And just like that, it's over. The final montage is one of the most emotional moments I've seen on TV, not because it wraps anything up in a nice bow (or ribbon) but because it restates its general thesis: life is cyclical, and life just goes on. It's the kind of show you never want to see end, really.
Season 5 has some issues with how far off the deep end characters go in making up bullshit but I'll be damned if it isn't close to the best season. It's not a perfect season of TV (unlike, say, Season 2), but it is a perfect season of The Wire.
Final thoughts;
Fuck Cheese.
Fuck Scott.
Fuck Herc right up his ass.
Poor Dukie.
Go Bubs.
"That was for Joe." ~ I love you, Slim Charles. Right up there with Daniels, Bunny, Omar, Kima, Cutty and Bunk as one of the most respectable characters in the show (damn, the list could go on, for a show about moral grey areas there were a lot of shining stars).
Sydnor as the new McNulty and Michael as the new Omar are both threads I wish could get explored more. Sydnor was an underdeveloped character but he had potential and showed signs of being good po-lice. Michael's arc is one of the most complete runs in the show, and carrying on the torch of Omar is drama I desperately want to see. Oh well, The Wire: the Movie dies in my dreams, I guess.
That was such an incredibly sad but perfect and correct ending.
I don't understand people who didn't like the ending because their favorite character didn't win. After 4 seasons with these despicable characters did anyone expect the Roy kids to unite and defeat the bad guy with the power of love and friendship? It was never going to end that way.
The three siblings just could never get over their egos. They all proved, through the 4 seasons, that they’re basically useless and the only reason they were ever in the discussion to be CEO is because Logan was their father. They'd rather destroy everything than have only one of the trio take the upper hand. Shiv just could not let her brother have a win, even if it meant her losing as well. Perfectly summed up their whole family dynamic and the show as a whole.
The siblings are so entitled and self-absorbed they never saw Tom coming. They’ve never had to work for a damn thing. I don't like Tom, but it makes sense for someone like Tom, who worked his way from the ground up and earned himself the position he was in.
The scene with the siblings making that awful smoothie and them watching their dad reveal yet another side of himself was so nice among the insanity that came in between.
That penultimate shot with Shiv and Tom in the car was phenomenal. Complete shift in the power dynamic. After marrying him specifically because she thought he was weak enough to keep holding power over.
Kendall not winning every season. That’s rough.
Willa revamping Logan's apartment with a cow print couch.
In the end Conor was the only one to have any kind of a relationship with Logan, the other kids are never shown having moments with him like he did at the recorded dinner.
Greg translating the Swedish in real time is the smartest thing he’s ever done. Four seasons and I cannot for the life of me understand why he would put up with that. His uncle offered him $250mil to get away from the firm.
But the biggest thing for me coming out of this episode is Kendall’s son isn’t really his. It really came out of nowhere and seemed more like a fact than a rumor the way everyone reacted to it.
All in all, Succession stuck to the show’s core till the end. In a way it’s a predictable ending but because it’s television and we expect some twist where a cool character comes out on top we don’t expect the expected. The outcome is pretty much what you’d expect from all the characters knowing their faults
Wtf happened at the end there, what is Shiv's angle? :thinking: They are all making moves without each other: Ken lied to Roman and Shiv about telling Hugo to badmouth their dad in the press, Roman froze out Ken when he went off on Matsson on the cliff, and Shiv is now developing her own relationship with Mattson. These siblings can't work together, can they?
I like how the episode opened with a mirroring scene to Kendall’s original intro in the pilot. When Ken is rocking in the town car to rap, you know he’s back on his bullshit.
“Already rich.”
The Tom/Shiv stuff is so unhealthy.
I think Matsson was lying to Shiv about the blood bricks. He's playing her for sure. He was sounding Shiv out, I think the fact that he plays to her ego right afterwards by commenting how she is cool and like her father indicates some manipulation on Matsson's part.
I thought Toms little speech before that about how America has its own Paris and if that burned down they’d just build another was really good as well, such a perfect summation of a particularly American arrogance.
“I metabolise fast because I’m dynamic.”
“2 meters of nepotism.” is such a brutal insult to Greg. I think the Tom and Greg thing has slipped into self-parody at this point and it’s not really working anymore. Greg has become a pointless character.
“Sweden or Norway they all descend from the same rapists.”
Loved, loved the whole season - but it's bra-cho-lay, not bra-jaool or brajão or however they're trying to pronounce it. It was painful to hear it lol
Anyway, about the episode. So many little but meaningful moments.
This series grasps that feeling of lacking air that anxiety gives you in a way I've rarely seen: that sitcom beginning was tough.
Also, Carmy's speech at AA, how he briefly looks rightly at you into the camera who slowly gets closer (checking back, probably it's an impression but you get the feeling of being sucked in and in by the story he's telling).
When he says he wanted to hear "good job" from his brother: lately I've been starting to think that lack of validation and approval are some of the biggest sources of many of people's cascade problem, that many come from that in several forms and displays.
Very insightful, very sharing and bonding episode - love it.
I also love that there was no cheap romance involved in the series. You know, it's part of life but it doesn't mean you have to put every part of life in every series. Sometimes there's death, sometimes love, sometimes happiness, sometimes they take different forms and are not all coexisting at the same time.
There's a lot of throat clearing.
The cleaning of The Beef is one of the first quiet moments kitchen side, when the rhythm slows.
Talking to the videogame and getting comfort was actually lovely. Makes you think that there are so many places people seeks peace to. Loved finally seeing Carmy smile and the exchange with his brother
Great series
Tom: "Do you want a deal with the devil?"
Greg: "Well...what am I gonna do with a soul anyways?"
Succession season 3 finale proved once again the importance of a satisfying ending because a reader/viewer's most long-lasting memory of your story will be its ending, thus making them to forget how the rest was bland. Succession's Red Wedding episode was amazing. It's obvious in hindsight that everything that happened this episode was going to happen, they have been setting Tom up for this since the beginning of the series, so I don't think it was shocking at all. It's brilliant but not shocking.
The devil works hard, but Logan Roy works harder. The man doesn't give a crap about anyone but himself. What's so ironic is Logan claimed he wants to see killer instinct in his children but the second they try to make boss moves he cuts them off at the legs. This should have been the moment he was waiting for - his kids finally realizing they're stronger together. But at the end of the day Logan doesn't want anyone to succeed him. He is also such a big hypocrite – while, yes his kids should've tried to succeed and made their own money, they can't because all of their lives Logan keeps them emotionally dependent on him. For all three seasons, he had them thinking they could finally win his approval, as long as they did everything he said, only to learn that it will never be enough. He was using his own children, only to throw them away once he saw the best deal for himself.
Can you really change the terms of the divorce that happened twenty years ago?
The scene with Kendall coming clean to his siblings was the catharsis he desperately needed. And the way it took all of Roman's strength to stand up to his dad, but then boom, Logan fucks them all as usual.
Connor repeating that he's the eldest son was funny. I sometimes forget there's a fourth Roy kid.
Tom stabbing Shiv in the back makes perfect sense after all the shit he put up with her. She was all shocked pikachu face because she is so unbelievably unaware and lacks any self-awareness. She kept underestimating how awful her relationship with Tom has become. The look in Shiv's eyes at the end was brutal - the anger and hatred of it all. I hope we are getting Gone Girl next year! Tom is probably the worst character on the show - the Roys were brought up by their terrible father and mother to be cruel and horrible, they don't know any better. But Tom worked to get here. Yes, he loves Shiv, but I do not think he would've kept swallowing her treatment of him if it wasn't for her rich family that gave him job, money, and status.
Roman looked so broken, practically in tears, when he asked Gerri for help but she betrayed him as well. I'm glad the writers didn't play into the shippers with them (they still went a little over the board this season) and actually gave us an interesting story there.
Season 3 was rather drowsy in comparison to previous ones, especially season 2, which is basically flawless. Not a lot really happened outside of the demise of Kendall (again). Season 3 never quite lived up to the plot it promised and the hype from the previous seasons. Season 2 ended so strong, set the expectation Kendall would become a 'killer', only to make him seem extremely incompetent and far from being ready to take down his dad. The whole thing has been as anticlimactic as they come. Jeremy Strong plays it well but at some point it's becoming tedious.
Season 3 has become so redundant. Every episode started to mirror the previous, and it was very obvious that the writers kept dragging the story, wanting to make the little progress in the final episode. All this build up and no execution. The senate hearing and Tom going to jail becomes ... nothing. The fed investigation - nothing. The search for new CEO - nothing. Search for the next president becomes...? Nothing there as well. During the whole season, they tee up these huge points constantly and then get cold feet approaching anything momentous.
I hope we see a more fast paced Season 4. This one was too much of a slow burn. I hope the creators do something with the plotlines they create next season, not just writing them off at the start of episodes in 10 minutes scenes. And most importantly, I hope they force the characters into highly unfamiliar territory.
