The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  While Vito is transforming himself with angst but high hopes, and Tony is mad at himself for doing the same, AJ is desperate to become someone else, and failing miserably. Where Meadow is the Soprano kid who knows what she wants in life and how to get it, AJ has drifted from plan to plan, identity to identity, never really fitting any of them. Here, he tries two—club kid and hitman—neither of which work out. The first finds him palling around with Hernan (Vincent Piazza36) and his crew and feeling important and valued, but he’s just being used to pay the group’s absurd bottle service fees, entertain them with Mob stories, and perhaps relay their problems to his father.37 His feelings of inadequacy there, his boredom with life as a Blockbuster clerk, and his powerful memories of watching The Godfather with his dad inspire him to seek revenge on Uncle Junior, but it’s bungled before it can even begin.

  Tony’s able to get AJ off the hook with help from Assemblyman Zellman, and their scene in the police station parking lot is a rare instance where Anthony Sr.’s temper over Anthony Jr.’s latest fuck-up transmutes to a more tender sense of concern for the danger his son just put himself in, as well as fear that AJ might follow in his footsteps. “It’s not in your nature!” he insists, and when a defiant AJ claims his father doesn’t know him, Tony presses on: “You’re a nice guy, and that’s a good thing, for Chrissakes!”

  We’ve never seen AJ show interest in the Family business; here it seems he’s drifted into the idea because nothing else he tries—not college, not clubbing—seems to fit. Pre–assassination attempt, Tony spends multiple therapy sessions asking Dr. Melfi38 for advice on what to do with the kid, but she ultimately has no more idea than he does, beyond insisting that Tony and Carmela present a united front to AJ, whatever they ask of him.

  Immediately after Tony disengages from Julianna, we see AJ back at the club, suffering another panic attack while studying his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Where the trigger for Tony’s attacks tends to be meat, for AJ it seems to be trying on a new identity: football star, military school cadet, and now club kid. He doesn’t know what he wants in life, but every change triggers something painful inside his rotten Soprano genes.

  These stories all testify to how hard it is to fight tradition and conditioning, as well as the futility of resisting forces you know deep down overwhelm you, be it sexual orientation (Vito), an aversion to fidelity (Tony), a constitutional inability to be dangerous (AJ), or the rising tide of corporate expansion (the North Ward).

  Tying things up in a non-Sopranos-like bow are the scenes with Patsy Parisi and Burt Gervasi (Artie Pasquale) trying to collect protection money in a neighborhood increasingly occupied by businesses whose parent companies aren’t impressed by street-level strong-arming. A chain pastry shop’s manager tells the mobsters that he doesn’t have a line item for protection money, and that if someone were to throw a brick through their front window, the head office wouldn’t even notice. Patsy’s right: It’s over for the little guy.

  “THE RIDE”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 9

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY ALAN TAYLOR

  A Pair of Socks

  “I was just thinking it’d lost some of its, you know, pop.” —Tony

  St. Elzéar was a French nobleman who died at thirty-eight, and who chose to honor his wife’s lifelong vow of chastity. Which means that Tony, Paulie, Chris, and the guys spend much of “The Ride” paying homage to a man whose life they would do anything to avoid.

  Not that their lives are much better. As Tony and Melfi discuss in therapy, people go on scary amusement park rides because they’re bored, and the gangster lifestyle is essentially one long trip to Great Adventure. You wait on line for an hour, scream your head off for ninety seconds, then go to the back of another line.

  Why do Tony and Chris try to hijack a hijacking? Because it’s something to do, something to punctuate the tedium and hassles of a life that’s a lot less glamorous than they had imagined. The two get drunk on the stolen wine and the retelling of the story (“We’re with the Vipers!”) for a while, but as time passes, the booze and the memories both lose some of their, you know, pop. And then it’s back to another card game at Satriale’s, another collection headache, another day of waiting for the next adventure.

  As Tony puts it to Melfi in describing his post-coma attitude, “Every day is a gift. It’s just . . . does it have to be a pair of socks?”

  At least the old Tony could count on some excitement from his mistresses before those relationships went south. This new Tony doesn’t even have that outlet; while he stands helpless on terra firma, his failed conquest Julianna is too busy laughing her head off on her ride to even notice him.

  Throughout the series’ run, its detractors complained that it glamorized the Mob, even as Chase, Winter, and company did everything in their power to show just how ugly and empty the lives of these characters were, how pathetic and selfish beneath the bravado. This one makes it plain.

