The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 21: "Made in America"

Hello Robbie and cnw,

I’m feeling inclined to cheat and offer this blog post as my contribution to the upcoming Reverse Shot symposium – you know, the one about the power of a single cut to shape and define an entire film. “Made in America” ended The Sopranos in media res with a hard (dare I say Dardenne-ish?) cut to black. Seated at a table in a cozy neighborhood restaurant with Carmela and AJ, Tony looked up to see Meadow coming through the door to complete the family dinner. Or was it to see a gun being pointed in his direction by the two-shifty looking African-American kids who’d come in moments before? Or maybe to anxiously note the return of the leather-jacketed guy who’d walked in just ahead of AJ a few minutes before that and stared at Tony’s table before making a pointed beeline for the men’s room: a location fraught with symbolic peril in this season of Godfather riffs. Yes, it would make sense that the show would come unplugged in the exact split-second that Tony got plugged; like Bobby, with whom he’d previously discussed death’s never-see-it-coming factor, he just never saw it coming. Or maybe our man was just about to order more onion rings.

There’s more to talk about in and around “Made in America” (written and directed with economy and purpose by David Chase) than its endlessly discussable ending. Like the fact that Tony managed to flip the FBI into serving his purposes, or the curious arrival of an adorable orange cat that stayed fixated on the picture of Christopher hanging in the Bing (shades of Ade? Or is that too sentimental?), or its potentially damaging effect on SUV sales after the catalytic converter cataclysm that nearly claimed AJ and his new girlfriend. But I’m going to linger on that final moment, mostly because that’s how Tony would have it. The last significant dialogue of the series was a father-son exchange, with Tony encouraging AJ – now working, at his parents’ nudging, as a “development executive” for a lousy screenplay forwarded to Little Carmine’s production company by Daniel Baldwin – to enjoy the good times. And this is what I thought the non-ending was getting at. Tony may have escaped Phil Leotardo’s endgame maneuvers and this season’s endgame atmosphere but his life has been reframed as one sustained panic attack: somewhere, someone (what rough beast?) is waiting to take him down. Good times, but with an asterisk.

The genius of the episode is that it placed that burden of anxiety onto us. The last five minutes were an exercise in unabashed sweatshop-suspense techniques, with every shot carefully selected for maximum portent. It began with Tony sitting alone in the restaurant, fiddling with the jukebox (before settling on Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin”) – finally out in the open after a small eternity of clandestine movements. The (separate) arrivals of Carmela, AJ, and Meadow –the latter after some extended parking difficulties which, as inter-cut with the sanguine scene inside the restaurant, raised the show’s terror alert level to orange – actually made Tony seem more vulnerable. At the end of last week’s episode, alone in a safe-house, lying in the (hard, sheetless) bed that he’d made for himself, Tony looked like a cornered animal ,but he’d made arrangements to keep his family sequestered far away. Is he really more comfortable with them at his side after seven years’ worth of vivid lessons about how quickly and unexpectedly the proverbial sword can drop?

Let’s take stock of Tony’s situation. Phil Leotardo is dead, killed outside a gas station with his infant grandchildren in tow ( how sick was it then when his SUV, left unattended by his understandably hysterical wife, rolled over his face and Chase cut to the babies smiling in the backseat? Grandpa as a speed bump!). Paulie W is newly entrenched as his first lieutenant (not a rat after all). New York seems willing to do business (that Butch…what a softie). And, after all that, Tony’s still likely to be indicted because Carlo (who he berated a few weeks back about poor earnings) has flipped. “Trials are there to be won,” says Tony’s lawyer, Neil Mink but the real focus of their scene (another restaurant sitdown) was the bank of security monitors sitting over Tony’s shoulder. Mink may have been stealing glances to catch the waitresses as they stumbled, in various states of undress, through the restaurant’s back hall, but given the cut-it-with-a-knife tension of the surrounding episode, we looked nervously at the screens to see if Tony’s fate was about to burst through the door, gun in hand.

So somewhere after that final scene – provided it wasn’t the last moment of his life, of course -- Tony will go to trial. Perhaps he will be indicted. Doubtlessly, Meadow will express outrage, having confided in this episode that her decision to go into law (now looking, to Carm’s delight, like a lucrative choice) was forged after years of watching her Dad being dragged away by the Feds. The woman is, finally, insane. AJ may cite it as another cause for his depression, although at this point, he’s looking sated on anti-depressants, easy money and a hot girlfriend. The shot of him and Rhiannon gladly giggling at footage of MC Karl Rove and a clownish G.W. Bush was a portrait of contemporary material medication. (Didn’t AJ start off this episode by righteously citing “The Second Coming” at Bobby Bacala’s funeral to prove that everything is fucked up and gaping in wonderment at the timelessness of a Bob Dylan protest song? There’s more to say about AJ’s eventful hour, but I will leave it to you guys). Carmela will stand by her man and keep looking at spec house plans – she may have thrown Tony’s last gift back in his face, but when the show’s camera was elsewhere, is there any doubt she went and picked it back up?

There were hints of where else things could go further down the line. AJ driving by Rhiannon’s school in his new car recalled Carm’s starry-eyed memories of Tony swinging by her campus in his Camaro; AJ’s short-skirted shrink looked a bit like a younger Melfi. But the final cut rendered them all moot – we’ll never know. There are those who will accuse Chase of churlishness, that his choice to go with an open ending is a kind of cop-out after setting up so many tantalizing narrative dynamos. But I can think of no greater way to pay justice to the compelling lives he’s created – has any show ever had so many intriguingly developed regulars? Not even counting whackees, there are a dozen players whose fate is of great interest to me – than to keep us at a remove. The Sopranos was always defined by its intimacy, accessing the lives (and in Tony’s case, the subconscious) of its characters and sparing no details. Last night, we were, finally, cut off. Yet I have never felt so closely aligned with Tony – during the credit roll (which was, for the first time, silent – as if anything could follow Journey!) I sat, insecure in the knowledge that while I didn’t know what was coming next, on some level I did. And that deeper knowledge that motivated me to look around the living room at the people I loved and resolve to enjoy the good times. It was the banal, evasive Hallmark-card advice of a sociopath, and don’t you know it swelled my heart.

