The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  If we remind ourselves that every single thing happening here is a product of Tony’s imagination, and compare this dream to past ones, we can see how much more sophisticated a dreamer Tony has become—almost certainly as a result of his regular conversations with Melfi, who (in various ways) stands in for Tony’s subconscious itself whenever he dreams. He’s aware that he’s dreaming, as seen in the many conversations that discuss movies versus life and the screens strewn throughout, serving as transitions and bridging movies and reality. “You know, douchebag,” he tells Mikey, “I realize I’m dreaming.”

  But what will he do with this dream?

  “LONG TERM PARKING”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 12

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Take Off and Drive

  “How could you fuckin’ do this to us?!” —Christopher

  She was dead the minute she got in the car.

  Not the car that Silvio uses to drive Adriana to the desolate woods where he murders her for ratting to the FBI at the end of one of the most devastating hours of the entire series. No, she was dead the minute she got in the FBI car, back in season four’s “No Show,” when Deborah Ciccerone outed herself as an agent and invited her target to come back to headquarters.

  Once Ade got in that car, talked to federal agents, and didn’t ask for a lawyer, it was over for her. Had she refused, she might have done a year or two in prison for the cocaine the FBI found in the club, maybe been shunned by Christopher and the rest of the Family, even had to start her entire life over from scratch. But she would have been alive. Even the sin of bringing an undercover Fed into Tony’s house shouldn’t have been a death sentence, because Tony really liked Adriana, as we saw in “Irregular Around the Margins”—and what did Ciccerone actually see for the two minutes she stood in the atrium?

  But as soon as Adriana got in that car without protest, everything changed. She didn’t know it, because she was too naive to think or do otherwise. Maybe Ciccerone and Harris convinced themselves that it wouldn’t end the way it does. But for the two seasons where Ade was a reluctant FBI cooperator, that ugly scene in the woods—Adriana crawling through the fallen leaves, sobbing as Silvio (who has just tried to drag her out of the car while calling her a “fuckin’ cunt”) walks purposefully behind her and draws his gun—was sadly a matter of when, not if.

  Adriana’s slow-motion tragedy was unusual even for a series this dark. She wasn’t wholly innocent. She knew what Christopher did for a living, and even assisted in some crimes out of fear, like covering up the murder at the club that finally goads Sanseverino to order her to flip Christopher or go to jail for twenty-five years instead of the original two. But she was also in way over her head, with no one to trust, trapped in a cycle of shame and abuse and addiction with Christopher, her handler pushing her to do things that would doom her. And because she didn’t know better at any point—particularly on that fateful afternoon when she was just out walking Cosette—she kept doing them.

  And it got her killed.

  In the larger scheme of the series, Adriana’s death isn’t as important as several other developments in “Long Term Parking,” chief among them the resurrection of the Soprano marriage. Carmela gives in not because she wants to, but because she’s exhausted from failing to find another path in life besides the one involving the bear of a man she married. The Wegler affair suggested she would never be accepted as something more than a Mob boss’s wife, and Tony made it impossible for her to get the divorce settlement she’d need to start fresh. “Marco Polo” showed she still has feelings for Tony, but she has no illusions. Tony can’t even bother with the pretense that he’ll stop cheating, promising only that his affairs won’t publicly embarrass Carmela anymore. This is a business arrangement: Tony gets to come home, and Carmela gets the small fortune needed so she and her father can build a spec house. Though the two will eventually feel a bit flirty once Tony has moved back in, the resigned nature of the whole arrangement is conveyed in two shots: the perfunctory kiss on the cheek he gives her at Vesuvio once they’ve finalized the deal, and the way Tim Van Patten and director of photography Alik Sakharov shoot Tony from so far away when he finally returns to the house as a resident. He looks small and insignificant, even though he got what he wanted, because even he knows how empty the relationship is.