  Paulie Walnuts is not a man to be admired. He’s a whiny cheapskate with a raging sense of entitlement. Even the other wiseguys can’t stand him, and when his stinginess with the festival rides endangers kids, it gives them a long-desired excuse to shun him. Deservedly treated as an outcast and facing his own mortality with a prostate cancer scare, the only person he can turn to is the Lawrence Welk–loving adoptive mother whom he had cursed out and abandoned.

  Then there’s Christopher. Aside from a gift for attracting beautiful women with minimal self-esteem, he has nothing going for him. His Hollywood dreams will never lead anywhere, his position in the Family came from nepotism, and even without people like Tony goading him, he’ll never have the discipline to stay sober for long. And by ratting out Adriana—which we finally see in flashback via a deleted scene from season five’s “Long Term Parking”—he not only murdered the woman of his dreams, but has become so obsessed with her that the memory of her life and death seems destined to destroy him, whether through his own self-sabotage or Carmela’s growing suspicion over Ade’s fate.

  A lot of major events happen in this episode—Christopher marries pregnant girlfriend Kelli (Cara Buono39) and falls off the wagon again, Tony and Phil cut Johnny out of the first of what will clearly be many future secret deals (eventually leaving Johnny, like Junior, boss in name only), Liz La Cerva (Patty McCormack) tells Carmela what she believes really happened to her daughter—but they’re presented casually, as if these people are so bored with the business they have chosen that they can’t even recognize momentous events right in front of them.

  We meet Kelli only moments before she and Christopher get married.40 While the series sometimes fumbles character introductions, we don’t need to know much about Kelli, save that she’s a replacement Adriana—less tacky with the makeup and nails, but seemingly more pliant, more submissive to her man and his moods. She’s Adriana with most of her decency but without the fire that made Adriana so special and uniquely lovable: the Adriana Chris didn’t know that he didn’t really want.

  All these characters are on a ride, all right, but it’s not a roller-coaster with dips and curves and loops. It’s the airport baggage carousel. They just keep going around in circles, seeing the same disappointed faces as they pass, waiting for someone or something to take them somewhere interesting. Someday that ride’s going to crash like those teacups at the St. Elzéar feast, and when it does, the damage is going to be a lot worse than a kid with a bloody mouth.

  “MOE ’N JOE”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 10

  WRITTEN BY MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY STEVE SHILL

  The Totality of Vito

  “I’ll take it.” —Johnny Sack

  And now, the end is near. Vito has lived free long enough, and now he wants to die.

  The man is driving back to a place where all his old friends want to kill him, guzzling gin and listening to “My Way” on an endless loop. This is what you call a suicide mission. It’s a much longer and more elaborate ver
sion of Eugene Pontecorvo tying a rope to a rafter in the basement—a self-contained, single episode story that in retrospect prefigured nearly every important moment of this season, but the tragedy of Vito most poignantly. And if you’re wondering why Vito would bother killing that stubborn New Englander to escape the cops, it’s simple: He’s ready to die, but he wants to do it his way.

  Vito’s not the only one facing an end. In the space of one deceptively busy hour, Johnny Sack pleads guilty, Tony crushes Carmela’s dreams of independence, Paulie reveals that he’s battling cancer, Meadow edges closer to dumping Finn, and Tony finally makes peace with Janice’s role in his life.

  David Chase and company have been using the show’s dwindling number of episodes to give each of their characters a few more moments at center stage before that final curtain. Three episodes ago, Artie got another star turn; the one after that, AJ. In “Moe ’N Joe,” that curtain begins falling hard on Johnny, who’s been disintegrating before our eyes.

  Chase has hired a lot of acting diamonds in the rough, and Vince Curatola has shined brightest. A bit player in the first two seasons, he would become an essential part of the show, and it’s painful to watch him portray how completely the Feds have broken Johnny. It’s a masterful portrait of a once-powerful man who’s had everything taken from him except his anger and sense of entitlement; now even that fire is dying. Johnny has smarts, a temper, and a love of family like Tony, but he’s also what Tony aspires to be. He’s the archetypal gangster, running New York and not New Jersey, dressed to the nines, always clutching his cigarette, calculating and ruthless in ways Tony can only occasionally be. Even a few episodes back, Johnny would’ve gone nuclear if someone tried to change the terms of a deal as Tony keeps doing in this episode. Now, he just shrugs it off.

  To paraphrase Phil Leotardo, if the Feds can make Johnny Sack commit the cardinal sin of going on record about the existence of La Cosa Nostra, what can they make Tony do?