A recap of The Sopranos' final season on Reverse Shot:

The Sopranos: The Big Lie

Season Six, Episode 13: Soprano Home Movies

Season Six, Episode 14: Stage 5

Season Six, Episode 15: Remember When

Season Six, Episode 16: Chasing It

Season Six, Episode 17: Walk Like a Man

Season Six, Episode 18: Kennedy and Heidi

Season Six, Episode 19: The Second Coming

Season Six, Episode 20: Blue Comet

The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 20: "Blue Comet"

“One more week of this,” Carmela sighed last night—though she was literally speaking of visiting AJ in the psychiatric hospital (the rates of which apparently exceed $2,000 a day, bemoaned Tony) following last week’s attempted suicide, in the context of this second to last episode of The Sopranos, it was merely one of many references to The End. “The End of Times,” groaned Agent Harris as he looked out at a grey, gloomy sky from the Satriales butcher shop window, then continuing, “Ready for the Rapture.” Additionally, AJ was seen watching a decidedly apocalyptic anime film on TV in the ward common area, and, later, on his couch at home, footage of an Iraqi insurgency. Plus, with Tony out back draining the pool, the message from David Chase & Co. couldn’t be any clearer: it’s the end of this world as we know it, and, as Yeats prophesied last episode, we’re not gonna feel fine.

Violent, propulsive, and breathless, “Blue Comet” was something of a change of pace, literally—an episode less driven by drama than action. Although, of course, as with any great episode of The Sopranos, not a moment was wasted, not an utterance or seeming throwaway shot not impregnated with years' worth of meaning. Portentous to an agonizing degree, “Blue Comet” closed many doors while also ending on one of the series’ most literal cliffhangers—its last image was, to speak of this duality, a closed door, though it put us on tenterhooks, leaving us far from resolution.

It was an episode full of references (to itself, to Scorsese, to Coppola) that were all neatly inverted, beginning with the ground level shot of a man walking to the end of the driveway to get the morning paper. It wasn’t Tony, however, but an associate, Burt, about to be brutally dispatched by bloody strangulation by a devilish Silvio for "misgivings" about his loyalty. After this disorienting opening, there was an immediate cut to Phil Leotardo, saying “Listen, I’ve made a decision.” This is the tone of “Blue Comet” – to the point, merciless, making no bones. Phil’s decision to “decapitate” the Jersey family, whom he calls “a glorified crew” after referencing past humilations (Vito, brother Billy, even the thought-forgotten Fat Dom), played out surprisingly literally. Bobby, murdered in a toy store while admiring the toy trains that were his hobby and one escape (if only he could have taken a real train out of town years ago), got an uncharacteristically stylized final scene, complete with close-ups of runaway mini locomotives and a last bloody sprawl over the elaborate train set. (The episode title was taken from the Blue Comet train he held in his hands with pride and hope.) It seemed a rather sentimental (fittingly so) conclusion for a character that often came across as one of the series' most likable: diginifed in his doofery, lunkheaded in his loyalty, to both Tony and Junior. Silvio, meanwhile, got his very own Bonnie and Clyde-esque shoot-out, outside the Bada Bing, ending up in a coma. Though Patsy Parisi got away, a hapless motorcycling passerby didn’t fare so well, slipping from his bike and getting crushed by an oncoming car—while Bing strippers and patrons watched from the parking lot. It was a strange moment of daytime carnage, and it brought the inside out, the secrecy of the establishment possibly forever exposed.

Earlier, in Vesuvio, Tony and Silvio enacted a slow-motion miming of the opening credit sequence of Raging Bul, spurred on by the sudden playing of Rossini’s "Rusticana" on the restaurant speakers…probably from an Italian Greatest Classical Hits CD that Artie has on constant rotation. Yet amidst such dire intimations of the end, this final moment of sandboxing seemed pathetic—and made Tony not just a parallel to Michael Corleone but also to Jake LaMotta. Enormously overweight, wheezing consistently, Tony has now become Jake, a has-been, playing at boss, taking final stabs at tomfoolery. Just as for Silvio, it was his dying punch, perhaps.

Meanwhile, perhaps the most pivotal moment of the season (or series?) occurred with Dr. Melfi, which not only reclaimed her character, but inversed the final shot of The Godfather in immensely satisfying terms. Melfi, on a quiet rampage following the last-straw moral crisis engendered by Dr. Eliot’s prodding about Tony’s probable sociopathic personality and then reading (rendered in extreme close-up font) a journal about The Criminal Personality, terminated treatment. After years of dancing around this possibility, she did so with a swift door in the face, switching the gender roles of Diane Keaton’s final shot in the first Godfather film, her face blocked out by her husband’s slam of a door. This time, she made the decision.

Though it was a moment of triumph for Melfi, David Chase and Matthew Weiner (this week’s exemplary writers) of course complicated matters. All season long, Tony has been pegged as a monster, a beast, a pathetic, murderous shrivelling patriarch, whose only moment of grace (saving his son’s life and cradling him in tears) was quickly followed by more thoughtless violence. Yet last night, Tony was in pure victim mode—hunted down by Phil’s henchmen, losing his associates, and now, kicked out of therapy, as he remarks to Melfi with rage, right when his son tried to kill himself. Melfi’s opportunistic use of Tony’s ripping a page out of her waiting-room magazine (hilariously called DEPARTURES, the publication had a steak recipe that Tony wanted to try) to instigate a fight seemed somewhat childish and disingenuous, further making Tony out as the abused. It was an extraordinarily tense interplay (as with many seasons ago, I greatly feared for Melfi’s safety in these moments), even more throat-grabbing than the death of Bobby, and while Melfi extricated herself, it still left a bitter taste.

One wishes that Carmela, though, had such backbone (though Tony tried to accuse Melfi of being like his wife, he was dead wrong this time). I can’t help but recall Tony in last episode’s session with Melfi in which he remarked on his Las Vegas epiphany: that our mothers are the bus drivers, and we’re always trying to catch up. What then does this mean for Carmela, being the mother of AJ? Last installment's “The Second Coming” dealt greatly with father-son dynamics, inheritance of violence and depression, and as always the show created plenty of other son/proteges for Tony (Jackie Jr., Christopher); yet thus far this season, Carmela has merely reacted, though in increasingly emotional, deluded ways. “He was always our happy little boy,” she wept about AJ, while all viewers collectively went, “Really?”

This week, Carmela’s two small moments were quite telling: in one, she’s making oatmeal for AJ, while Meadow watches her from the counter. Carmela is smiling, while AJ is in the other room, watching the Iraqi war footage. Meadow stares at her mother with both melancholy and compassion. A few scenes later, at Vesuvio, Carmela, talking to Artie and Charmaine, expresses her pleasure at Meadow’s leaving pre-med. In an odd moment, she remarks, with harsh judgment, that she doubts her daughter has the “compassion” or “patience” required to be a doctor. Might Carmela's resentment of Meadow be equal to Tony's towards AJ? Soon, Tony rises to greet another guest eating dinner, and Carmela is left alone. Director Alan Taylor holds on her for a while,long enough to catch her expression changing to something like frustration…or anger…or loneliness. At this point, with one week left, hoping for Carmela’s moral revelation must be wishful thinking. Perhaps in last season’s “Cold Stones,” she saw the beacon at the top of the Eiffel Tower (mirroring perfectly the light on the horizon seen by Tony in his coma dream state), because she and Tony are on parallel paths, heading towards the same “big nothing.”

