beautifully sings to his deaf son "my buddy, my buddy, your buddy misses you."
We end with the brothers Thompson in their natural habitat, on a rainy windswept Atlantic City boardwalk, begrudgingly aware of the fact that they may need one another after all.