This episode was insane, so much happened! I can't believe it's the 8th episode, and finally something happened this season. The focus of season 3 being more on the company, not on the family is a minus for me because we know the Roys can’t lose the company, otherwise the show would be over.
Best episode of this season. I don't even know where to begin:
"Happiest Man/Bullet Proof Candidate" - How Connor proposed to Willa at his siblings' mother's wedding, and then pretending Willa accepted the marriage proposal. So much cringe.
"I may not love you, but I do love you" - The real tea is that Shiv meant every single word she said to Tom during their ‘dirty talking'.
"Your father never saw anything he loved that he didn’t wanna kick it just to see if it would still come back." - Shiv and her mom scene was amazing. So much hatred and hurt being shown.
The Kendall/Logan dinner scene! Logan used his grandson as a royal taste tester, he's truly a monster.
Shiv trying to get both Roman and Geri out the way by weaponizing the harassment against Gerri is a next level snake move. She is the most awful girlboss feminist ever.
I'm not interested in any Greg storyline. It seems to me the writers don't know what to do with him so they just put him in this random dull side plot that nobody cares about.
Why do people think Kendall died? As if the show would go there and lose one of their stars. That's actually my biggest problem with season 3 - the show just seems afraid to walk through any of the doors it opens. It doesn't want to disappoint fans with the direction it takes, do anything interesting, or follow through.
I can't believe we only have 1 episodes left and everyone is basically still on the sides we started out at. This season was promoted like there would be a split in the group, a war, like characters would be stabbing each other in the back, but nobody ended up joining Kendall, they're really turning him into a caricature this season, he has been taking Ls for the past like 7 episodes. Season 3 is definitely not nearly as good as season 2, what is basically a perfect season of television.
“You're suing Greenpeace? I like your style Greg. Who's next? Save the Children?.”
Maybe I’m being hyper critical but this season really lacks flow. It feels like there aren’t really any subplots, the main focus is just on one thing only, and that plot isn’t moving a whole lot either. It's mid season, and there's still no serious plot progression. It's like the show is just spinning wheels and doesn't know where it wants to go. Frank desperately stalling on stage this episode felt like a coded cry for help from the writers.
Not a big fan of this episode, mostly because I was expecting this to be a turning point in the season. They’ve been hyping the shareholders meeting since season 1 episode 8, and in the end, it was resolved with a few board seats and private jets. It felt pretty anticlimactic, and a total and complete cop-out. There was no tension because we already know they wouldn't lose the company or else the series ends right there. Also, we are into the 3rd season and the hierarchy hasn't been changed at all, it looks like the writers don't know a way forward without Logan in charge and keep going in circles - all the events that have taken place so far are shown to be huge but just end up being none issues. I’m surprised at how quickly they dropped Lisa Arthur or the DOJ investigation, for example.
We have watched 5 episodes of this season and I still have no clue what's the point of Kendall right now? The writers did very little with it given last season’s pivotal cliffhanger. Kendall was never this dumb before. It feels like he’s just kind of aimless this season, painfully ineffectual. I think the writers are planning to revisit this plotline of Kendall going after his dad, then fail. I hope I'm wrong.
Overall, there's still some great little moments (“It would be great to get the body up there”, Colin rushing off with the imaginary dead cat bag, “If he can do people, he can do rabbits”, the irony of saying they care about women and then cutting that video off) but I just couldn't really get into this episode. I hope the real action starts next week.
"You tried to assassinate our dad with the sun."
I don't know what's going on with this season, but it's dragging and these episodes could easily be condensed into one and the story moving along a lot quicker. Some of the momentum has gone, probably because filming limits during Covid. Season 2 finale setup a big opening for this season, but it's been kind of blah so far. Kendall keeps talking about his plan to finally bring down his dad, but we are almost halfway through the season, is it happening or not? I hope it’s a very slow burn to something bigger.
Best part of the episode - Brian and Jeremy's scene on the beach in total silence. Jeremy Strong’s range of emotion even more impressive this episode, when there was no dialog, just his face - the look of confusion, paranoia, and just the smallest hint of hope as Logan said he loved him. And then the disgust on Logan face when he has to say something nice about his kid even though it was just for show.
Connor woke up this episode and chose :star: violence :star:. The fact that him of all people said to Shiv she doesn't have a real job was hilarious.
Are we ever going to get the real reason Shiv married Tom? I don't get their marriage at all, and I've been waiting for something to hint towards a reason, flashback or something. Also, how is it that they haven't had a talk after what Tom said about the nature of the relationship in last season finale? Shiv is gonna be all shocked pikachu face when Tom stabs her in the back, as he clearly hates her guts.
I'm tired of Roman and his weird sexual comments to Gerri. I know people seems to love and ship them, but it's a no for me. It seems too on the nose this season, and it's all they do now. In my opinion, it was way better when it was little drops of it here and there to keep it interesting.
So did Tony die or didn't he? I think he did. I think the suddenness of the cut to black and the previous flashback to his conversation with Bobby that you don't see or hear death nods in that direction. But I also think it doesn't really matter. The point, if I may be so bold, is that the end doesn't necessarily come on schedule. It can come at any time, when you least expect it, when you're not thinking about it, in the heightened moments when you fear for your life at a safe house with an assault rifle draped across your stomach, or when you're feeling safe and enjoying a family meal at a diner.
We try to ignore that fact, to try to live as though it weren't true. You pretty much have to in order to keep living any semblance of a real life. But Tony, more than most people, lives, as Carmella notes, with a sword of damocles hanging over his head at all times. And that means that we should, as Tony once said and as AJ reminds him, remember the good times, to try to enjoy those sweet moments when we have them because we don't know how long they might last or how many opportunities we may have to find them again. It's existentialist, but a surprisingly optimistic take on it for this show.
Drawing back to the title, there's always been something the show posits as quintessentially American about Tony. In the final scene, they surround him with Americana at the diner: the friendly young couple, the cub scout troupe, the sports hero murals on the walls. Even Tony is assembling his nuclear family. He's from an immigrant family, considers himself self-made and both proud of his heritage and a part of the melting pot. Is Tony himself an aging superpower, or am I reading too much into it here?
The finale spends more time with AJ than I might prefer. But it also shows that as much as Tony wanted it, his kids cannot really escape his orbit. AJ is naive and misguided for the most part, and certainly insanely self-pitying, but he also shows a (again naive) sense of understanding about the greater tragedies in the world. His method of trying to help is an interesting one, but also a hard one, which is not typically the Sopranos way. Instead, his parents ply him with a cushy job (as the equivalent of a D-Girl, as Chris might say). And suddenly his concerns about the material world seem to drift away. He may not be a mobster, but he can be corrupted.
And Meadow has given up Tony's dream for her - becoming a pediatrician, and helping little babies. (The episode does lean hard into the "sociopaths like babies and pets" idea between this and the cat.). Instead, she's going to become a civil rights lawyers, and Tony can see her representing folks like him, marrying another mobster, and being pulled into a life he did not want for her. If there's a persistent theme to these series, it's not simply about the difficulty of changing on a personal level, it's about it on a generational level, how we carry the baggage of our parents and grandparents and other generations past, that makes it difficult to escape from their orbit. The show is a little blunt about it when Meadow says that if she hadn't seen her father dragged away so many times civil rights wouldn't be such a salient concern for her, but it's an interesting idea.
Indeed, another theme the show has kept close and blossoms in this episode is the idea that Tony taints whatever he touches. AJ is back to being a spoiled brat. Meadow is too much in the world of the mob to truly escape it. Carmela long ago figured out that she was in too deep to pull out of the life she had made with Tony. Agent Harris has gone native, cheering on the NJ crime family when he hears that Phil has been executed. Paulie talks about taking time off, but instead agrees to skipper the construction crew. And as he hits out in front of Satriale's, there are a lot of empty tables there with him.
So when the episode cuts to black, do we see a man about to get his just deserts, a tumor in the lives of friends and family being removed, or have we simply ended our time with a man who will go on to face a weapons charge? I have my thoughts on it, but more importantly than the outcome is the idea behind it. We don't know whether Tony lived or died, just like we don't know when the end is coming. There are perilous forces in the world like Tony Soprano who result in people like the motorcyclist from the last episode dying, or the comare and her father, who have no reason to suspect they'd be impacted by these events in this way. You can live the high-powered life of Junior Soprano and still have who you are taken away by forces beyond your control. Value the good times, David Chase & Co. seem to say, because we live in a state of sudden uncertainty, where the cut to black could come without warning or fanfare, and those moments become all we have, or had.
A lot of plot movement condensed to a single episode. Not really sure what I make of it.