After all, that’s what Livia Soprano called it. And we know she’s waiting there.

The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 19: "The Second Coming"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The opening image of "The Second Coming", the third-to-last Sopranos episode ever, is of asbestos -- waste Tony's crew has dumped on a marsh. Later in the episode, after Tony's son unsuccessfully attempts suicide, members of the crew sympathize, commiserating and confessing the psychological struggles of their own children: there's a pervasive sadness they see in that generation, an overwhelming sense of dysfunction. Tony insists this is a disease, something physical and chemical (never mind that Christopher's appeal to the same logic failed to earn him a reprieve from his surrogate father; Tony's guilty of far greater hypocrisies than this). Then Paulie speculates -- maybe it's the chemicals polluting the environment, and, as a result, our minds and bodies. So is it heredity, or is it lousy waste management that's robbed A.J. of his will to live? Either way, I'm left thinking about the way Tony described himself back in Season One, like "King MIdas in reverse; everything [he] touch[es] turns to shit."

Before everyone starts thinking me a complete tool, a brief clarification about the poem I've quoted above: "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, gives the episode its title and is featured prominently here. A.J. studies it in class and later reads it alone in bed, as he wallows in the depression that culminates in his wrenching, devastating suicide attempt (wrapping a plastic bag around his head, tying it to a block, and dropping himself into the Soprano swimming pool). This is actually the second time (by my count), The Sopranos has alluded to this particular poem. Back in Season Five's "Cold Cuts", Dr. Melfi quoted it to Tony. Its recurrence is of obvious significance; so I thought it was worth quoting in full. "The Second Coming" is about a world spinning towards its own destruction, a world where tradition has given way to chaos -- an apt encapsulation of the Sopranos world, by which I mean both organized crime as depicted in the series and the show's grander subject, post-millennial America, as a milieu and a state-of-mind. This episode has a particularly timely inflection, with mentions of Iran, Bush, Israel-Palestine, and terrorism (what is up with that? Brother and Robbie -- a little help please?), and there's no denying a certain honesty and truth in A.J.'s adolescent desperation. Yes, we can agree: anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Meadow tells A.J. that you need to learn to block these things out; she seems to have done a fine job herself. Whatever her lofty ideals of the past, Meadow's dating within the family, again, and when she's insulted in the city by Coco, one of Phil's men, she makes a show of reticence before telling her father everything -- though let's face it, Meadow knew full well her honesty would cost Coco some teeth (just as she was far too quick to have Finn confirm Vito's sexual proclivities to Tony and his crew, whatever the consequences). Hers is a peculiar fall from grace. "You'll always be more important", she tells A.J., but Meadow's failure to see past the consequences of her actions, her willful denial of the hypocrisy upon which her family life is built, has been one of the most heartbreaking things to watch this season.

So what is this "rough beast", who, "somewhere in the sands of desert" (Somewhere like, say, Vegas? Okay, I'm being literal, but still) "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Tony has become a pitiless monster, and whatever small moments of pathos he manages are quickly obscured by his ruthless selfishness. He sees himself as the walking embodiment of the "Soprano curse", a tendency towards depression common among Soprano men he's inherited from his father and passed along to his son. But it's Livia Soprano's insatiable need and self-pity, her inability to empathize with others but her insistence that everyone else give themselves fully to her, that Tony is really aping. "Poor you", Tony says twice -- Gandolfini's line reading eerily echoing the late, great Nancy Marchand's. Livia is all over this episode; when A.J. tells his parents about his depression, he remembers that great moment in Season Two when his grandmother shattered his illusions of self-importance ("It's all a big nothing; what makes you think you're so special?"). In Tony's therapy, he tells Melfi that our mothers are like bus drivers or buses. They bring us into the world and drop us off, and we spend the rest of our lives chasing after the bus. Livia fantasized about infanticide, even tried to have her son killed to spare herself the fate of Green Grove nursing home; last week, Tony killed his surrogate son to spare himself a different kind of prison. The second coming, indeed.

As The Sopranos has drawn towards its close, the writers have displayed a near-obsessive fixation with the past -- characters have recycled lines and remembered odd moments; small events from the distant past have taken on ominous weight. This is my last time writing the lead entry here at Reverse Blog; so I feel inclined towards something summarative. It seems to me there are some steady, recurring themes this season: it's about the things we inherit and the things we pass on, and whether real change is possible -- and the consequences of that possibility, or lack thereof, on the ethical and moral world we inhabit. There's a fiercely bleak world view on display here. But there's perhaps one small glimmer of hope. In "Second Coming", Tony, feeling guilty about his Vegas adventure, gives Carmela a watch, engraved to say "You are my life." Tony said this to Carmela once before, in the "Pax Soprana" episode from Season One. When she receives the watch, Carm is won over, just as she was the first time Tony used that line. By episode's end, she throws it at Tony, fed up with his bullshit. Once again, Carmela is confronted with her love of things -- and her willingness to accept the lies that come with those things -- and her compromised sense of right and wrong. Back in our first, collective entry on the show, I speculated that Carmela was "perhaps the show's last, best hope at redemption." I still think that's the case, though perhaps I'm naive to hold out any sort of hope.

On a personal note, Brother and Robbie, it's been a pleasure writing these with you over the past few weeks. I'm excited to hear what you thought of "Second Coming". I'm not going to offer any suggested topics for conversation, just because I'd rather leave it as open-ended as possible in hopes that we can keep up some sort of dialogue to bide our time (two weeks!) until the penultimate episode...

The Sopranos: Season Six, Episode 18: Kennedy and Heidi

It would be easy enough to start off my assessment of the Sopranos’ fourth-to-last episode by invoking Tony’s exultant final line – “I get it!” – and saying something cute about how he’s the only one. And I guess I just did. Certainly, “Kennedy and Heidi” has confounded certain expectations (i.e. mine) about the series’ trajectory. Anybody out there who thought that Christopher was going to become the next inhabitant of Tony’s dream house (you know, the one with the doorman who looks an awful lot like Steve Buscemi) should raise their hand, lower it, look into the mirror and call themselves a liar.

Ten minutes into the show, I thought that writers David Chase and Matthew Weiner were the ones whose pants were on fire. The spectacle of an SUV flipping in the middle of a desolate upstate highway was just too reminiscent of Season Five’s “Irregular Around the Margins – in which Tony and Adrianna swerved to avoid a raccoon and ended up in the hospital – and that something fishy was going on. I was convinced that the ensuing shocker – Tony dazedly but determinedly suffocating a badly (critically?) wounded Christopher before phoning 911 – was actually the product of one character’s subconscious. It was, I kept telling myself, either one more of Tony’s portentously coded bedtime visions, or else a glimpse into Christopher’s eternally anxious and newly drugged-out headspace. In other words, I was waiting for J.R. to walk out of the shower, or Tony to wake up next to Susanne Pleshette.

