Not that there was any shortage of action. Michael Stuhlbarg's treasurable portrayal of Rothstein seems to have fallen down the crack, since he was killed sometime in the interval. It felt more like a portmanteau of short stories than a coherent narrative, as if the time lag from the end of the previous series had cut it adrift from all that had gone before. Still, as it pingponged across the decades, filling us in on the current whereabouts of the major protagonists while offering glimpses into the Thompsons' early years and the relationships between Nucky, his brother Eli and their father Ethan (Ian Hart), this episode had difficulty finding a consistent pace and tone. Indeed, Boardwalk's burgeoning air of a dynastic saga inexorably unfolding down the generations is acquiring ever more Coppola-esque overtones, with its mounting sense of fatalism and depiction of how organised crime grew into a vast parasite leeching off America's body politic.

The Cuban interlude, complete with the gruesome thwarting of an assassination attempt against Nucky, could hardly help triggering echoes of the Havana scenes in Godfather II. Foreseeing the imminent end of Prohibition, prescient Nucky was busily inveigling a US senator into his scheme to become the sole importer of Bacardi rum into the USA, a coup which could give him a leg up towards becoming almost a respectable businessman. We found Nucky (a haggard and desiccated Steve Buscemi) and girlfriend Sally Wheet (Patricia Arquette) bathed in the golden Caribbean light of Havana. His brain was whirring away again as we jumped back to the show's present day of 1931, seven years after the ending of series four. The tale-within-a-tale of how the young Nucky got lucky enough to find a $50 note inside a rich man's hat, only to grasp that he could leverage it into something even more valuable by returning it to its owner in a theatrical display of honesty and loyalty, flashlit the way Nucky's innate gift for long-term planning has always allowed him to outwit rivals like Arnold Rothstein or the grotesque Gyp Rosetti (below, Vincent Piazza as Lucky Luciano).

An opening sequence set in 1884, of young boys diving into the sea to catch gold coins flung from the Atlantic City pier by the city fatcats (principally, the young version of the despicable Commodore, so ably embodied in his toxic dotage by Dabney Coleman), was a telling metaphor for the generational power struggles, greed and ambition which continue to shape the story.

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