  And as Tony reconnects with one old partner, another drifts further away. Billy Leotardo’s murder leaves Phil out for revenge—conveyed in a haunting piece of acting by Frank Vincent, where we see Phil sitting at the bar flashing back on his brother’s death, eyes burning with equal parts regret and rage—and Little Carmine looking for a way to keep this “fuckin’ stagmire” from getting him killed, too. So he concedes the leadership to Johnny Sack, who takes to the job as if to the manor born, imperiously telling Tony their meetings at the usual spot by the river are over, because “it’s undignified.”

  The civil war is over, but the Tony B matter remains unsettled. He’s hiding at Uncle Pat’s farm from “Cold Cuts,” but calling Tony out of guilt, fear, or both, and then hanging up for the same reason. Finally he stays on the line long enough for Tony to confess the truth about his panic attack on the night Tony B got arrested. Like a lot of Tony’s confessions (see also informing Ralphie about Valentina while Justin is in the ICU back in “Whoever Did This”), the timing is self-serving: Tony B’s too far away and in too much trouble to do anything about it, and Tony is doing it to even the score between them so he’ll feel less guilty about tracing the call and potentially turning him into Johnny and Phil. Instead, despite the threat that Phil could take revenge on Christopher60 in lieu of the Soprano cousin he wants to murder, Tony keeps stalling on giving Johnny the location, and refuses to do it outright because he’s so offended by Johnny talking down to him after ascending to the throne. Although later he’ll help arrange to murder the love of Christopher’s life, when it’s Tony’s responsibility to facilitate the death of someone he cares more deeply about, he flinches.

  This is the one bit of good news for Adriana in the whole doomed mess, because Tony’s defense of Tony B at Christopher’s possible expense leaves Chris disillusioned about “the guy I’m goin’ to Hell for,” and thus more open to the idea of going into witness protection when Adriana makes her pitch.

  That is not his first reaction to hearing the news, though. Instead—in a scene that, by itself, probably won Michael Imperioli and Drea de Matteo their Emmys61—the information at first seems to break something inside him. Christopher gets twitchier throughout her story, the camera pushing in on his face, until the mention of the murder at the club—and what that means for the both of them—gets to be too much, and he turns pure animal: punching her in the face, choking her (as he did over the thought of her infidelity in “Irregular Around the Margins”), screaming in a guttural voice, “My God! What are we gonna do?!” And as many abuse victims reflexively do, Adriana apologizes for putting Christopher in this predicament, and they hug and weep together.

  It’s an astonishingly raw scene—closer to the intensity of some of the Tony–Carmela fights in “Whitecaps” than could be expected from any Sopranos scene not featuring them—and in the hours of offscreen conversation that follow, it appears the catharsis was enough for Christopher to realize how bad this is, and how their only salvation is to take the FBI deal and hide.

  But like everyone in this world, including his cousin Carmela, the prospect of becoming someone different is more than he can handle. While clearing his head before agreeing fully to the FBI offer,62 he stops to gas up his ridiculous Hummer and is struck by a glimpse of a poorer family traveling in a beat-up Chevy Citation: the life (mullet and all) that could be Christopher’s if he flips on the Family. It’s more than he can bear, and he not only rats Adriana out to Tony and Sil, but later helps cover up her murder, tossing a suitcase full of her clothes into the same clearing under the Turnpike where Tony nearly executed him in “Irregular Around the M
argins,” then ditching her car in a Newark Airport lot. Once he was willing to die rather than live in a world where his fiancée had slept with his mentor; here, he chooses Tony over Ade, and even if he’s so broken up over the choice that he falls off the wagon after, he still made the terrible choice. (As a wise woman once said: Poor you.)

  But back to Silvio’s car. We never see Adriana get into it, and the episode briefly shows her driving herself down south, far away from people who have no real regard for her or her safety, the radio blasting Shawn Smith’s “Leaving California,” a song whose lyrics advise driving away as fast as possible—though that line ironically only plays after the daydream is revealed for what it is. Nor do we see the moment when Christopher fesses up to Tony and the others, nor even Adriana’s actual death. That last choice led many fans to make like Sanseverino and try to concoct a version of the story where Adriana wasn’t dead. Even the episode’s final scene, with Tony and Carmela in the vacant lot where she intends to build her spec house, opens up with a shot of the trees designed to evoke the ones we saw when the camera panned up at the moment of Adriana’s murder, teasing us with the possibility that we’d be returning to that first set of trees to witness Adriana climb to her feet, bloody but still very much alive.