So when Tony did wake up – next to good ol’ Carmela, but still – my pulse quickened. But the scars on his forehead indicated that only the preceding scene – a therapy session in which he blatantly admitted to murdering Pussy, Tony B. and Christopher – had been taking place behind those beady eyes. Christopher was dead, and last week’s severely portentous episode, which loudly dropped hints that he was about to flip and bring the whole family down with him, looked like yet another of the writing staff’s beloved blind alleys.

Let’s refocus, as the show did, away from Christopher (but only for a moment) and towards Tony. (The true subject of its gaze, no matter how many times it’s feinted elsewhere). The aforementioned dream therapy session was replayed in the real world a few scenes later, but where Tony’s dream self was able to inventory his own sins, the waking Tony hid, as usual, behind obfuscations, half-truths and outright fabrications. “They shot his face off and I was prostate with grief,” he says of Tony Blundetto, the lie not meeting his eyes. His need to unburden his conscience does not overwhelm his need to take himself off the hook (cleaver?) every time he does something wrong. In the scenes after Christopher’s death, Tony tells anybody within earshot that the baby seat in the back of the SUV had been destroyed in the crash, that Christopher’s renewed drug use could have cost him his daughter. But when Ms. Moltisanti shows up at the Soprano household with the baby in tow, Tony can’t even come down to say hello – he sneaks a guilty peek at Kelly’s breast while she suckles the infant (the maternal tableaux especially evocative in light of Tony’s own mother issues) and then flees to Las Vegas.

Tony wants to get away. So did Christopher – his disinterest in the “family business” had become palpable. He had become a movie producer and started a new family. I think Tony recognized that he was losing Christopher – had lost him, in fact and, presented with the latest in a series of cosmic “outs,” acted with characteristic expediency. He couldn’t shoot Christopher, but quietly snuffing him out on an empty road while nobody’s around and then acting holier-than-thou in the aftermath? That’ll do nicely. I don’t know if Tony has ever been this unsympathetic, yet at the same time, his behavior shows a remarkable consistency. As much as “Kennedy and Heidi” upset my conception of where the show was going, it jibes perfectly with where it’s been, and if Chase is in the process of punishing us for daring to care about a rich, hypocritical criminal with impeccable survival instincts and an irretrievable soul, he’s going about it fairly.

I’m not going to write too much about the Las Vegas sequences, as I want to know what cnw and Robbie think. I will say that the garbage piling up so ominously everywhere is indicative of more than poor waste management practices in the state of New Jersey and that Tony’s climactic, self-actualizing epiphany (spurred by a return appearance of the mysterious beacon from “Members Only” and “Cold Stones” should be taken with several grains of peyote. Instead of hogging all the exegesis for myself, I will throw out some discussion fodder. Does A.J.’s tearful outburst in his shrink’s office suggest he’s turned another corner (turn enough, of course, and you end up where you start)? What did Tony’s stoned cry of “he’s dead!” at the roulette table signify? And who mourns for J.T. Dolan, who has gone from potential narrative fulcrum to just a dead Law and Order scribe?

The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 17: “Walk Like a Man”



If entire seasons of The Sopranos have unifying themes, then season 6’s finally crystallized last night. Significantly, as opposed to earlier seasons—and specifically 1, 3, and 5—the female characters have remained greatly on the sidelines. In the first half of the season, Vito’s banishment made everyone in the Jersey fam, whether they knew it or not, reassess their definitions of masculinity, and with such major story developments involving the sight of Johnny Sack crying at his daughter’s wedding, or Tony’s need to beat the shit out of his muscle-head bodyguard, Chase seemed to be stripping the show down to its core questions about American manhood and patriarchy. Now, the second half of the season has gone even further in focusing almost exclusively on the men, whether they’re festering (Uncle Junior), rotting (Johnny Sack), simmering (Chris), retracting (Hesh), growing inconsequential (Paulie), or just emerging (AJ). Though Janice was central to the opening episode “Sopranos Home Movies,” and her Livia-like cadences were growing ever more alarming, it was brother-in-law Bobby’s finally assuming the identity of a true killer (“popping his cherry,” as it were, when assigned by Tony to a murder mission) that provided the story arc, mirrored two weeks later in “Remember When,” when the bones from Tony’s “first time” is excavated in a suburban basement. Of course, his father goaded him into doing it.

Fathers and sons—their inextricable legacies. No wonder all the Godfather references in these final episodes. As it turns out, the false paternal guidance Tony showed to Vito’s wayward son last week was merely a trial run. In last night’s “Walk Like a Man,” Tony had to contend with his two own wayward sons: his actual offspring AJ and his sort-of nephew, surrogate son, and once protégé Christopher. With that expert parallel structure that Chase & Co. have been practicing with dexterity all season long, AJ and Christopher spiraled out into different forms of dependency and mental sickness. The benefits and severe limits of therapy and self-help have always been front and center on The Sopranos, as has Tony’s interference in others’ attempts to better themselves. Much like Tony had mean-spiritedly dulled Janice’s halfhearted stabs at anger management in season 5’s “Cold Cuts,” last night the boss man’s poor guidance was put into sharp relief. AJ’s suicidal intimations and descent into depression, following Blanca’s dumping him, were treated by his dad with a strong dose of fatherly intimidation. The prescription? Underage drinking and strippers with his buddies’ frat-boy sons-cum-wannabe-thugs. Taking part in the torture of a rich white kid who owed his friends money, AJ, who was called “Tony Soprano Jr” for the first time in the series, has perhaps frighteningly found his identity. Though ignorant to the facts, Carmela was as colluding as ever, just happy that her son didn’t throw himself off of the roof of the pizza parlor.

And while Tony was busy giving his son entryway into a life he has so often expressed he didn’t want for him, he still found time to further alienate Christopher. The rift between them growing ever since Adriana’s murder, and now with “Cleaver” having cleaved them in two (thanks, AN), Tony and Christopher seem locked in an unspoken battle royale—Christopher’s denouncing of his own father as nothing more than a “fucking junkie” while flipping over steaks at he and his wife’s first BBQ in their new home didn’t further endear him to Tony, and the ever-growing mutual loathing of Paulie and Chris only serves to exacerbate this withering bond.

Everything seems to be disappearing this season: gone is Tony’s financial stability, gone is his nostalgia for the past (symbolized by his father and Hesh), and now, gone is the possibility of Chris as his successor. Though he’s been sober again for about a year, Christopher downs a scotch in a moment of weakness (or a symbol of reconciliation with Paulie). Paulie’s mockery of Chris’s moments of drunken rhapsodizing about his new baby, sanctioned by Tony’s approving laughter (caught in an expert use of slow-mo, from Chris’s POV, that made Tony’s grin look positively satanic), send him storming out of the bar. As with AJ, any headway he had made with his own mental health is dashed against the rocks. What have years and years of sitting on Dr. Melfi’s couch done for Tony but reinforce his own narcissism? Even if he has learned from introspection, and I believe he has learned much, Tony has never learned to fully empathize with others, to apply what he learns to the world at large. And his inability to do so could be his downfall.