First there's the Melfi storyline, and the way that it's enough to finally convince her that she's not helping Tony. I don't know that I buy it. I mean, it seems to be the thesis of the show more or less -- that this therapy is enabling Tony more than it's actually prompting him to improve himself, but I don't know if I agree. Is Tony ever going to become a kind and gentle soul? Certainly not. Is he, or can he become a little better, a little more understanding of people and situations around him? I think the series has shown that he has, from his feelings about Vito to his mixed up feelings for his own son. The fact that after the confrontation with Melfi, Tony initially tries to be sensitive to his son when telling him that they need to hole up, only then to boil off and drag him to the closet, speaks to the sense that Melfi's had an effect, and that without some reinforcement it's easy for him to fall back on old habits. It felt very sudden somehow.
But on the other hand, part of the thrust of the episode seems to be that these people don't care about others. The random guy who has to break the news to the New York mobsters gets beaten up for his troubles. The guys who take out Silvio cause the death of a motorcyclist without any regard for the value of other lives. Phil's comare and her father are killed without anyone noticing or taking the time to check whether they got the right guy. There's a persistent sense that people are suffering for these mobster's largesse and they're entirely unaffected by that thought.
I don't know, man. A lot of it is interesting, but it didn't do as much for me as I might have hope given how long the build to the NJ/NY war was. Bobby's murder was beautifully shot and edited, but felt almost gratuitous. The image of Tony falling asleep with the assault rifle Bobby gave him is a powerful one, but still. Was it too much all of a sudden? Is the AJ stuff dragging on too long? I don't know. Something didn't quite work for me despite the ratcheted up tension.
To be frank, maybe I'm just burned out. I didn't binge watch the show exactly. Instead, I parceled out 1-2 episodes an evening. But even then, it may have been a bad idea to try to watch the whole show in the span of a couple of months. Sure, it lets me draw connections and themes between episodes that might have been jumbled or forgotten otherwise, but you also hit a point of exhaustion with a fictional world and the characters within it, even one that you're terribly compelled by. It feels like the show has been building to the moments in this episode for so long, and yet, when they arrive, I just don't feel what it seems like I should toward them. A recommendation to savor, I suppose.
AJ is an isn't his father. "The Second Coming" explores that dichotomy, and Tony seems to acknowledge it in therapy. (When he says "I know" after his description of AJ.) I love the finger-pointing that goes on here between Tony and Carmella. Not that it's good, but that it feels real in terms of how the characters would react in this situation. One of the great things about Tony Soprano as a character is that he lacks self-awareness, or at least buries it down so deep out of necessity that he rarely sees his own reflection except in the glimpses through other people's eyes.
And maybe that's why he can see AJ a little clearer here, because for all the ways that AJ would never be suited to take on his father's mantle, he is very much his father's son. The depression, the way he withdraws and blames everyone and everything else, the way he avoids making any changes by making excuses. When Tony walks arm in arm with him at the end of the episode, it's a little on the nose, but it's also a visual reminder of how matched the two are. And it's a two-way street. When Tony chastises his son, he's really chastising himself. When he talks about his sons flaws, he's talking about his own. His fear and concern and love for his son are reflections on how he feels about his own situation.
And again, masterful performance from Gandolfini in the scene where Tony rescues AJ and is initially angry and then just sad and protective. He's always tremendous at showing the different emotions coursing through Tony. By the same token, nobody does a scene of domestic strife like The Sopranos. Again, Carmella and Tony's fight, with the thrown watch, feels like the kind of argument a couple of people at their wits end after a child's suicide attempt would have, especially one with all the baggage of Tony and Carmella. Truth in even the most extreme moments. That's this show.
Hell of a way to start an episode. The scene of Chris's death is brutal and visceral. The cough up blood, the quiet simplicity of it.
And I was still a little unmoved, I have to admit. Part of it, I'm sure, is that I had this event essentially spoiled for me by The Simpsons episode "Papa Don't Leech", which does a shot-for-shot homage to it in an episode I saw long before I watched The Sopranos. But there's still something very Shakespearean, maybe even biblical, about a father killing his son like this that manages to ring during the episode, even if it fell flatter than it ought to have for me.
Now maybe, part of why the episode didn't work as well for me despite having something this monumental happen is that I've seen all of Mad Men, and it feels a little too familiar. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner co-wrote this episode, and if you've watched that show, the idea of a character getting frustrated with what's happening at home and decided to escape out west, including some pharmaceutical experimentation, is a familiar one. This isn't a rehash of that exactly, especially since it came first, but the trope from Weiner feels a little too worn from my perspective.
It's also a very vague episode. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Some of the weakest episodes of the show happen when things get a little too hamfisted, but unlike Tony at the end of the episode, I'm not sure I "get it." There's a lot of interesting symbolism and parallelism going on. Tony and Chris flip in the car just like Tony and Adrianna did. Tony savors his wine the same way he did when he and Chris boosted some on their road trip. The flash of the sun over the edge of the horizon calls back to the flash in Tony's coma dream. He returns to gambling and finds that he can do nothing but win.
What does it all mean? I'm not sure I have any idea. I'm not sure we're supposed to have much of one. Tony is certainly doing what he's always done in these situations--whether it's Big Pussy or Adrianna or Chris--convince himself that it was the other guy's fault. That they were the ones who messed him over. That they made him do this, and that he gets to be angry at them for it.
That's what's striking about this episode more than anything -- the lengths that Tony will go to escape what's left of his conscience. Chris was right in the prior episode when he said that Tony will offer you a drink with one hand and then shame you for taking it in the other. He wanted Chris not to be weak, but also to be fun. He wanted his dependable family member at his side, but wanted him to be unscathed by this life. I'm not convinced Tony is a sociopath, as much as that narrative is thrown around. I'm convinced that he's someone who has a conscience, and a depth of feeling for people close to him, and even a good bit of guilt for his actions, but he's shouted it all down and made such strenuous attempts to bury it that it's become a habit.
And yet I'm not sure what Tony "gets" when tripping on peyote. Maybe he sees the devil in the casino, and the flash of light over the horizon and understands that he is, or was, between Heaven and Hell. Maybe he believes that Chris was the thing holding him back from happiness, that he was a crutch and a burden, and that by getting rid of him, Tony misguidedly thinks he can make real progress freed from the burden of carrying the next generation forward. Maybe it's just the incoherent ramblings of a guy who's brains have been scrambled by a hallucinogen. Who the hell knows?
(As an aside, does it feel like the show's gone a little heavy on the malapropisms over the last few episodes? Maybe I'm just noticing them more. Also, I loved Paulie's remorse about what happened to Chris. He may be my favorite character at the end of the day, for just how simultaneously broad and awful and human and deceptively complicated he is. I also liked AJ realizing he doesn't have the stomach to be a mobster, and him actually breaking down in tears over what happened to the black man he and his friends beat up. There may be hope for him and the next generation yet. And last, but certainly not least, Carmella's reaction to the news of Chris's death was the most affecting thing in the episode. Give Edie Falco all of the acting awards, please.)
Excellent episode. There were some abrupt cuts here and there, but overall I liked the fact that it focused on Tony's two sons -- AJ, his flesh and blood, and Chris, his surrogate child, and how he corrupts them.
What's striking about the episode is how at the beginning of it, AJ and Chris, in different ways, do not fit Tony's ideal for what it means to be a man. AJ is heartbroken and possibly suicidal after his break up with Blanca. Chris is not so much a part of the old boys' club anymore now that he's avoiding the temptation of the Bing and Satriale's.
What does Tony do in response to these changes in his two sons? For AJ, he pushes him into strip clubs and parties and, inadvertently, small time mob stuff with his friends. AJ has always seemed more sensitive than his father, even at the height of his brattiness. He's never seemed to have the fortitude of Tony, but he also never seemed to have Tony's mean streak or callousness. Does he have Tony's selfishness? Sure, in spades. But not the amoral will to take what he wants that drives Tony. So when we see AJ holding down the guy who owes his friends money, while they pour acid on his toes, it's startling, due in no small part to the wicked smile that emerges on AJ's face, the same kind Tony sees in the mirror after beating down his young driver earlier in the season. There doesn't seem to be the same wickedness in AJ that there is in Tony, or at least it seems much milder, but Tony thrusts AJ into his world, and seems to be bringing out more of that side of his son.
With Chris, it's a little more complicated. Chris is in too deep to ever break out of the mob life, even as he becomes more and more disillusioned with the lifestyle in general and Tony in particular. And as his affair with Julianna indicated, he's not exactly ready to be a steady family man either. But through his sobriety, he seems to be making a change for the better, and it, plus the specter of Adrianna who continues to haunt every moment the two share, drives a wedge between him and Tony.
Tony said as much at the beginning of the half-season, but he's moving away from Chris and moving more toward Bobby as his familial lieutenant (another gentle soul Tony's recently corrupted). He doesn't have time for Chris anymore, and breaks his balls over his temperance, as does Chris's other surrogate father figure, Paulie. Eventually, Chris starts to crack from the pressure of it. He throws little Paulie out of a window. He goes back to drinking. And in the moment when he's trying to explain his connection to his daughter, all his mob family can do is crack jokes, and he sees them as a group of braying jackasses to which he no longer belongs. Once upon a time, he was proud enough to call himself a member of the mafia that he celebrated his name being in the paper for it. Now, he shoots J.T. Dolan after the writer cuts through his self-pity and confessions of things Dolan shouldn't have heard, and tells Chris that he is, in fact, part of the mob.