  None of these fake outs are really convincing, but we want them to be. And their cumulative power suggests David Chase, Terence Winter, and everyone else involved felt the same way. They didn’t want Adriana to die any more than we did, and crafted an episode that tantalizingly suggested that she might not.

  But this story only ever had one ending.

  “ALL DUE RESPECT”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 13

  WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  Glad Tidings

  “It’s my mess. All my choices were wrong.” —Tony

  “Two Tonys,” the first episode of season five, concluded with Tony Soprano sitting in a patio chair at night, awaiting the return of the black bear, assault rifle locked and loaded. He was the hunter. The bear was his prey.

  “All Due Respect,” season five’s last episode, seems to resolve the matter of there being two Tonys, in that Tony murders Tony B in hopes of resolving the feud with New York. But does it really? Not only does Tony wind up as both the hunter and the bear at different stages of the episode—gunning down Tony B with a shotgun before his cousin is even aware he’s there, and later emerging, bear-like, from the trees behind his house—but the episode, and the season, keep circling the idea that the two Tonys are really the same Tony, just manifested in different contexts.

  We were told in “Rat Pack” that the two cousins—who were really more like brothers—were indistinguishable growing up, down to the first name, and the season made this manifest. They could’ve had each others’ lives if not for circumstance. Tony’s greatest weakness is his impulsivity, and how his temper often outpaces his rational mind. Tony B is presented as a more extreme example of that, as his death at his cousin’s hands results from three unnecessary outbursts: beating Mr. Kim right when he’s on the verge going legit, agreeing to the Joey Peeps hit after simmering in envy of his cousin, and gunning for the Leotardo brothers because he can’t let Angelo’s murder sit. All these tantrums lead to Tony B lying dead on Uncle Pat’s porch.

  The Tonys’ name thing becomes impossible to overlook, too. Our protagonist gets to be just Tony, where this other man—completely new, but treated as a crucial piece of Tony’s origin story, with whom everyone else on the show has a preexisting relationship—has to go by Tony B. He is the Plan B version of Tony, the Tony our Tony almost was, the chaotic not-quite-twin who brings out the “real” Tony’s worst impulses (as Christopher insisted to Adriana back in “Cold Cuts”). It can seem like Tony dreamed him up as a way to see how a darker version of his life would have gone, just as he dreamed about Tony B going after the Leotardos as it was happening, as if he conjured the hit into reality.63

  Tony B isn’t a dream, nor Tyler Durden, nor any other literary device. Everybody sees him, everybody knows him, and episodes like “Sentimental Education” and “Marco Polo” lay out the small, messy quality of his life in a way that seems antithetical to dream logic. But there’s something about him—or about any character introduced this late in a series who has such a shared history with longer-established characters—that isn’t quite . . . right. Tony B exists, but it’s almost as if he isn’t meant to, and his continued presence in the narrative keeps causing problems for everyone else.64

  “All Due Respect”—the title inspired by a marvelous (and Mob-ubiquitous) introductory phrase that allows the speaker to evade repercussions for any following insult—is all about Tony coming to accept that his cousin shouldn’t be alive anymore, and that he has to be the one to kill him.

  This is not an easy process for either him or his guys. He bolts early from a wiseguy dinner honoring Ray Curto because he knows all the captains and their lieutenants are seething over his reluctance to give Phil and New York what they want. His popularity in the Family is at such a low ebb that after Benny Fazio winds up with a fractured skull courtesy of Phil and his guys, Vito openly suggests it might be time for them to take out their own boss. Even Sil is willing to suggest this current mess came about because Tony’s pride kicked in when Johnny started treating him like the hired help.