Chris’s final actions—shooting his “Cleaver” co-screenwriter and oft-abused rehab sponsor, Tim Daly’s J.T., in the head—could be the beginning of the end of this family’s way of life (though Adriana’s death is probably the more appropriate “beginning”). If Chris is caught for J.T.’s killing, then what would stop him from spilling all the beans, especially as he no longer has any loyalty? Then again, thinking ahead has always been foolish with this series, and these five episodes have confounded my expectations again and again. Another Sopranos tactic on full display was the unceasing ebb and flow of sympathies: Michael Imperioli, who plays one of the show’s most hateful characters, gave a close-to career best performance here, time and again making me side with him—amidst his struggles in AA, his passive-aggressive brawls with Paulie, and his antagonism with Tony, Imperioli nearly makes you forget his complicity in all aspects of his own misery. Similarly, writer Terence Winter so fleetly moves AJ from angsty naval-gazing to the chalky pallor of medical depression that I felt concerned for him—though I was punished for this when he makes the final turn to twerpy punkdom. Like season 4’s “Whoever Did This,” the shocking reversals of sympathy happen quickly, mercilessly. Which begs the question: Do we care because we want to see them all taken down, or because we want to believe that their reclamation is possible?

The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 16: “Chasing It”

That pervasive sense of dread and foreboding hanging over The Sopranos seems to be getting stronger as the end nears. Last week, Tony said he was waiting for the other shoe to drop; in this week’s episode, “Chasing It”, Carmela says that she feels like there’s a piano hanging on a rope overhead. As the metaphoric stakes have gotten bigger, the literal stakes have grown as well: this episode saw Tony (played to brilliant, implosive perfection by James Gandolfini) gambling away increasingly vast sums of money in a futile attempt to recover from some stumbles, in pursuit of a fortune he’s already losing. Listening to Tony describe his compulsive behavior, he sounded eerily like the Tony Soprano from the pilot episode – chasing a dream that’s already in the past.

Like the first three episodes of the season, “Chasing It” is all dark and broody atmospherics, more doom and gloom than explosive fireworks, but the oppressiveness is more palpable here, as though the series is inching its way towards something decisive. Note director Tim Van Patten’s shaky handhelds and awkwardly-framed close-ups, which give the episode an uncharacteristically jittery look and uncomfortable feel.

If we need further evidence that things are reaching a boiling point, we also get one nasty fight between Carmela and Tony (and how great it still is, after all these years, to see these two remarkable actors play off of each other). Tony and Carmela know how to hurt each other better than anyone else: she’s the only person who can really call Tony on his selfishness; meanwhile, he sees the hypocrisy in her minor pangs of conscience, well aware that she cares enough to lose sleep over the shoddy construction of her spec house, but not so much that she’d be willing to forego her financial windfall from selling the house (to family, no less). The writers get every nuance of this relationship, and it comes through in nearly every line: Tony and Carmela hate each other because they need each other, because they understand each other so completely, and because they’re so much alike, complicit in their destructiveness, greed, and complacency.

Tony’s increasing alienation manifests itself most acutely in his argument with Carmela, but it pervades the episode. Early on, Tony confides to Hesh (Jerry Adler, also great here) that he can’t trust Christopher, Paulie, and Bobby, because they are all “murderers”, though Tony knows full well he bears primary responsibility for turning Christopher and Bobby into killers. Later, he proceeds to lash out at Hesh with a nasty, racist tirade for his very reasonable request for payment or interest on the $200,000 loan he gave Tony.

Despite his obvious culpability, Tony refuses to take responsibility for creating his current situation. Like Carmela, he’s built his house with rotten wood, and it’s set to cave in – taking others down with it – and all he can do is hope it doesn’t rain. Tony is too weak, selfish, and lazy to do things right (even to take his own therapy seriously). Hence, the gambling and the temptation to stiff Hesh on his money. Towards the end of the episode, Tony reflects on his luck and decides that, money notwithstanding, he’s “still up.” Later, after Hesh’s girlfriend dies suddenly, Tony returns Hesh’s money with condolences: “I’m sorry for your loss,” Tony offers. Forget the money, though. By the end of “Chasing It”, everyone’s on a losing streak.

“Chasing It” may be the most intricately plotted episode of the new half-season so far, and I have neglected a few major subplots for lack of time and space (Blanca and A.J., Vito Jr. and poop in the shower). I hope Brother and Robbie, along with anyone else who’s been reading (Eve, Matthew, etc.), that you will give these matters the attention they deserve. Bonus points for anyone who’s willing to tackle the terrorism thing. I thought this was a first-rate episode, and I’m anxious to hear from everyone.

The Sopranos, Season Six Episode 15: “Remember When”

The last image in “Remember When” is of Junior Soprano (Dominic Chianese) slumped meekly in a lawn chair outside his treatment center, absently petting a snaggle pussed cat. His tight-lipped expression bespeaks frustration at his plight, but also the fact that for the first time since the sixth season premiere “Members Only” – in Friends parlance, The One where Junior Shoots Tony – he’s without his dentures. A few scenes earlier, he’d been assaulted by a fellow patient who gave him a good sock to his fragile jaw. What we’re seeing then, is a tableaux of toothlessness at once literal and figurative – the old fox defanged.

It seems as good a place as any to leave Junior, arguably the least empathetic of The Sopranos’ major characters (seasonal bogeymen like Richie Aprille and Ralph Ciffaretto notwithstanding) and seemingly a forgotten man as far as the writers were concerned. The slow erosion of Corrado Soprano’s former sharpness has been a familiar motif over the past few years, but (pace its nostalgic title) “Remember When” charts just how far he’s slipped by introducing an old photograph of Junior and his brother Johnny, slouched casually against a Cadillac in front of Satriale’s.

As a portrait of old-style wise guy cool, it’s just about perfect. The pair’s expressions hover somewhere between avuncular and homicidal. Flipping through old photos during a South Beach sojourn with Paulie, Tony gives the picture a quick glance and seems eager to move on. He’s equally uninterested in the vintage snapshot of Paulie (a real and arresting image of Tony Sirico, all biceps and slicked-backed attitude), exclaiming a few seconds later – after Paulie has commandeered the conversation with another long-winded remembrance of malfeasance past -- that “‘remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.’”

