The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Christopher doesn’t even come close to recognizing his own blind spot, though his new pal, recovering-addict TV writer JT Dolan39 (Tim Daly40), gets a look at the hypocrisies Christopher commits every day without realizing it. They became friends in rehab, and Christopher takes their Narcotics Anonymous work seriously. But he also doesn’t hesitate to invite JT to the Executive Game when his sponsor expresses interest in gambling—even Tony tried to talk Davey Scatino out of playing at first—because outside of their respective sobriety, JT is like any other civilian to Christopher: a mark to be exploited. JT can’t believe his friend would be so ruthless about a $60,000 debt, and brags, “What could you do to me that I haven’t already been through?”

  “I’m positive we’ll think of something,” says Christopher, right before he and Little Paulie knock JT through his coffee table and off the wagon.

  On his way back to rehab, JT signs over his beloved convertible to pay part of the debt, then is aghast to hear Christopher spouting recovery clichés like, “There’s no chemical solution to a spiritual problem.” As a rational (if insufferable) human, JT can’t believe Christopher would still try to act like a friend; as a man working in a sick business, Christopher has to think of all of this as perfectly normal. (If anything, he probably imagines himself as being much kinder to this guy than Paulie or Patsy would be.) When he explains how much interest JT will pay on his debt, he warns, “I will not fuckin’ enable you,” not comprehending that he did exactly that by inviting the poor sap to play.

  Where Tony is able to beat down attempts to make him examine this part of him, and Christopher isn’t even aware it’s there, it’s Uncle Junior who gets a devastating glimpse of what he’s become—who he always was, really—at the end of his latest attempt to escape the boredom of house arrest. His current drug regimen has made his memory sharper and his mood more upbeat. When the judge allows him to leave Belleville to attend the funeral of Tony and Janice’s Aunt Concetta, it’s the happiest he’s been in forever—declining Tony’s invitation to visit Johnny Boy’s grave with him, Junior suggests, “I can pay my respects from the after party”—and he begins combing the obituary pages looking for any excuse to get out of the house and interact with people besides Bobby and Janice.

  This starts out as comic relief, with Junior and his attorney shamelessly contorting Junior’s relationships with the dearly departed for the judge’s approval. But it quickly turns dark, with Junior raving about the deli platter at the funeral for his dry cleaner’s seven-year-old son, oblivious to the devastated mourners. And when Concetta’s husband Zio dies two weeks after his beloved wife, Father Phil’s eulogy about all that Concetta and Zio enjoyed during their long life together utterly wrecks Junior, who has been alone for so long.

  Junior’s neurologist wonders if he had another stroke, while Uncle Jun insists the new meds have just stopped working, as he finds himself shuffling around like Tony on lithium back in “Isabella.” A medical cause is plausible given Junior’s condition, but more likely Father Phil’s speech forced him to take a harsh but not inaccurate look at himself.

  “My life is only death,” Junior wails. “I’m living in a grave. I beat prison, and for what? I have no children. Will somebody please explain this to me?”

  No one can, because what can you say? The funerals provided a brief distraction from his lonely, deteriorating existence, but only for so long. Christopher can focus on bleeding JT dry, and Tony can ignore his troubles at the Bing, but Junior’s blinders, along with his dignity, have been stripped away. This is a life where the only way to function is to not look too closely at who you are and what you’re doing. Tony and Chris can mostly succeed in that; Junior can’t anymore, which is why they end the episode celebrating and he ends it sobbing.

  “MARCO POLO”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 8

  WRITTEN BY MICHAEL IMPERIOLI

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  Truce and Consequences

  “This is nice, no?” —Tony

  From a Family point of view, “Marco Polo” is among the series’ more minor episodes. There’s continued back and forth in the New York civil war, with Johnny sinking Little Carmine’s boat, and Little Carmine and Rusty trying to recruit Tony B to murder Phil’s protégé Joey Peeps (Joe Maruzzo) in retaliation for Lorraine. But the most prominent Mob story of the hour is small and petty: Tony assigns Angie Bonpensiero, now running Pussy’s old body shop, to repair Phil’s car after the crash Tony caused during “In Camelot,” taking pleasure in his dead rat friend’s widow getting nickel-and-dimed by (as Tony describes Phil) “the Shah of Iran.”