  “You got no fuckin’ idea what it’s like to be number one,” Tony replies, as oblivious to the Soprano crew’s discontent as John was to his. “Every decision you make affects every facet of every other fuckin’ thing. It’s too much to deal with almost. And in the end, you’re completely alone with it all.”

  It’s a long-ignored member of the crew who gives him the final push toward a decision, the Pie-O-My painting improbably becoming a plot device. Tony pays a surprise visit to Paulie’s home—with Paulie noting that Tony’s increasingly rare stops there are one of the reasons he felt secure in putting the painting up—and is offended to see both that Paulie disobeyed his orders about destroying the thing, and had him retouched to look like “a goddamn lawn jockey.”

  “That’s not a lawn jockey,” Paulie insists. “That’s a general.”

  Tony loves his military history (he’s watching yet another documentary about legendary German officer Erwin Rommel when Carmela talks to him about the spec house), and as he stares at the painting one more time,65 he considers what it would mean for him to make decisions that sacrifice men he loves for the greater good of the campaign.

  We’ve already heard Van Morrison’s “Glad Tidings” when Christopher meets with Silvio while hiding out from Phil. The song rises on the soundtrack again as Tony recognizes what he has to do. Tony B returns to the farm with groceries, and we hear the lyric “And we’ll send you glad tidings from New York” as he exits the barn with his bags, and then “Hope that you will come right on time” just before Tony steps out from another corner of the wraparound porch and ventilates his favorite cousin with a shotgun before he can defend himself or even recognize he’s about to die. This is not the kind of rage-filled killing we’ve seen Tony commit on Ralphie or Pussy or Matt Bevilaqua; this is Tony the hunter stalking and killing prey. It’s a clean, cold kill. Even Febby Petrulio got a few last words and a chance to beg for his life.

  Though Tony B didn’t exist for us before this season, James Gandolfini’s performance makes it clear just how much his presence meant to Tony, and why he risked death at his cousin’s hand rather than let Phil handle it. Tony B was, for a time, everything to Tony, and then he was gone, and then he came back like a specter of the past, to haunt our man for all the mistakes and regrets and lucky breaks he’s made and felt over a lifetime. “I paid enough, John. I paid a lot,” Tony tells Johnny Sack as they bring the feud to an end, and there is such pain on Gandolfini’s face and in his voice that it’s as if we’d also known Tony B all our lives.

  The guys in the crew appreciate the sacrifice, too, but the finale mostly finds
things far better for Tony at home, where he and Carmela are still making nice post-reconciliation—even if she dresses sexier for a snuggle session with the spec house blueprint66 than she does for her husband—and where AJ and his friend Patrick (Paul Dano67) have such success throwing a party with their own money that AJ becomes excited about the idea of becoming an event planner. (Neither parent understands this idea, but both accept it as a fallback for their screw-up son that they can live with.)

  Even the season’s concluding minutes have Tony fleeing Mob business to get back to his family by any means necessary. Moments after he and Johnny broker a truce, armed FBI agents raid the house to bust the new boss of New York, sending Tony sprinting through the woods—fleeing prey in a very expensive suit. This turns out to be unnecessary, as Tony’s lawyer explains when his client calls mid-flight that one of Johnny’s captains has flipped, but only on other Brooklyn wiseguys. Tony’s not at risk of arrest, but he’s now so much closer to his own house than to Johnny’s that it makes sense to keep walking home.

  Before, it was Tony B who hid out in nature. Now it’s Tony S—or perhaps we should call him Tony B now, since the finale ends with Tony emerging from the backyard tree line just as the black bear did in the premiere (the episode’s chorus “Glad Tidings” rising for a third time on the soundtrack). Tony was always the bear as much as the hunter, but this last scene literalizes the Tony Bear of it all: like the ursine interloper in “Two Tonys,” more of a threat to this home in theory than in reality. Where once he turned up at the house without warning and drove Carmela mad, here his arrival instead invites her sympathy and concern: “What happened to you? Your shoes are soaking wet.”