It’s understandable that Tony doesn’t really want to dredge up the past; after all, the little bit of past that’s been dredged up in a Jersey basement – the corpse of a bookie who was apparently Tony’s first-ever kill – is what has him fled to Florida, dining chez Beansie (now moving about in an expensive-looking wheelchair) and wondering which of his many regrettable yesterdays will finally undo him in the present tense. And Tony looks very much like a guy who’s coming undone: he seems paunchier and sallower than usual, and a furtive phone call to Hesh suggests he may he having money problems. (200 K is no small loan).

The week’s major revelation, courtesy of bigmouth Paulie, is that Tony murdered the bookie at his father’s insistence. No wonder Tony is reticent to reminisce. The Sopranos has always been a show marked by hauntings, but this episode was a veritable echo chamber, referencing important moments in the show’s past.Junior being pelted by paper balls by his former charge mirrored Meadow’s drunken behavior in the season three finale; the tense scenes between Tony and Paulie on a rented boat loudly (and some might say over-deliberately) evoked Big Pussy’s murder.

Despite its abundance of carefully wrought resonances, “Remember When” feels a bit like a holding pattern, another attenuated standstill to mark time as the plot slowly kicks into gear (though we did see another bloody step Phil Leotardo’s NYC takeover bid). There wasn’t much, f’rinstance, to substantiate (or refute) Robbiefreeling’s superb postulation from last week about Christopher’s possible extra-cirricular activities. (And I watched Imperioli during his one scene like a hawk). There’s more to be said, of course, and rather than try to unravel it myself, I’ll just give you both some talking points that I’m not articulate enough to jump on. Why the sudden and frankly unprecedented glimpse into Paulie’s interior life? What do you make of Junior addressing his treatment centre protégé/assailant as “Anthony?” Does the tomato plant count as another Godfather reference? Help me out here.

The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 14: “Stage 5”

An utterly unnerving night with the Sopranos, if you ask me: one of those expert straddlings of the line between the broad and the sober that’s been the show’s stock in trade for quite a few years now. Even as the episode opened on a seemingly fairly innocuous note, with hyper-gory footage from Christopher’s indie horror-crap “Cleaver” encompassing the screen as it’s being digitally tweaked in the editing room, “Stage 5” moved on to deeper reflections, climaxing with what might have been the series’ most fully realized evocation of its “sympathy for the devil” leanings. But, first, to the get the “Cleaver” stuff out of the way (which is exactly what David Chase, brilliantly, did): How refreshing (and what a relief) that Christopher’s long-gestating mob-horror hybrid (Goodfellas meets Saw, natch) finally premiered and rather than provide either climax or catharsis, it was merely a plot device to both deepen the festering rot of Tony and Christopher’s father-son bond, as well as create new reservoirs of anger and resentment between Carmela and Christopher. The “Cleaver” screening itself was a predictable chuckle-fest, reminiscent of nothing less than the meta madness of The Muppet Movie (Steven Van Zandt looked especially Dr. Teeth-like as he chortled and nodded with approval) or, as when Paulie loudly answers his cell mid-movie, one of those pre-show movie theater politeness ads. But then a quick, expertly timed glance from Rosalie Aprile to Carmela when “Cleaver”’s mob boss (clearly modeled after Tony, and played by Daniel Baldwin with prime Baldwin doofiness) seduces his protégé’s fiancée, and the floodgates of recognition open.

Later on, not only does Carmela further turn her husband against Christopher by emphasizing the similarities between him and his onscreen version, she confronts the little rat-face herself at her home, memorably with his newborn baby in her arms. As with all essential Sopranos exchanges, the conversation was brief, yet cutting; blink and miss the portending wrath to come. Segueing from concerns over “Cleaver”’s proximity to her husband’s extramarital dalliances, she moves into darker territory—quick and without warning. Carmela first speaking of Adriana directly to Christopher, and voicing her concerns that she might be dead (!), seemed like a true breakthrough; furthermore she insinuates that she was better off without him. Christopher’s relationship with Tony already shaky, he certainly doesn’t need Carmela to turn against him, too.

And something is terribly amiss with Christopher: he’s too sober. After last season’s (or the first half of the season, depending on how you want to look at it) downward spiral into addiction (again), everything seems too rosy: wife, house, baby. And what was that business with the feds outside the diner, laughed off as if old school chums? And what of Christopher’s final look of hollowed (dare I say “Pussy-like”?) guilt at his baby’s baptism, the end of the episode and already the second Godfather reference just two weeks into the season?

If my suspicions of Christopher come true, then it would be in perfectly keeping with David Chase’s horrific sense of irony. Paralleling all this meaty family intrigue was the further humiliation of Johnny Sack, not only facing the daily grind of prison life but also discovering that he’s in the final stages of lung cancer (just another of what will be many of this season’s “chicken’s home to roost” nuggets: Johnny was rarely seen without an elegantly curling waft of cigarette smoke by his side). Perhaps by virtue of his soothing control and comparatively gentlemanlike manner, Vincent Curatola’s Johnny Sack always came across as one of the series’ most valuable, even likable players, eminently measured, as much a murderous scoundrel as anyone else yet so utterly convincing in his self-assurance and unwavering in his own ethical standards that he made for an appealing counterpoint to Tony. Johnny’s slow death, mouth agape, with his beloved wife and daughter at his side, leaves something of a gaping hole in the morally relative Sopranos world.

Picking up where Hal Holbrook brilliantly left off in last season’s “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh,” Sydney Pollack was on hand to deliver one of his best performances, and one surprisingly free of the harried neuroses of his greatest onscreen roles, as a convicted wife-killing doctor, working in the prison hospital and giving Johnny some hope in his dying days. Never sentimentalized, their relationship remains as no-nonsense and unerringly masculine as any in the show’s history. Unlike Holbrook’s hospital companion to Tony, Pollack isn’t here to give spiritual advice or philosophical wisdom, rather to provide Johnny with (ultimately futile) hope; thus the paralleling between Tony and Johnny was reinforced—and put to sleep. Tony’s second chance at life versus Johnny’s hopeless fade; Tony’s been aided along the way by road markers, beacons, and guardians, while Johnny had everything taken away from him piece by mortifying piece. In the show’s reliance on binaries, the Tony/Johnny trajectory may be the second most heartbreaking behind Carmela and Rosalie Aprile (who’s already lost everything that Carmela holds dear); and it’s doubtful that Tony and Carmela will remain so comparatively untouched for much longer.

Season Six, Episode 13: "Soprano Home Movies"

“Soprano Home Movies,” the first episode of The Sopranos to air in the better part of a year, actually begins with an old scene from the end of the fifth season’s finale (“All Due Respect”), dating back to 2004: Johnny Sack, the boss of New York, was arrested in the backyard of his home, and Tony fled through the snow, tossing his gun. Tony’s casual mistake—tossing the firearm in plain view of a spectator—comes back to haunt him when he’s arrested on a gun charge in the present day. David Chase and his writers seem to be setting up a major story arc around Tony’s precarious relationship with the legal powers-that-be, but until that’s played out, that potential plot advancement may be the least interesting thing about the use of that footage from “All Due Respect.”