Tony makes things worse for his two sons. He turns them into worse people than before he got his greasy mitts on them. He makes both of them more violent. He makes both of them more like him. And he makes both of them a little closer to his misery in the process. It's sad, because, as is often the case, Tony seems to have a moment of clouded self-realization with Melfi, where he understands and laments what he passes down to his kids.
The Sopranos is often a show about the abuses and conflicts passed from one generation to another. In that moment, Tony is genuinely saddened at the idea that he passed his depression on to his son, that he's the root cause of AJ's misery. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he seems to viscerally understand Chris's statement that he inherited his propensity for drug abuse from his own father. And yet, when push comes to shove, Tony pulls AJ and Chris down into the mud with him much more deliberately. That's always the story with Tony. He's smart enough to understand, at some level, what he's doing, but he can't admit it to himself, or lacks the will to make a change, and hurts the people around him because of it.
Paul Cicero's cigar is magic, it disappears in between shots (the scene at 25 minutes-ish). That's one of a few truly glaring continuity errors in this film. (IMDB lists a remarkable number of "Goofs", but most of them are so small you'd have to really be looking for them. Not so with the cigar—that one practically slaps the viewer in the face and says, "Hi! Just wanted to remind you that this is a film.")
Having just finished the film, my foremost thought is that Henry's parents kind of disappeared. They were important at the beginning, and then suddenly they vanished from the narrative when it was convenient. Bit disappointing—not that there weren't enough characters to keep track of as the story continued.
The other thing on my mind, a bigger-picture thought, is that the movie feels both long and slow, and quick, somehow. At roughly the one-hour mark I was surprised how much time had gone by. But that's where it began to feel like it slowed down, too. The remaining 60% or so of the film increasingly dragged on until the last 20 minutes. A lot of it had to do with the sheer number of times Tommy was shown to be a careless, hot-headed asshole with a gun. Most of those scenes didn't add anything new to his character.
GoodFellas is an impressive piece of cinema, but at times it gets bogged down in atmosphere for atmosphere's sake, needlessly extending the run time without contributing to the film (whose world is already quite well defined even without those scenes). If the whole film was as engrossing as the first hour, it truly would be a masterpiece. 8/10
Not my favorite episode of the show. There's a lot of interesting ideas being tossed around here -- of how money affects, or in some cases dictates our relationships with people, but despite hints here and there, Tony's gambling problem felt very sudden. I do like the idea that with so many worlds conquered at this point, Tony is chasing another form of conquest. As Melfi points out, it's not the money he's after; it's the thrill. That part is semi-plausible, but still doesn't feel as organic a development as it might.
I've seen critics lament the "death of the episode" in television today -- the idea that with more and more shows being about serialization and catering to binge-watchers, the idea of a single episode of television as a story that can stand on its own is fading away. I understand that mentality to a degree -- some of my favorite episodes of serialized shows are basically one-off short stories that give shading to the overarching narrative, but are basically stand alone stories.
But the obverse of the problem comes in episodes like these, where a character develops a characteristic and goes through an entire series of ups and downs in a mere hour, and it all feels very rushed. That was, frankly, why I wasn't as enamored with the Tracey episode as most people -- because the rise and fall happened so quickly, and the narrative shortcuts necessary to establish the scenario made it difficult for me to buy in to the story. There's a very interesting story to be told about Tony losing the thrill of his business and trying to recreate with betting, but it's a tough one to start, finish, and adequately develop all in the same episode.
That said, as always, the acting makes almost any episode of the show worth price of admission. The scene where Tony tries to convince Carmela to bet some of her spec house money on the Jets, and then the follow up where he berates her after she turned him down and the Jets won, were both desperate and devastating in their own way. I'm a broken record at this point, but Gandolfini and Falco are each so good at conveying little shifts in emotion, and subtly startled reactions and fear and hurt and anger at oneself that's directed at another, that you can basically put the two of them together discussing grocery shopping and still feel the emotion of the scene. There's a lot of history and subtext baked into these two scenes, and they were definitely the pinnacle of the episode.
I always enjoy stories with Hesh, and there were some interesting scenes discussing how money turns even old friends against each other, and what Tony's response when somebody becomes economically inconvenient is. The way Tony's demeanor quickly turned sour against his good friend, simply because he owed him money, and even got antisemitic, was classic Tony pointing the finger at anyone but himself for his frustrations.
The Vito Jr. stuff didn't necessarily work for me. Again, there was some interesting stuff about Tony wanting to do right by Vito's family, but being unable to break out of his selfishness and addiction to do it. The contrast between his and Frank's talks with Vito Jr. certainly drew a good contrast between the two bosses, and showed how that Tony is, as always, a man with legitimately good impulses and a degree of perspective and understanding that Frank has, but who just as easily succumbs to his worse impulses when the road gets even a little rocky.
And the last storyline also had to do with money, with Blanca leaving AJ. The implication is pretty clearly that she thought she was moving her way into the luxurious and lucrative world of the mafia by dating the boss's son, and when it's clear that she's not going to be moving into a mansion like cousin Brian, that she'd be marrying a manager at the pizza restaurant, she wants out. It's all done very quickly, but it is, for once, a sad story for AJ, who despite his brattiness, seemed to be working hard and being a good surrogate dad and making something of a change from the lazy schmuck we'd seen in the first half of the season. To see him doing better and getting left for not being the type of high roller his dad is was certainly unfortunate.
Writing all this up, I think I like the episode better than I originally thought, if only because the ideas it covers are interesting even if the execution feels a little pat and the episode ends up feeling like a Sopranos take on an after school special. I'd probably call this a 7.5/10 for the standard the show's set. There's a lot to like thematically, but it doesn't quite come together.
(As an aside, that Nancy Sinatra cameo felt a little gimmicky to me.)
What do we do when our heroes fail us? What do we do when the people we once looked up to start to fade away, to lose what made them vibrant and admirable. And worse yet, what do we do when we grow up, and realize that our heroes only seemed larger than life because we were so small?
These are the issues that "Remember When" deals with. We learn about how much Tony looked up to Paulie when he was younger, how he was, in many ways, Tony's role model. And now that he's a boss, and has a greater understanding of what goes into running this thing, he sees the chattiness that once made Paulie seem gregarious as annoying at present, and worse, as a liability. He sees the hot-headedness that made Paulie seem bold and cool when he was young now makes him risky when Tony's trying to close a new deal. The sheen is gone, and Tony seems to come very close to killing the man he used to admire.
There's a parallel story with Junior and Carter at the medical ward. Junior is a faded big shot. He tries to maintain his personal style -- running card games, getting favors on the side, bucking against the authority, even in his diminished state. And while we only get a handful of clues about Carter, Junior's would-be protege, it's hinted that he has fallen idols as well -- that he's in here because of violence against a father whom he felt he was never good enough for and whom he could never live up to. There's also hints that his father, in turn, couldn't live up to his grandfather. And when Junior gets tired of fighting, tired of trying to hang on to who he was in that picture Beansie shows Tony, Carter is disgusted, failed by another father figure, and attacks him, leaving what looks like to be even worse brain damage.
There's more than a thematic thread connecting the two stories, when Junior calls Carter by his nephew's name. Junior is another broken idol for Tony, a man whom he loved who turned on him. Tony once asked Junior if he loved him back, and in this episode you see that Junior did, in some sense, that when he's talking to Carter he's missing Tony in a peculiar way.
I love the subtext that oozes throughout this episode. I love the business with the Ginny Sack insult bubbling up at just the right time, and Paulie remembering Big Pussy and seeming nervous the entire time on the boat, and the Napoleon portrait. There's so much that goes unsaid and yet it so viscerally felt here. So much shading in the background that makes good on story threads that have lingered for seasons. It's that type of ability from the show - how it says so much without ever making it explicit: Tony's intent to kill Paulie and eventually relenting in his turmoil over killing a man he once loved; Paulie's remorse and understanding that he needs to make good with Tony, Junior's feelings of being beaten down, of accepting his diminished capacity, and Carter's anger at another "great man" failing him.
Tony is definitely grappling with the sense that everything fades in this episode. I've often heard the back half of The Sopranos as a series about decline, and there's a certain underlying autumnal feeling to it - that everything's dying, that it's all slowly going away. But despite the faded lions who make up the theme of the episode, I don't think that's true here necessarily. I think there's instead a sense that everything is great--Tony admits as much--but that it still feels very precarious. That even when things are stable and prosperous and happy, Tony is so snakebitten from everything he's been through that he can't enjoy it. He keeps "waiting for the other shoe to drop." I don't see Tony as a man in the middle of autumn. I see him as a man who is in the heart of spring, but who can't stop thinking about winter, due in no small part to seeing how men like Paulie and Junior are now so diminished no matter what seasons they once enjoyed.