  Lowercase family–wise, though, it’s one of The Sopranos’s most charming and memorable episodes: a rambling, Robert Altman–esque hour, set primarily at the seventy-fifth birthday party for Carmela’s father Hugh, so intimate, detailed, and cognizant of how well we’ve come to know these people, that it often feels as if we’re in the Soprano backyard smelling the chlorine and grilled salsiccia.

  Tony B spends much of the episode, and the party, fuming at being given such a thin slice of the Family pie after so many years away, and having to act like the hired help at his rich cousin’s party. When he was pursuing his massage therapy dreams, it was easy to accept how little he had, but now that he’s signed back up, he can’t help but notice how drastically the two Tonys’ roads diverged since that night twenty years ago. He covets the Soprano mansion, sees how well Meadow is doing (Meadow, more empathetic than most Sopranos, knows instantly that Tony B is thinking about his daughter Kelly), and can’t deny how shabby his life is in comparison. His twins know nothing of the past (they’d been told throughout their childhoods their father was in the military overseas), but they see their diminished present as clearly as their dad does. Jason steals one of the many valuable items (a folder of ’96 Olympics pins) that lies forgotten in the back of AJ’s closet, and when Tony B scolds him for it, Jason protests, “I love where he lives” and says he doesn’t want to return to Tony B’s place anymore.

  Earlier, Tony B had rebuffed Little Carmine and Rusty, wisely avoiding the New York war. But after a day as errand boy for both Carmela (helping with the party, then sitting way out on the fringes of it) and Tony (trying and failing to get Phil to ease off his demands for Angie), plus this outburst, he’s had enough. He kills Joey Peeps, plus a prostitute unlucky enough to get a ride home from Joey, and limps from the crime scene on a run-over foot.

  Tony B’s gnawing resentment is but one thread developed before, during, and after the party that ranks with the Sopranos’s best evocations of how communities can poison shared milestones and rituals. Early on, it seems as if Hugh might not even make it to the party, as our first glimpse of him is when he falls off Carmela’s roof while trying to lay shingles. This turns out to be another bit of classic Sopranos slapstick (Hugh falls past AJ’s window; AJ, oblivious, keeps drumming), and Hugh escapes with minor aches and pains, which leaves open the question of whether Tony will be invited to the party now that he and Carmela are splitsville. Carm has good reason to not want Tony there, but it’s really Mary opposing it because she fears Tony will embarrass her in front of her high-class northern Italian friend,41 Dr. Russ Fegoli (Bruce Kirby). But Hugh—who has the surprise party spoiled early for him by an amusingly petulant Uncle Junior—suggests he won’t come unless the man of the house mans the grill.

  It’s an inflection point for the Soprano separation. Tony is lonely42 and miserable at Livia’s, and Carmela’s fling with Dr. Wegler left her pessimistic about finding happiness outside of the world she already knows. If ever there was a moment for them to better appreciate each other’s company, it’s now, during a long day spent with friends and family, with Tony on his best and most charming behavior, from the way he twirls the sausages around his neck to the Beretta shotgun he thoughtfully buys for Hugh. Throwing any sort of party is stressful for Carm—particularly when people like Tony B show up to “help” and wind up burdening her with more work—but the day
still reminds her of what it was like to be married to Tony in better times. And looking at her own parents, who are still together after all these years, helps her appreciate the feeling of stability that comes from spending your life with the same person.

