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, 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?
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