The four men at the core of this episode are all connected in this way, in the way that there is love and admiration in both directions, but also a sense of distance, and in some ways disgust. There's even discussion of it in the past, when Tony asks Paulie if Johnny Boy ever really believed in him, and Junior relays the story of his own father making him walk 11 miles home for refusing a quarter. And in the episode itself, Tony remembers the man he looked up to, and Paulie is careful enough that in the shadow of that past image, Tony can't quite muster the excuse he needs to see past that and kill the ghost of that image that still remains. Carter's respect for Junior is a projected one, laden with the baggage of his own paternal relationships and not enough truly-established affection to prevent him from lashing out in the way that Tony forebeared from. As Beansie points out, for everyone but Tony, these men are all each other has. That leads to heightened emotions, both good and bad, and the episode does a fantastic job of exploring that idea.
Three men, three bosses, three legacies. Johnny Sack asks what kind of name he'll leave behind, and his brother-in-law tells him he'll be remembered as a great husband and father. Johnny says no, how will he be known as a mobster. The brother-in-law explains that he'll be remembered well, except that once he took on the responsibility of being boss, he became a hothead. And Johnny, as he slowly fades away, begins to feel like it was all for nothing. When he dies, some his closest colleagues in the mob toast to him, and then life goes on.
Tony is someone who always worried about legacy to begin with -- carrying on his father's, passing on Dickie Moltasanti's, and ensuring its survival with Chris. Now he looks at 'Cleaver' and he too wonders if it was all for nothing, if the degree to which he tried to bring Chris up as his own left him to be seen as a rude bully by his protege. Melfi asks if he's reading into something there, and though he's not, as the final scene with Chris and Tony's eyes as they embrace shows, it is revealing of Tony's insecurities, of his concerns about what he's leaving behind.
A Phil Leotardo has the same worry. He looks back at twenty years in jail, has the same sentiment about lost honor that's been expressed by Tony, Big Pussy, Chris, and many others on the show, and wonders if it was all worth it. He worries that all he'll leave behind is a name that he feels has been mangled, that he's sees as symbolic as his family having taken other people's shit for too long. And he seems to vow to do something about it.
It was a little more out in the open than The Sopranos usually is, not as subtle, but as usual it was well-acted (Tony's scene with Melfi especially) and looks interesting as a harbinger of things to come, and as the show itself looking back at what kind of legacy it'll leave as it closes out its run. Not my favorite episode, but an interesting one.
(7.5/10)
Violence, family violence, violence enacted against children by their parents especially, is the spectre lurking behind the events of "Soprano Home Movies". Tony and Bobby, and in a different way, Carmela and Janice, are in a violent business. Tony and Janice's parents were in that same violent business. Though the episode never comes right out and says it, it's not a far leap to imagine that some of that filtered down to hitting their kids.
Tony says as much in therapy in prior episodes. He's told Melfi multiple times that his father would have whupped him for things Tony's children do, and that not doing the same to his offspring was Carmela's idea, not his. It's the style of parenting he grew up with; it's what he knows and as we've seen with everyone from Gloria to Ralphie, it's what he defaults to when he's truly upset about something. It's the language he knows to communicate emotion.
Receiving it, let alone being on the losing side of it, makes him feel small and weak. Tony, even at his blubbery zenith in the sixth season, is a large, imposing man. It's no coincidence that he reasserted himself by taking on his burly driver at the beginning of the season. His physical strength is part of what gives him his swagger, his confidence that he's not the small kid who was kicked around by his father. Tony can't accept that his father was anything but a saint who was dragged down by his admittedly monster of a mother, and yet, as Melfi points out, he marries and support a woman who did what his mother never would -- protect her children from their father.
And so while it's easy to take Tony's rationalizing away his losing the fight with Bobby as his feeling older, feeling like things are coming to an end (and admittedly, that's part of it, his conversation with Bobby on the boat certainly shows a Tony more contemplative of where things might finish), it's as much in service of justifying to himself that he is still the physically capable man who wouldn't have to suffer that kind of abuse from another man again.
It's clearly impacted Janice as well. She's appropriately Livia-like in her conversation with Carmela, where she not so subtly suggests that Tony may have been physical with his family as well. Carmela denies it (though there have been moments with AJ she didn't know about aside from the one she mentions), and while Janice is, as always, trying to stir up trouble, she's clearly not off-base in wondering if the same cloud of violence that hung over her childhood hangs over Tony's home as well. Bobby objects to Janice bribing Nica to get her to go to bed, but there's a sense that as much as she can be the evil stepmom to Bobby's kids, she's overcorrecting for her own daughter.
That's what makes the story about Johnny Boy shooting through Livia's hair so unpleasant for Tony, even if he doesn't quite realize it. There's irony in his complaint that it makes them look like a dysfunctional family shortly before a monopoly game ends in fisticuffs. But it's also a sign of his father's temper -- that what seems humorous in the rear view mirror decades later is, to someone who experienced it at the time, a sign of a dad who expressed his anger with tools of violence and a home of discord. As Bobby notes, The Sopranos go too far, they take one step over the line, and when they do, it's evident how much Tony and Janice were damaged by what when on in their home.
And then there's Bobby himself, one of the gentlest, most kind-hearted mobsters the show ever depicts. And it's clear that Tony both looks down upon and yet also envies Bobby, not simply for his youth but for the way that Bobby had a dad who loved him ("he never wanted this for me"), for his sense of honor (leveling the playing field against the deer) and who has a quiet strength and steadiness that Tony lacks. Like with Janice after her anger management classes, Tony has to break anything that someone has that he doesn't. So he hits Bobby where it hurts -- he takes the last of Bobby's innocence my making him kill a man, and not just a man, a father. The Sopranos is a show where people don't necessarily understand the real motivations for their actions, and it's hard to know how much Tony sees the symmetry in that given what's lurking behind the walls in this episode, but it's palpable.
And then there's that 10,000 yard stare, the way Tony sits in that chair after all the terrible excitement and gazes on the water, lost in thought. There's a sense that he's being soothed, as he was at his Uncle's farm, of having to escape the thoughts and scars of the life he's lived and the pain he's suffered. And at the end of the episode, Bobby, holding his daughter, shares that same gaze. The ducks Tony hears Nica signing about remain a potent symbol on this show -- of family, of the good life, so hard to hold onto and so easily lost. Bobby may have gotten the better of the fight, but Tony left him with a new scar that now needs to heal, and we cannot help but wonder how this beautiful innocent child might be tainted by this life that has left its mark in different ways on so many people. It might not be in the same terms, but the cycle of violence goes on.
Probably a 6.5/10. I just feel nothing for the Juliana character. She seems transplanted from an entirely different show and her style just seems to clash tonally with the entire episode. I wasn't terribly moved by her story with Chris. We've seen him relapsing before, and it was done much better after his wine-heist with Tony. Watching people trip and do nothing isn't terribly interesting, and turning into a montage helped with that. Watching an uninteresting guest character be uninteresting with Chris wasn't a terrible compelling way to spend this would-be finale.
I did appreciate the small rivalry with Tony and Chris. The show hit similar territory with Meadow and Carmela, where Carmela was clearly jealous of the things her young daughter could accomplish and the possibilities still ahead of her. But Julianna really dragged things down, both in her acting and in the sort of toothless storyline.
The AJ story was...fine? I guess? It was interesting to see the difference in how AJ handled the situation with the loud neighbors versus how his father might have done it. Otherwise I didn't really know what to make of it. Are we seeing a small but significant amount of development from him? Is there a parallel to the idea explored in Season 5, namely that Tony needs Carmela in his life to keep him from spiraling out on his worst impulses? Maybe.
I did enjoy Tony's moment with Frank in the hospital. There's a definite sense that there's still something that's changed within him after the coma, even if it's not the clean break he might have initially thought. "There's enough for everyone" is an interesting sentiment, even if it feels like we may be a little too far down the path to his own destruction by now. He is having some realizations -- like the fact that all of his mistresses have a few things in common -- even if he can't put it all together. And we do gesture toward the mob war, though it may be adverted, or at least delayed.
I also liked the plot development with Tony finally helping out on the spec house as a way to keep Carmela distracted from thinking too hard about Adrianna. Tony doesn't want his wife to be too inattentive to his needs, but her being busy means that she's too busy to poke and prod at his business. And the bookends of the episode, a head being shoved under ground in the cold and the family warmly gathered at Christmas are an interesting contrast, with the music sealing the deal.
(I did have a big laugh at the stripper wearing the santa hat.)
Came of pretty flat to me. There were certainly some interesting elements. Tony feeling guilty about how AJ turned out, and finding other ways to use his physicality than hitting his kid was an interesting bit. Deepening Frank a little, showing subtly that much of his hatred of Vito is an act, or at least more motivated by his wife than he lets on, and that what he's done gives him pause (the grip of the covers while Vito was beaten, him being kept up at night). And I would totally watch a travel show where Roe (who's always hilarious) makes quips and Edie Falco subtle shows her internal emotions while looking at the sights.