The recycled scene sets the tone for this elegant and surprisingly stripped-down episode, which is loaded with echoes of the past. Carmela waxes sentimental about that house on the shore she and Tony nearly bought before she threw him out of the house in “Whitecaps” (the finale of season four). Tony tries to insulate himself by using a family member, his brother-in-law Bobby, as a buffer, then later asserts his authority by coaxing Bobby into killing a man, as he did with Christopher in “For All Debts Public and Private” (the season four premiere). Tony tries pinning Bobby to the wall in a balls-out fight that looks an awful lot like the scuffle that cost Ralph Cifaretto his life in “Whoever Did This.” Janice tells Carmela about the boyfriend who once hit her (dearly departed Richie Aprile), neglecting to tell Carm that she responded by shooting him dead in “Knight in White Satin Armor,” way back in season two. There’s just no escaping the past, it seems; these characters are doomed to remember and relive past mistakes, indiscretions, and half-baked schemes. And while we could speculate what this means for the eight remaining episodes, it’s enough for now to take it as an apt enough distillation of “Soprano Home Movies,” an episode that, to a surprising degree, privileged family melodrama above mob drama.

By my watch, over 30 minutes of the episode’s running time were devoted to Tony and Carm’s trip up to the Adirondacks to celebrate Tony’s birthday with Bobby and Janice. In slow, quiet scenes, Tony makes real headway in his relationship with his sister and brother-in-law, and Janice even tries to compliment him, to tell him he’s changed since being shot last year. Tony takes offense at what he sees as a thinly veiled attack, and what starts as validation of Tony’s “every day is a gift” transformation from a year ago actually sets off the quick slide back to the default hostility between Tony and his sister, culminating brilliantly in an explosive and violent game of Monopoly. At the end of the episode, Tony watches the home movies from his childhood that Janice has had transferred to DVD. Little Janice sprays little Tony with a hose, and he chases after her. It’s as though they were doomed to this vicious cycle of aggression and resentment from the time they were half-formed.

Providing the psychological templates for both brother and sister are, of course, Tony’s mother and father, who loom large over the episode, and though Tony and Janice fancy themselves more like the latter, they each have plenty of Livia Soprano within themselves to inspire each other’s (self) loathing—Tony in his insatiable need for his sister’s gratitude for the things he has done for her, Janice in her erratic parenting skills. The point is simple and profound, subtly rendered but crystal clear: Our families are larger than ourselves, and one way or another, they make us who we are. To return to something I wrote last week about the previous episodes of Season Six, this takes the show back to this thorny issue of whether or not people are capable of real change, whether it’s possible to escape the things that have formed us. To The Sopranos’ credit, though, however close the show comes to implying that everyone is caught inescapably within institutions and relationships that make them who they are, that never means they get a free pass morally. Tony, Janice, and Bobby all come out of their boozy, brutal weekend together worse for the wear, a little more compromised and further away from realizing whatever hopes they have for redemption. As for Carmela, well, she may get off the easiest this week, but her passivity, on full display here, has always been her greatest sin. In “Soprano Home Movies,” she is more chorus than anything to else—in this case literally, in one glorious moment of drunken karaoke, singing “Love Hurts.” If she meant the love of family, well, I’ll drink to that.

From Cnw:

On April 8, HBO’s landmark original series The Sopranos begins a stretch of nine final original episodes, officially the second half of the series’ much-maligned sixth season. For some of us at Reverse Shot, the end of The Sopranos is a pretty big deal. How better to tackle the end of the series and to pay tribute to a masterpiece of American popular culture than with a bit of ongoing dialogue, Reverse Shot style? So I’m happy to inaugurate an ongoing discussion on Reverse Blog about The Sopranos, Season Six, Part Two. Of course, we’re not the only game in town, and I do encourage anyone and everyone to check out the Sopranos coverage from our friends at the House Next Door. But with a text (film, television series, or otherwise) this rich, there’s plenty more to be said, and a multiplicity of voices is always a good thing. So, without further ado…

When last we saw Tony and friends, New York and New Jersey were on the verge of war (again); Christopher was fighting a drug habit and pining for a career in the movies (again); and Carmela was selling her soul for a sweet real estate venture (again). The series sixth and final season began with a shattering event. Tony was shot by his Uncle Junior and slipped into a coma, barely clinging to life. He escaped purgatory (quite literally) to find he had a new lease on life; he would treat each day as a gift. This setup established the central theme of the season: how much can we really change, and can we will ourselves to be different than—or better than—whatever it is we’ve become? At least four major character arcs in the season came back repeatedly to this theme: Tony’s last shot at redemption, Christopher’s repeated slide into addiction, Carmela’s perennial abdication of moral responsibility for material comfort, and, most prominently, Vito’s ill-fated attempt to flee New Jersey and the mob and to live as a gay man. The results were predictably bleak. If the season seems to have asked if redemption is possible for any of these characters, it’s fair to say that David Chase and his writers came down with a hard negative assessment. So season six set up a serious of false starts and dead ends, leaving everyone, in the end, pretty much where it found them, and pissing off fickle Sopranos fans across the country (let’s just be honest, if you watch Sopranos for climax—and you probably shouldn’t—David Chase is an incredibly big tease). While it may not have been conventionally satisfying in a straightforward (read: boring) way, though, there was something incendiary and brilliant about how Chase and his writers set up such clear moral tests for each of these characters and then let them all fail at them systematically and nearly without exception.

This all came to a non-climax in the midseason finale, an episode called “Kaisha.” The title refers to a lie Christopher tells Tony about the woman he’s seeing: she’s black, he says, and so he can’t bring her around; in fact, her name isn’t Kaisha—it’s Julianna—and he can’t bring her around because she had an aborted fling with Tony. So Kaisha is really a non-person, an absence, the lie we tell to make everything seem okay. There are plenty of these lies to go around. As the episode ends, the Soprano family gathers for Christmas, and Tony and Carmela’s daughter Meadow calls home from California. “Everybody’s here”, they tell her, which is a lie. Meadow’s not there, for one, but also, the camera lingers on Christopher’s new wife and we realize that Christopher’s dead fiancé Adriana, murdered by Silvio with Tony and Christopher’s blessing, is also the hidden lack, her absence concealed by a lie that no one believes, a lie that explains her away without expunging her from memory.