  Despite early hiccups, this turns into a great party that continues well into the night, when a handful of guests convene to play the titular game in the Soprano family pool. Carmela has worked so hard to escape this marriage, to stay above the fray of all of Tony’s nonsense, but she keeps being thrown back into the pool—literally here, when Tony and AJ toss her in fully clothed so she can join the game. (Edie Falco’s resigned delivery of “Marco . . .” when Carmela is tagged is a thing of minimalist comic beauty.) But if she’s angry for a moment at getting wet against her will, it’s not long before she’s happy to realize she and Tony are the last ones in the pool and that he’s making a move.43 For so long, she’s wanted to be wanted by Tony in this way, and not just because he’s horny or lonely or atoning for his latest fuckup. Now here he is, acting like the man she once loved very much, looking at her like she is the only woman in the world for him, and soon they are doing what happy spouses do together.

  Uppercase Family-wise, Tony B sticking his beak into the New York civil war is a big deal. But the more important piece of “Marco Polo” involves the cessation of hostilities in the civil war between Mr. and Mrs. Soprano.

  “UNIDENTIFIED BLACK MALES”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 9

  WRITTEN BY MATTHEW WEINER AND TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Arch-Nemesis

  “Is this what you grew up with?” —Finn

  Almost every significant character on The Sopranos is either in the Mob or connected to it by ties of profession, family, and/or friendship. The major exception is Dr. Melfi, but she only knows what Tony tells her—a mix of truth, self-aggrandizement, and legal cover. If she could actually see the full extent of who Tony was and what he did, she might refuse to be in the same room with him again, let alone treat him.

  Finn DeTrolio is far from the series’ most charismatic figure, but as a civilian who grew up a continent away from all this, he has a distinct role in both Meadow’s life and the series as a whole. None of this is normal to him. None of it is something to be shrugged off as just the way things are. And the more he learns about all the men Meadow calls Uncle, the more justifiably terrified he becomes of staying in a relationship with the daughter of Mr. Mob Boss.

  After Finn fails to land a job on his own that might at least buy a new air conditioner in the middle of an oppressive New York summer, Tony hooks him up with the operation over at the Esplanade, where no-work guys like Vito and Eugene are amused by how hard he tries when he could lounge around with them. He soon learns to accept some of the spoils of dating the boss’s daughter, but little about this environment seems right to him, even before he witnesses Eugene laying a savage beating on Little Paulie because he took offense to a joke implying he was gay.

  Meadow has, like her mother before her, become inured to all of this. She has learned to tell the lie about who killed Jackie Jr.—one of several sets of nonexistent African American scapegoats who provide “Unidentified Black Males” with its title—as if she believes it, and she dismisses Finn’s story of the Little Paulie beating because she only knows Eugene as one of her father’s sweet friends.

  But that beating helps to frame the next disturbing incident Finn witnesses—Vito blowing a security guard in the Esplanade parking lot44—because he knows how dangerous even a joke about homosexuality can be. Vito is in grave danger if this secret ever gets out, which means Finn is in grave danger for knowing it, a situation made clear when Vito confronts him outside a Port-A-John—quipping, “Finn DeTrolio, my arch-nemesis,” in a way that sounds much less jokey than intended—and ominously invites San Diego fan Finn to join him at a Yankees–Padres game in the Bronx that night.

  Finn instead hides out at the apartment with Meadow, which turns out to be the more perilous locale. Where Vito simply looks disappointed and lonely as he stands in full Yankees gear outside the stadium, Meadow lures Finn into an endless argument about not only the Vito incident (She’s in denial about this, too: “Vito Spatafore is a married man, Finn”), but the state of their relationship, given Finn’s decision to take out a suitcase in the event he had to go on the run. The fight lasts only a few minutes across a pair of scenes, but it seems to go on forever, until Finn can hardly be blamed for proposing marriage to Meadow simply to end it.

  The episode’s title primarily applies to two sets of fictional black men in the past and present: the group Tony blamed for missing the hijacking that sent Tony B to prison, when he was really just suffering an early panic attack; and the group whom Tony B claim injured his foot, when it actually got run over at the end of the Joey Peeps hit. It is a racist lie coming full circle, so much so that Tony has his first panic attack in years45 upon realizing that his cousin was responsible for escalating the civil war in New York,46 which could mark both Tonys for death.