But it just didn't amount to much of a whole. There's a palpable sense that Carmela could have been more, that she has a deeper understanding and appreciation for life than the other standard bearer of mob wife life like Ro have. (Reminded me of the scene where the mob wives watch Citizen Kane). I did appreciate the scene where Carmela talks about worrying so much and it all gets washed away, that after decrying AJ's "God is dead" phase she's unwittingly stumbled into some kind of existentialism (and in an appropriate city, too!). But the story felt sort of aimless. And even when it made great effort to contrast Jersey and Paris (as in Tony's trip to Italy) It lacked the clarity and intentionality of the best Sopranos episodes.
And the Vito stuff dragged on still. Tony is conflicted. We get it. His staff isn't even when they kill a New York mobster for insinuating that they are. Ultimately it's a business decision and he makes his choice. He's always going to back his choice. He's backsliding yet again from the "every day is a gift" persona that he's tried to assume and found ill-fitting, whether its capping guys he doesn't want to getting a roadie from one of the Bing girls.
You do feel bad for Vito's kids, but his attempts to talk to his kids and his wife and even Tony just aren't as interesting as they could be given the stakes and how much time we've spent on the storyline. Again, something about the dialogue and the tone of the episode just seemed off. It certainly hasn't been the strongest half season.
(But oh man, Frank coming out of the closet to confront Vito had me in stitches. What a goofy thing in a moment that seemed meant to be menacing.)
An interesting episode, though I'm not exactly sure what I make of it.
For once, I was compelled by Vito's story. His domestic squabbles with Johnny Cakes, and the sweetness of their home life were effective to me. I get the idea that you can take the guy out of the mob but you can't take the mob out of the guy. Vito's lived with the mafia for too long to work a straight job. And so he throws the baby out with the bathwater and abandons what he's built with Johnny Cakes. It's an interesting idea in principle, but the execution...eh...I can't really explain why it didn't work for me. It felt...sudden? I get that he was having a rough time as a handyman and fitting in, but it still seemed like he went from really enjoying his new life to bolting awfully quickly without it feeling earned. Maybe that's the point. Maybe he's a reactionary who jumps from thing to thing without much warning, but we've never really gotten that from him. Whatever it was, it didn't work for me when he left. And him capping the guy he rear ended seemed manipulative, to try to remind us that this guy we've been warming to as he cuddled with his partner is still a cold-hearted killer. I don't know. Just kind of too tidy.
I do enjoy, as always, Carmela finding ways to get to Tony, even when she has plausible deniability, to get what she wants vis-a-vis the spec house. The scene with Tony and Meadow (where Meadow whines over minor nothings) and it's something Tony would prefer Carmela dealt with was pretty amusing in Tony's uncomfortableness. And it was a nice contrast with Carmela handling Janice's emotional outburst at the end of the episode. Tony and Carmela's marriage is obviously built on a house of sand at this point, but they do have their arrangements.
The most interesting reveal of the episode was Tony's resentments of Janice. It's no secret that Tony harbor antipathy for his sister, and it's not even the first time that he's brought up the fact that she got to leave while he had to stay. (It was in the scene where he choked her.) But there was something very striking about the way he used it to justify not giving handouts to his sister -- that he feels entitled to his success and stature and finances and feels justified limiting his sister's (and her husband's) share in it as much as possible because he had to live in the Soprano household after Janice left and endure the scars of their parents' fucked up child-rearing while she left. I love the show's explorations of Tony's psyche, especially the things he has trouble admitting to himself, and factoring his sister into the home life that left him so damaged is a very interesting avenue on that front.
Of course, there's Johnny Sack copping a plea, and slowly being abandoned by his mob buddies. There's always been a hypocrisy to the mob in the series that 'The Sopranos' has never shied away from -- this is a group who talks about honor while robbing people, that talks about respect while doling it out selectively, and talks about family and loyalty while chewing you up, spitting you out, or worse, the second that you cease to be useful to them. Ginny Sack sitting despondent at home while Janice sized up her living room was a great image to drive that point home. And the point is underlined even more with the gardener from last season. When he asks if he can stop taking care of Johnny Sack's lawn now that he's in jail, Tony shuts him down; but once Johnny pleads guilty, Tony admonishes him for treating Johnny Sack like a criminal (even though he himself was lamenting it seconds earlier), but then absolves him from having to continue to service Johnny Sack's house.
A recurring theme in the show this season has been the haves and the have-nots. Tony is at a peak, and Johnny Sack is at a nadir. Clearly, this puts Frank in charge and (hopefully) is building to something significant on that front, though Vito looms as a wildcard in all of this.
Tremendous episode. The scenes with Chris and Tony in particular were striking how much subtext was built in to each and every interaction. It was superbly shot and edited, with some particularly great cuts and sequences and use of music in the background to convey certain moods. The sequence of Chris using again in particular was stellar in how it depicted his trip, and the dog as a stand in for Adriana (both herself and for her dog that he killed).
Paulie may secretly be my favorite character. He's an abominable person--selfish, miserly, cruel--but he's just so damn human, so heart on his sleeve at all times, even when he doesn't realize it, that the times when the show shines the spotlight on him, I'm always compelled, occasionally against my will. Between his struggling to put on the festival, to worrying about his biopsy, to (maybe?) reconciling with his mom(aunt), it was all very interesting to see him strain to balance everything and set his fears that he was getting his comeuppance for his various misdeeds aside. (His look to the rustling in the trees in particular was a nice nod toward his superstitiousness about this kind of thing.)
And there were so many wonderful little touches here. I love how Tony says to Carmela that he doesn't want to setback Chris's progress, while doing the same wine-tasting routine that started Chris slipping in the first place. I love the way Carmela hears Tony's version of the Adrianna events and subtly begins to realize that something is amiss, even if she can't admit it outright to herself yet. I love the awkwardness of Tony and Chris trying to recreate the magic of their post-heist conversation in the Sopranos' basement.
Adrianna is definitely a ghost haunting these proceedings. She hangs in the air in those interactions between Tony and Chris, in the back of Carmela's mind after she talks to Ade's mom, and she lurks in the shadows of the life Chris is trying to make for himself -- the house and the kids to fill the void of his guilt or pain or whatever you want to call what he feels for causing her to be killed. It's in the background of his using again as well.
And I love the theme of boredom that starts to filter in during the second half of the episode. Tony's life is never going to be a calm one, but there's a sense that things are good at the moment despite everything. He's recovering from his injury, he's living well, things are at a detante with Frank, there's no internal agitators like Richie or Ralphie or Feech. So what's there to do? Just kind of fumfer around in the daily grind, even if his grind is a lot better than most people's. The old days are done, and momentary jolts like the wine heist are just faint echoes of it that can't be preserved or recaptured.
The facade of the "new Tony" is beginning to crumble, bit-by-bit, and it's interesting to see the slow burn. Children, a recurring theme in the episode, offer some idea of hope, of something new and different and a reason to make a big change in life, something lots of people in The Sopranos are looking for. It doesn't seem to have changed Janice, Chris's trip doesn't portend great things, and it's doubtful that despite Tony's one-man teacup ride at the end, that hope is likely to be realized.
(Oh yes, and Janice continues, delightfully, to be pure evil. Clearly Livia's strongest inheritor. So much great stuff and wonderful little details built into this episode.)
Everyone needs to grow up and move on. That seems to be the theme of this episode. AJ needs to start becoming an adult and not just an impetuous youth coasting on his dad's name. Tony needs to move past his womanizing and be an adult about that. Vito needs to move past his closeted fears and accept his attraction. And the neighborhood itself needs to move past its history as "The North Ward" and accept that times are a changin'.
It's not subtle, but I enjoyed the irony of Patsy (twice!) going around to collect protection money, learning that big box stores were coming in, and asking "what happened to this neighborhood?" "Johnny Cakes" certainly takes the stuffing out of the idea that the old ways were always better and the next wave is wiping them out for the worse. In the old days, all of these business would be on the hook for protection money, Tony would cheat with impunity, AJ would be expected to avenge his father whether he was ready or capable or not, and as Frank notes, he and Tony "wouldn't even be having this conversation" about a gay mobster.
I like the thesis of the episode, but it's still not my favorite. In fact, it's really only the scene with Tony and AJ after AJ is arrested that moves it into "solidly" good territory. And even though I loved that scene, especially the way in which Tony is conflicted between being upset with his son for disobeying him, but being even more upset that his son put himself at risk and dipped his toe into a life and a mode of being that Tony never wanted for him, I also felt that Tony didn't really sound like Tony. This isn't to malign Gandolfini, who knocks it out of the park as usual, but dialogue like "you're going to make me cry" just does not sound like something Tony would say. Not that he doesn't cry or can't be emotional, he's just rarely that direct and the dialogue sounded a little off. It's a nit, but I did enjoy the scene and what it showed about how Tony views his son, how he fears the effect he's had on AJ, that he likes that AJ is a "nice guy" and that he's scared of a kid who hasn't shown himself to be adept at much putting himself on the firing line of the mob.
