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?

Everyone's favorite:

1. A Miscellany of Angelenos, Meeting in Love and Anger
2. Young Students Post Solid Gains in Federal Tests
3. Dead, Buried or Risen Again, Garbage Is Forever
4. Dudes Toasting the Newlyweds (and Their Bodacious Guests)
5. Couture Steps Lively for a Corpse
6. Unprepared and Ill-Equipped for a Serial Killer at Large
7. Four Souls Disguised as Couples
8. Imitations That Transcend Flattery
9. Even After a Few Too Many Rounds, She's Still a Professional
10. Egyptian Detained in Cairo in Connection With London Attack

Pick the magic four:

1. Fanciful to Figurative to Wryly Inscrutable
2. Even Comic-Book Superheroes Can Use a Little More Momentum
3. Billions Needed to Improve Great Lakes, Coalition Says
4. Houses in Gated Communities: Security in All Seasons
5. A Son of Two Nations, Stoically Searching for His Father
6. A Children's Troupe, Homeward Bound
7. CardSystems Sets Plan to Comply With Security Standards
8. A Noisy Upstairs Neighbor Is Just the Beginning of a Rental Nightmare
9. On Saturn, a Spacecraft Is Finding New Worlds
10. A Commentary on the Ruthless Pursuit of the News, With Some Cat-and-Mouse Thrown In

For those newcomers to the Reverse Shot blog, this weekly column pays tribute to the wonderful article titling abilities of everyone's favorite big-city maybe-liberal daily paper. Below are the titles of ten articles, your task is to pick the four that head real movie reviews. Without peeking. Someday we may give prizes for this.

1. Amid the Pulp, a Meditation on Fathers, Sons and the Ties That Choke
2. A Scary Crash, a Thwarted Deal and Then Plan B
3. Voice of the Boss and a Voice of Reason
4. Reluctant Coach, Bad Team and, of Course, Redemption
5. When Preaching Globalized Ethics Is Just Corporate P.R.
6. A Place in the Mood for Anything
7. Senate Approves Central American Free Trade Pact
8. How a Japanese Master Enlightened the West
9. A Story of Unusual Love, Minus All the Complications
10. A Riddle of a Romance Stricken by a Different Kind of Love Bug

Hit it.

1. Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign Teacher Said
2. Trying to Update the 60's, Just a Twitch at a Time
3. Under a Bridge, and on Top of the World
4. Adulterous Romance in a Fractious World
5. New EBay Service Aims to Stem Merchant Exodus
6. At Your Request, a Bespoke Adventure
7. Lord Love a VW Bug That Knows Its Mind
8. An Affair of Their Art
9. The Lives and Loves (Perhaps) of Emperor Penguins
10. U.S. and Europe Differ on Testing Athletes for Rare Heart Ailment

I had a good time with the new format used in last week's edition, so I think I'll stick with it for a while. It occurred to me that it might also make sense to post the answers at some point, so I'll try to do this on Monday from now on.

Here goes. Pick the real four:

1. Many Still Seek One Final Say on Ending Life
2. What Price Authenticity?
3. An Artistic Eye Wide Open, Observing Odd, Lost Souls
4. When Blurry Lines Divide Fact, Fiction and Family
5. When Astronauts Brief Congress, a Little Levity Goes a Long Way
6. New Jersey Won't Make Deadline to Transfer Mentally Ill Youths
7. Dark Was the Young Knight Battling His Inner Demons
8. Giants Still Healing From Last Year
9. A Corporate Moral Slide on a Wartime Oil Slick
10. Not Ready for Their Close-Up

A little late this week, but I thought it'd be nice to switch things up for our seventh installment. Instead of matching titles to movies, below is a list drawn from the entirety of today's NY Times and your challenge is pick the real movie review titles. Good luck.

1. Action Hero Travels Light and Often Takes the Bus
2. The Appetites Are Nearing the Gate
3. Citigroup to Pay $2 Billion in Enron Lawsuit
4. For Better or Worse, Even on a Battlefield
5. A Sliver of Prairie Still Untamed
6. A Church Where Birth Runs Out of Control
7. A Cursed Teenager Turns 90. Let the Adventures Begin.
8. Portraits of Life and Fantasy That Embody the Artists
9. Fungus Fatal to Mosquito May Aid Global War on Malaria
10. Like Trains, Crossing but Never Touching

This week is the juciest we've had in ages:

1. Mean Girls (Some Are Even Fascists)
2. Struggling With Nature and One Another
3. Often Serious, Often Not, Teaching Rock His Way
4. When California Started Sliding on Little Wheels
5. Roll the Fairy Tale, Fade to the Fists
6. Try to Help a Stranger and This Is His Thanks
7. Friends 4ever No Matter Who Wears the Pants
8. Struggles of a Working Mom and Her Daughter in Tel Aviv

1. Or
2. Caterina in the Big City
3. Apres Vous
4. The White Diamond
5. Rock School
6. Lords of Dogtown
7. Cinderella Man
8. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants

A bit of a disappointment this week, but it must be done:

1. Escaping New York for a Real Jungle
2. A Cruel Choice for a Priest Manipulated by the Nazis
3. A Remake Files Down the Sharp Edges of a Prison Football Saga
4. Juggling Her Chinese Clan, Gay Lover, Pregnant Mom
5. A Band With the Courage of Its 'Insane' Convictions
6. An (Illegal) Artist Determined to Make His Presence Known
7. Bowling Strikes and Spares, While the Fans Drift Away

1. A League of Ordinary Gentlemen
2. The Ninth Day
3. Saving Face
4. Madgascar
5. The Yongest Yard
6. Fearless Freaks
7. Bomb the System

If you didn't catch our first installment...below is a list of review titles from today's NY Times movie section. Below that is a list of the films they refer to. Match 'em up. No cheating.

1. An Epic Bloodletting Empowered by Faith
2. Bigotry as the Outer Side of Inner Angst
3. Paris Hilton and Friends, Pursued by Maniacs With a Fondness for Wax
4. Seeking Adult Answers in Two Scarred Boyhoods
5. Wartime's Collateral Damage
6. The World's Worst Interviewer Visits Toronto
7. Party On! It's a Civic Duty

1. Crash
2. Girl From Monday
3. Mysterious Skin
4. Kingdom of Heaven
5. Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
6. Brothers
7. House of Wax

Great prizes this week.

Below is a list of review titles from today's NY Times movie section. Below that is a list of the films they refer to. Match 'em up. No cheating.

1. The Way the World Ends, With a Shrug and a Smile
2. At a Hotel Where Desire and Shame Intersect
3. A Man Breaks Into Houses to Fill Them Up With Life
4. A Student's Impulsive Love With an Imperfect Stranger
5. Ensuring National Security With Guns and Vixens
6. Postgraduate Depression, When True Love Is as Elusive as High Pay and Low Rent
7. More Than Tea Is Brewing in This English Household
8. Raucous Means to a Surprise End

1. The Holy Girl
2. Funny Ha Ha
3. A Toute De Suit
4. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
5. Death of a Dynasty
6. 3-Iron
7. Ladies in Lavendar
8. XXX: State of the Union