These characters are ill equipped to deal with relationships; they’re constantly lying to themselves and to one another. “Kaisha” ends chillingly, as A.J.’s new girlfriend tells Carmela, “You have a beautiful home.” Carmela smiles, “Yes, we do.” There you have it, one sad moment of truth, as Carmela, perhaps the show’s last best hope at redemption, takes pathetic joy in her stuff, pretending that everything is okay, and that having a beautiful home is the same thing as having a beautiful family. These people have all chosen things above people; they don’t even know how to do otherwise and can’t do otherwise, even when they try. I have no thoughts about where these final episodes are headed, and I don’t care to speculate about the finale that the series is or isn’t building to, but I am sure that Chase and his writers will come back to these themes, and I fear that the outlook for these characters is bleak. And still, I’m so excited to see what they do that I can hardly stand it…

From robbiefreeling:

And it’s funny how in the months proceeding, when I recalled the title of the final episode, I always just assumed that it referred to the character of A.J.’s new girlfriend. Rewatching it, I was taken aback by my presumptions, racist or otherwise. In a sense, this episode reminded me very much of the fifth season’s “Unidentified Black Males,” in which the show prominently took itself to task for all of its intentionally race-baiting subplots in the past, climaxing with the revelation that Tony had not, in fact, been assaulted by random black guys on his way to meet his doomed cousin Tony B (Steve Buscemi) on that failed mission that got Tony B put in jail for years, but that he had an embarrassing fainting spell brought on by (what else?) mother troubles. So then, Kaisha is an Unidentified Black Female, another, as you put it, “absence” and a “lie.” Sopranos has always trafficked in the ways in which ethnicity is wielded as both a scapegoat and self-definition, yet this was perhaps its most subtle use. And most telling: A.J.’s Puerto Rican (“Maybe Dominican,” Tony reasons…hopefully?) girlfriend, named, actually, Blanca, is suddenly part of the family; almost welcome, even, at their Christmas gathering.

This is a stunning turnabout not only because of the fact that A.J. has suddenly become something bordering on responsible (not adult yet, I dare say) but also because his sister Meadow was certainly not allowed the “privilege” of an interracial romance back in season three, when her Jewish/African-American paramour seemed lucky to have escaped the Soprano home with his life (and pretentious rectitude) intact. So what does this mean? Is Tony “evolving”? Did his near-death experience truly force him to turn over a new leaf and cherish every day as if it was his last? Doubtful if David Chase has anything to say about it, but it was a remarkably subdued ending to an emotionally volatile season (just one week prior, we saw Vito get the Joe Pesci-in-Casino treatment, that guy Fat Dom get sliced up like raw fish, and, most disturbingly, Adriana come back in a possibly prophetic dream Carmela had during her Paris sojourn), and pointed towards so many explosions they would be impossible to numerate and a fool’s errand to predict.

But since I am a bit of a fool, I will make a prediction about the Final 9: that Carmela’s growing suspicions about Adriana’s disappearance will be further investigated (spec house distractions be damned) and her discoveries will explode into a full-fledged moral meltdown (which, paralleling Tony’s psychiatric self-evaluation, has been simmering since season one’s “College”). Tony and Carmela’s relationship is the center here, everything else just satellites orbiting them; as Season Four’s “Whitecaps” proved, the dissolution of their marriage could carry a dramatic sting far greater than any baseball bat knock to the head.

From Brotherfromanother:

Robbie, I don’t think you’re a fool. Adriana’s ghost hovered over season six in more ways than one, and cnw’s description of her as a kind of structuring absence in the brilliant final scene of “Kaisha” is right on the money. I also saw her in the character of Julianna—curly hair, big chest, dark features, and prone to lounging around in a stupor with Chrissy. Surely you both caught the musical cue when the pair went out to the movies: Bernard Herrmann’s swooning Vertigo theme.

More to the point: Adriana is the only major character whose murder was not shown to us. Yes, we saw Sil stalking after her in the woods (very Miller’s Crossing) and heard the fatal shots. I am not suggesting that Ade is still alive, and that the big revelation this season will be that Sil is a treasonous softie. But after the clinical depictions of Tony & Co.’s “waste management” skills re: Richie Aprile, Ralphie Ciffaretto, and Big Pussy, it’s unlikely that the writers simply neglected to show us Ade’s corpse being hacked and packed out of squeamishness. Yes, we saw Ade’s car being checked into “long term parking” (also the episode’s retroactively affecting title) and yes, Chris threw some suitcases into the tall grass, but my feeling is that if Carm calls the private investigator, and if Adriana’s body is found, it’s going to be because of ineptitude/laziness on Sil’s part.

One of my constant Sopranos companions (full disclosure: my mum, the loudest member of our six-strong weekly viewing party) has suggested that if Carmela discovers what happened to Ade, the Big Lie of the series—the uneasy complicity of the female characters in their partners’ boys-will-be-boys misadventures—would be exposed. Not because Carmela is a paragon of virtue—she’s made her king-size bed and lies in it fine—but because this particular can of worms is plenty deep. Consider the ramifications of Meadow finding out what “really happened” to Jackie Jr: for all her bleeding-heart hypocrisy (which the writers, mostly in the voice of Finn, have routinely called her on), this revelation might be too much for her to bear. People have been wondering in print for the better part of a decade about what would be an appropriate fate for Tony, and I think this could be it: estranged from the person he loves most unequivocally. AJ, being a boy, is a different story—i.e. Tony lets him bring a Puerto Rican girl home. (At least she’s Catholic.) And I think AJ is a dead issue at this point: the old-world traditions of idealizing daughters and then objectifying/abusing them if they belong to someone else are what Chase is after here.

So I’m moved to think of the one female character who, even more than Ade, stands in as the series most innocent (and unmourned) victim: Tracee, the stripper unceremoniously beaten to death by Ralphie in Season Three. The not-unsubtle graphic matches between her and Meadow in that fateful episode hinted that Tony saw them existing on the same continuum. When he mauled Ralphie, screaming, “She was a beautiful creature! She never hurt anybody!” I don’t really think he meant his horse. His cries also foreshadow Adriana’s demise—another innocent, beautiful creature, empathetic to the point that she admired the drug dealer who committed a murder in her nightclub because he sent money home to his family. Adriana, Tracee, and the thrice-burned shell that is Rosalie Aprile, whose unimaginable suffering is once again contrasted with Carmela’s relatively smooth ride during their tetchy trip to Paris (during which Carm may have literally and figuratively seen the light —a beacon atop the Eiffel tower that perfectly mirrored the portentous blip glimpsed by Tony during his near-death stint as Kevin Finnerty (infinity?) are the real victims of the “things” that Tony and his colleagues do.

Whatever “direction” the series is heading, I can’t imagine that a reckoning around these issues isn’t on the horizon. Especially considering that Tony’s teetering psychological architecture—the focus of the series—owes its rotten construction in large part to the I-married-a-mobster coping mechanisms of a very important lady. Recall the amazing house-of-the-dead dream sequence in last season’s second and best episode, and the shadow in the doorway whose mere presence convinced Tony it was best to retreat to the land of the living. Given your Poltergeist-derived moniker, Robbie, you’ll appreciate this: she’s (sort of) ba-ack…