Tony's business with the real estate agent was a little pat, to my taste. The actress didn't really sell me on her being attracted to Tony or feeling real conflict in the moment. And while I liked the symbolism of the shirt, it was just a bit too easy. I did appreciate Tony, frustrated by the guilt he's feeling, projecting it into something as mundane as The Sopranos being out of turkey. Tony is a teapot, and if you put him on the stove, sooner or later he's going to have to shoot off some steam, even it's in a silly direction.
Otherwise, AJ isn't the show's most interesting character, but when the show uses him sparingly and deliberately (generally either to show that he's a brat or to contrast and compare him with his parents) he can still work well. Again, take out the scene with Tony and I don't think the AJ plot in this episode qualifies as a success, but for once we feel AJ struggling to take action and live up to his last name and the complications that come with carrying that name. It's not perfectly executed, but it's at least something interesting.
And lastly, the Vito storyline drags on. I'm not saying this isn't an interesting storyline, but I am saying that it's not interesting enough to stretch it out for this many episodes. The scenes with him in New Hampshire and his romance with the Johnny Cakes guy are dragged down by the fact that the actor who plays Vito isn't as good as his colleagues on the show at selling internal conflict and emotional turmoil. Given the company, that's no shame, but it still makes this a weaker element of the season thus far.
It's interesting to see the macho mobsters deal with the idea of homosexuality. Tony in particular seems not to care except that he has to. Again, we're seeing a lighter, more sensitive, more understanding Tony who keeps having to go back to his old ways because of his business. As Silvio lays out for him, if he's seen to have gone soft, even on something like who his capo sleeps with, because of the prejudices of his men, the whole thing could fall apart (as we saw when he was in a coma). Tony is trying to give into his better nature (despite his air conditioner bugging him) but more and more has to make the same compromises he always did.
I did enjoy the Melfi scene in this episode particularly. These scenes have a way of nudging at Tony's various hypocrisies and, the way he explained that guys get a pass in jail and how adamant he was that he never partook, and this large defense of homophobia he gives before essentially admitting that he doesn't care and wishes that he could let Vito be Vito was very Tevye-esque. It's an interesting idea -- Tony hates the idea of homosexuality in the abstract, but he knows Vito as a real live human being, and that's something much harder to hate. There's an interesting parallel with and Tony and Chris's conversation about the Arab men Chris has been dealing with. Chris concludes that they can't be terrorists because one of them has a dog, and they act like real people, not like scowling villains in a bond movie. I don't know whether or not those men are or aren't terrorist, but both scenes gesture toward the idea that we have one conception of the things we fear or hate or are uncomfortable with, and the reality of the situation, how complex and, dare I say, human, the people who embody those fears are, can throw us for a loop.
In some ways it's the same thing with Meadow's story. She sees the Afghani family who comes to see her as real people while her parents write them off as part of a nebulous other, to where they conclude that their son probably deserved whatever happened to him. But on the other side of the coin, Meadow was socialized into the civilian mafia culture and sees them as real people in a way that allows her to excuse and ignore the terrible things they do and that the culture endorses in a way that Finn, who is not nearly so indoctrinated, cannot.
And at the same time, Carmela is feeling restless again, in no small part because the two significant men in her life -- Tony and her father, have hindered her attempt at independence with the spec house while Angie Bumpensero is not only living well from her own body shop business, but is "putting money on the street." There's the hint that frustrated by her shot at legitimate business, she may want to be a bigger part of Tony's.
And Vito is...doing Vito stuff. We don't see much of him running away, and the show wisely chooses to depict most of it visually rather than in dialogue, but you do see him glancing at a seemingly accepted gay couple and get the impression that he too is torn between two worlds - the life he wants to live as his out self and the mob life that allows him to provide for his family (there's a lot of talk about him being a good father and a good husband). As in the last episode, both he and Tony can push down parts of themselves or they can get eaten alive but those around them. Vito's hoping he can live free here, at least for a while, with death very much looming in the corners of the place he might have belonged has his life gone differently.
If the last episode was about the potential of Tony changing, about his ability to become a different, possibly better person, this episode is about how it may be too late, about how he's too deep into this world that any move toward his becoming kinder and gentler and more sensitive would only make him weaker in the eyes of his colleagues and competitors.
Institutional fatalism is really more the realm of The Wire, The Sopranos' HBO cousin that was on the air at the same time as this season of the show, but there's a sense of it here too. There's the idea that to be a major player in the mob, you have to be ruthless, to constantly show strength, that any hint of compassion or care only shows you as vulnerable. The Mafia, at least the incarnation, doesn't just welcome in ruthless individuals, it makes them and reinforces them. Anyone who deviates from the plan gets whacked or marginalized. Even if Tony wants to change, if he starts moving down that path, it won't be long until people are literally gunning for him. So he starts to turn back into the pitiless gangster we know, even when it makes him vomit up blood.
We shouldn't give too much credit to the mob, though. Even before Tony listens to Melfi's advice and sizes up his men for a fight to reestablish his image of strength and dominance, there's a sense that his patience for sensitivity is fraying. It's summed up best in the metal detector scene, where his having to go back and forth is clearly irking him, but he's trying to keep it under control. There's all these little things nagging at Tony's happiness. It's sweet when he talks about the idea of wanting to hold Meadow's kid (it's frankly the sweetest moment we've probably seen from Tony in the whole series), but it's clear that certain nagging things keep bringing the easy-to-anger Tony back to the fore.
It's an interesting contrast with Johnny Sack, who always seemed like a kinder, gentler mobster in some ways. Sure, he clearly had a temper and wasn't above ordering Ralphie killed for insulting his wife, but that's just it. In contrast to Tony, Johnny seemed to legitimately love his family, not in an idealized sense, not in a "this is the kind of life that's expected of me, but I'm not going to put real effort into it" sense, but in that he legitimately loves his wife as she is, that his heart is undeniably full at seeing her get married and bringing his son-in-law into his circle, and that he is truly devastated when the feds interfere with it. (Make no mistake, the feds come off as pretty big dicks throughout here.)
And while Frank is likely looking for an in to becoming boss regardless, he uses these qualities to tear Johnny down. It clearly makes an impression on Tony, who had his own (different) moment of weakness after collapsing at the party. He's not wrong to notice that Chris is more apt to challenge or disagree with him since the coma. He sees Johnny and admires him, wants to move in that direction perhaps, but sees what it would cost him, and so he beats up his own soldier to show that he's not weak like Johnny, that he's not vulnerable, that he needs to be respected.
There's thematic resonance with Vito's storyline, where he too wants to embrace something other than the tough mobster stereotype and pursue his real sexual desires, but he realizes that once his fellow mobsters see him (and ignore his sad and cringe-y attempts to pass it off as a joke) that his goose is likely cooked. The mob doesn't tolerate differences from the paradigm very well. Vito leaves his home and checks into a cheap motel.
And there's the contrast again. Johnny walks to his prison cell after his daughter's wedding. Vito is scared for his life a dingy rented room. Tony lies in McMansion with his wife. If Tony wants to avoid ending up like Johnny or Vito, or worse, he's got a lot more blood to throw up, and the show underlines how this is, in some ways, a tragedy, that keeps Tony from being the better man he might be.
There's a lot of talk about The Sopranos as having two phases. The first half of the show is said to be about the last of the salad days of the New Jersey crime family, where things are going well with hints that this kind of prosperity can't last. The second is said to be about decline, about the walls closing in and a certain dourness hanging over everything. Reviewers like Todd Vanderwerff talk about an "autumnal" vibe to these later seasons.
But thus far, despite suicides and shootings by Junior, there's an odd bit of optimism, sunniness even, to much of this season. Sure, things are tight in some corners, but things at least seem to be going well enough for The Sopranos themselves. (The show definitely seems to be playing in the theme that Tony and his family are living high on the hog while other people, like Jason Barone and the garbage truck driver, suffer.)
And for once, it seems like Tony might be making a change. He seems to take fellow patient Mr. Schwinn's view of the world to heart. When he sits in his backyard and sees and feels the wind blow through the trees, you get the idea that he's thinking about the idea of everything being connected. When he keeps repeating and rephrasing the mantra on that little index card in his hospital room, you get the impression that for once, he's realizing how good he has it and how minor his problems really are, to where he's content to let his paramedic keep the $2,000. It's baby steps -- like Tony saying "there's enough garbage for everyone" and just generally not being as hard-nosed and prickly and selfish as he generally is. It's him expressing his love for Carmela. Whether it's the coma dream or the near-death experience, Tony starts to feel like he might finally become a better person. It's The Sopranos, so we can't expect it to last, but there's a hopefulness here, a sense of keeping problems in perspective, even if the show undercuts it with Paulie's attack on Jason.