  The Peeps hit, and the connections Tony makes between the panic attack it causes while he’s golfing with Johnny Sack and earlier attacks seemingly sparked by mentions of cousins, help Tony disclose to Dr. Melfi the guilt-ridden truth about that night when Tony B got pinched. It all started back when Meadow was a baby, not because of jealousy or bitterness, but because of the cycle of abuse and anxiety between Livia and her son that Tony barely recognized at the time. A screaming match triggered what Tony would recognize decades later as a panic attack, causing him to cut his head and miss the hijacking, ruining one Tony’s life and leaving the other one on a path to take over the Family.

  When Tony B was in prison, or even pursuing his massage therapy career, Tony could block out the memories and the guilt. With Tony B not only an active wiseguy again, but suddenly pushing New Jersey into the middle of New York’s war, Tony can’t avoid facing these feelings, and they’re crushing him—to the point where he has another panic attack in the safe space of Melfi’s office, just from discussing that fateful evening. This is the first time she has witnessed such an event—Gandolfini is so typically spectacular at portraying Tony at his most vulnerable that it’s easy to overlook how deftly Lorraine Bracco balances Melfi’s desire to help her patient in this moment of crisis and her professional fascination at finally experiencing what she’s only heard Tony describe in retrospect—and though she pulls him through it, he feels no better. (Melfi compares sessions like this to childbirth, while Tony insists, “Trust me—it’s like takin’ a shit.”)

  Tony at least has a professional to guide him through these terrifying moments. Carmela spends much of the episode seeking a different form of counsel, deciding to hire a divorce lawyer after Tony is slow to follow up on the tryst at the end of her father’s birthday party. But she discovers47 that Tony has followed Alan Sapinsly’s advice from “Whitecaps”—taking token meetings with top area attorneys so they’re conflicted out of representing Carmela—and the few untainted ones are too afraid to tangle with the boss of New Jersey. It’s brutal to watch, in many ways worse than Carmela’s realization in “Sentimental Education” that everyone will always assume the worst of her because of Tony—at least she still had a shot at her fair share in the divorce and carving out a life on her own. Tony smugly celebrates his victory by replying to her complaints with, “The only reason you have anything is because of my fuckin’ sweat, and you knew every step of the way exactly how it works.” He’s trapped her in a life where she depends on the scraps he gives her to live on, always subject to his moods and petty grievances, knowing there is no way out.

  The hour closes with Carmela watching Tony swim in the pool of the house where he no longer resides, listening to Meadow tell her about Finn’s proposal. Carmela weeps not with joy for her daughter getting engaged to a nice guy who couldn’t be more unlike Tony, but with despair at everything her own marital choice has—and will—cost her for the rest of her l
ife.

  Finn’s prospects seem just as bleak. In popping the question, he proved himself unexpectedly fit to join this particular Family. His proposal prioritizes the short-term gratification of getting Meadow to just shut up about the damn suitcase over what is genuinely best for Finn, which would be to run away from all the people whose miserable stories fill the rest of the hour. This might be the only characteristic Finn has in common with Tony, an impulsive man with no long-term vision who momentarily undoes catastrophic marriage screw-ups by dropping small fortunes on gifts for his wife, some of which (such as the house that they ended up not buying) require years, even decades, of commitment. Finn spends much of the episode terrified of what Vito might do to him. Officially joining Tony’s family is an easy way to become protected in the short term—just look at how differently Paulie Walnuts treats Finn once he learns out who he is—but he might want to have a long talk with his future mother-in-law about what you get, and what you risk, by marrying into this world.

  “COLD CUTS”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 10

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY MIKE FIGGIS

  On the Farm

  “Tell me about the Soprano temper.” —Dr. Melfi