Oh Paulie. One of the things I like about the show is that while it's content to get its laughs out of unsophisticated or otherwise unenlightened characters like Paulie, it's also has a lot of sympathy for them. Paulie is incredibly cruel to his Aunt, revealed to be his mother, and even worse to the woman who raised him as her own. And yet he's pitiable in how hard he takes everything. He has a pre-set notion of what it means to be a mother and a son that is very formalistic, and when reality turns that on his head, he can't deal with it. He's hurt in a way that he doesn't know how to process, with strange feelings of abandonment, the come out when he hears Mrs. Barone pleading for her son's safety. Tony as much as tells him to appreciate the woman who raised him, and his reaction to her is childish, but Paulie is really a big kid. When he attacks Jason, it's less about the money and more a jealousy of something Jason has that Paulie feels was taken from him. It's a testament to the skill of the show that they can have Paulie be so shallowly awful and yet still imbue him with pathos in all his terrible actions.
The hip hop gangster stuff, as usual for this show, brings the proceedings down. The juxtaposition of Italian-American gangsters and African American gangsters, as is typically the case, seems interesting in principle, but the handling with Bobby and the junior rapper, is all thumbs.
A 6/10 is probably too low for a series this good, but I wasn't a big fan of this one. I liked Tony's dreamland in the prior episode, but the show laid it all on a little thick in this one. Tony S's exchange with Tony B in front of the house that was an obvious metaphor for death lacked the subtlety of the show's best set pieces, and the dialogue about letting go didn't help much either. There was a little bit of interesting stuff with Tony wondering if he really is Kevin Finnerty, but overall, the dream sequence business should probably have been confined to the prior episode instead of becoming to literal and running out of steam in this one.
Back to the real world, the idea of what happens when the boss isn't around is an interesting one on principle, and in general I liked the idea of Sil being impressed into service and suffering from the stress, while Vito clunkily tries to position himself to take over and Paulie is his usual greedy self. But in practice, it fell a little flat. Neither Sil nor Vito seemed to have much finesse when given more screen time for something meatier like this (the focus on Vito in particular is a little puzzling), and Paulie's hit these beats before. It does give us this sense that as much of an impulsive ox as Tony seems like sometimes, he has a knack for this that few in his crew do, both in terms of strategy and in keeping everyone in line. He's certainly isolated from them, and its striking how quickly his capos are ready to ignore his family with him out of the picture (Carmela was right to be worried about whether or not she'd be taken care of!), but his absence shows him as a necessary part of what makes the operation work.
It was, however, a decently funny episode. Paulie being told to stay positive in Tony's hospital room and immediately saying, "Madonn'! He looks terrible!" cracked me up, as did his presence giving Tony a heart attack. Similarly, while Chris's movie storyline and subsequent conversation with a brain-addled Tony came off a little corny, the scene where he and J.T. pitched his idea to the mobsters was very funny.
I almost forgot about Carmela's therapy session, which, though colored by her husband being near death, is one of the most revealing and honest moments she has on the show. It feels like Melfi is willing to push her a little more than she is Tony (possibly because Carmela's a little less likely to get violent or use his power to try to intimidate her). Her discussion of her kids and complicity and how she chose this life were all very interesting tidbits.
It's a mixed episode overall, but it had some interesting individual components.
There was a certain optimism, if you can call it that, in the early-to-mid points of the season. Guys were getting out of jail and coming home. Money didn't seem to be the lurking specter it was in Season 4. Tony being apart from Carmela seemed to give him the little bit of a push he needed to examine aspects of how he is, of how he acts toward the important people in his life. He seemed to be remembering why Carmela is important to him, and in a peculiar way, vice versa as well.
And then that all faded away. Then, it started to feel like a mutual ransom. Tony would poison every divorce lawyer in town so that Carmela couldn't find a good one, and scare off any forensic accountants so that she couldn't get her fair share. He had to have what he wanted -- he always does -- and block any and every of Carmela's attempts to escape. It's a trap, and a certain point, Tony knows it and Carmela is a resigned to it. But knowing that, Carmela still extracts her price, her compensation for giving into something that's clearly against her wishes. That price turns out to be a half-hearted promise that Tony's daliance won't intrude into their lives. (Carmela seems resistant at first but then knows that's the best she's going to get.) And it's also a $600,000 lot to build on. AJ's right that it is "fucking weird" when they get back together because it's a business deal, an exchange of value, of two people realizing that they're stuck in each other's gravitational pull, not that they truly love each other.
There's a lot of questioning of love in this episode. Christopher questions whether Tony loves him. Tony S. is forced to confront how much of his affection for Tony B. is love and how much of it is guilt. (I really enjoyed Buscemi's delivery when Tony S. confesses and he asks if all of the casino and other perks he'd received were because of that. He didn't really care and had moved past it long ago in a way Tony S. hadn't.) And the New Jersey mob captains question the extent to which Tony loves his cousins at the expense of his own crew.
I have to admit, I was a little underwhelmed by this finale. Sure, the FBI getting Johnny Sack right after he and Tony S. had patched things up was kind of an interesting twist, but I don't know. The show trades in anticlimax, and I enjoyed Tony's elegant solution to the Tony B. problem at the end of the day, of swallowing his feelings and doing what had to be done, but it all felt sort of inevitable. So much on this show is inevitable and yet wrings more out of the process of getting from the beginning to end. Here is one of the few people in the world who could talk to Tony like a peer instead of an underling, at least to a degree, and somehow his death and that loss didn't feel as impactful as it might have.
I'm not demanding mob violence fireworks or anything (though we did get some of those), but like the Sopranos' marriage, it just felt like falling back into something rather than cutting new territory. Maybe that's the point -- the stasis of this way of life persists despite the numerous events that threaten to jostle it. Carmela can kick Tony out. Tony B. can get out of jail. New York can have a civil war. But that bear in black will still come lumbering into the backyard no matter what happens.
(As an aside, the comedy of Carmela and Tony's reaction to AJ's potential career in "event planning" was amazing.)
An interesting, weird episode of The Sopranos. The most striking thing about it at first blush how great James Gandolfini is at portraying what Tony Soprano might have been like if, as he mentioned in "College", he'd decided to sell lawn furniture on Route 9 instead of going into the mob. Even before he opens his mouth and we start hearing many more Rs than we're used to hearing from him, there's something in how Tony carries himself while walking up to the convention that immediately conveys the fact that he's a different man than the one we're familiar with. It's incredibly fascinating to see Tony as a shnook, to use a term from 'Goodfellas'. The way he's largely impotent and meeker, the way he's still too focused on his work and apt to cheat on his wife, even if he's less successful in both areas, the way he's polite and smiles and is uncomfortable at having to lie. Whether this is all in his head or purgatory or something else, it's an intriguing glimpse at the malleability of Tony; that while certain things are set as part of his personality, he could have been a very different man with a very different life.
There's a lot of religious imagery in the episode, and a lot of reason believe that Tony is in purgatory, if only in his own mind. He's stuck, unable to get back home or go on to his next stop. There's footage of flames from Costa Mesa suggesting hell, a religious infomercial suggesting heaven, and even a confrontation from Buddhist monks suggesting reincarnation. The entire exercise is much more linear and much less surreal than Tony's usual dreams.
All the while Tony is asking "Who am I?" "Where am I going?" "What's the point?" He picks up the wallet of one Brian Finnerty -- it's a bit of a reach, but the name sounds Irish and may be a hint toward the idea of Hell as an Irish bar as Chris once reported -- a sign that the doppleganger who took Tony's briefcases represents the life of the man we've come to know, and that it has a definite ending. And yet, there's also the strange conclusion to this little scene that Schnook Tony has alzheimer's, that he will literally forget who he is. Tony is spiritually and emotionally lost; he essentially admits as such; and yet there's a sense to all this that even if he had avoided the mob life, he still might have experienced something less than fulfilment and ended up like Junior.
In an odd way, this episode feels like two distinct episodes: one about Tony in his coma, and the other about his family and colleagues holding things together in his absence. I will continue to gush about Edie Falco and how amazing her work on this show is. Her monologue with Tony in the coma and her tears at hearing that Tony will likely die (news delivered by Masuka from Dexter!) absolutely blew me away. Robert Iler was less impressive as AJ (and that's no sin as compared to Edie Falco), but he was still moving and believable as a bratty teenager when he too spoke to Tony in a coma and vowed revenge on Junior. One of the most interesting moments of this side of the episode for me was when AJ said "poor you" to Meadow, in a frightening echo of Livia that suggests her grandson may have absorbed more from his grandmother than it initially seemed.
The mob stuff on the edges was a little less interesting, with Silvio consolidating things in Tony's absence and Chris rising in prominence as well, but mostly this was an episode about Tony's journey and his family coping with it, and while the tone occasionally felt different from the usual Sopranos vibe (likely intentionally), it still worked amazingly well.