  But rage, followed by resignation, is the mode of the hour. Johnny has fought and fought, only to realize he has no choice but to do whatever the Feds demand. Carmela earned every penny Tony gave her for the spec house (and then some), yet when he blows off meeting the building inspector who can keep construction moving forward—out of petty irritation that he’s forced into awkward, rage-inducing small talk with Meadow (who objects to Tony’s suggestion that she and Finn have been “living in sin”) because Carm isn’t home—she has no choice but to swallow her anger, even as she continues to enviously note the independence Angie Bonpensiero has achieved while running her body shop.

  Tony’s more full of anger than anyone this time out, not only over the Meadow argument, but a source of much older familial irritation: the older sister who always belittled him, then ran away and left him to care for their mother, then came home to seize Livia’s house, car, and domineering position in the biological family. Though Janice has superficially changed from her debut, all her chameleon moves still serve the same needy behavior that persistently has her brother questioning her motives. “Janice only does acts of Janice,” Tony insists. At the end of a particularly raw therapy session with Melfi, he snarls, “She took off. She laughed at all this shit. Then the trip’s over and she’s back and she’s one of us. And she wants her piece. Well, let me tell you, she gets nothing! ‘Cause I got the scars! So it’s mine!”

  Yet the same feelings of familial obligation ultimately push Tony to do an act of Janice himself, by agreeing to negotiate a deal on Johnny’s behalf41 in exchange for Johnny selling his McMansion to Bobby and Janice at an absurdly reduced price. It’s a brotherly gesture so grand and unexpected, it cuts through all Janice’s usual defenses and con artist personae. “Who knows what goes on in my head?” she weeps. (Carmela, baffled by this outburst, asks what’s the matter. “She’s happy—about the house,” a resigned Tony explains, understanding his sister’s moods better than his wife ever could.)

  The allocution renders Johnny persona non grata within the Mob, and the plea deal strips away most of the fortune he spent a lifetime building for Ginny and his girls. But it feels to him like the only choice he has left, in the same way Vito decides to abandon the Gay Heaven of Dartford to go on his booze- and Sinatra-fueled suicide run back to Essex County.

  The relationship with Jim is still mostly idyllic, at times even absurdly so: as Jim slips behind Vito in bed, we cut to one of Bacala’s model trains going through a tunnel, like the famous last shot of North by Northwest. But Jim and the other people of Dartford ultimately don’t accept the totality of Vito any more than the Jersey wiseguys did. They accept the gay man with an eye for antiques and a taste for johnny cakes. But the guy with the Mob DNA is still there, too. The urges to drink, gamble, and mess around are too great, and Dartford is not only too sleepy a community for his appetites, but it’s one where this former no-work job holder is expected to put in an honest day’s labor.

  Vito’s internal monologue while playing handyman—agonizing over the slow passage of time even as he tries to avoid checking his watch—is, like much of the Dartford interlude, a stylistic departure for the series, but also the most efficient way to get across how temperamentally unsuited he is to the life he’d have to lead if he remained. Much as he may care for Jim and appreciate being able to live as an openly gay man, he knows he’d die a different death if he stayed. So, like Johnny and Tony and Carmela in this hour, he gives in to the inevitable, pointing his car toward Jersey and whatever fate awaits him.

  “COLD STONES”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 11

  WRITTEN BY DIANE FROLOV & ANDREW SCHNEIDER AND DAVID CHASE

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  City of Lights

  “He came out of the coma for a minute, and he said, ‘Who am I? Where am I going?’ At the time I didn’t know what he meant. But coming here, I feel the same way.” —Carmela

  Much of “Cold Stones” is spent contrasting Carmela and Rosalie’s Parisian vacation with the escalating New York–New Jersey tensions. It is a tale of two cities, told in edits: Carm looks at a sculpture of a beautiful woman, and we cut to someone scraping bird splutz off the Bing sign; she looks at a Virgin Mary statue, and we see Tony getting a happy ending from a stripper;42 she snaps a picture of a neon pig restaurant sign, and suddenly there’s Murmur telling a dirty joke with a pig as the punch line.

  Carmela is overwhelmed by both the beauty of Paris and how much more history everything has there versus North Caldwell. “This city is so old,” she tells Roe during a sightseeing trip. “You think about all the people who have lived here, generation after generation, hundreds and hundreds of years, all those lives. God, it’s so sad. I mean, it isn’t sad, I don’t know. It just makes you think—just makes you look at yourself differently.”

  History is at the heart of the entire hour, which features more callbacks to past episodes than any other in the run of the series: chopping up bodies at Satriale’s, AJ’s nihilist phase, Carm and Roe’s aborted trip to Italy, Mr. Wegler’s book about Abelard and Heloise, Richie Aprile’s gay son, Tony’s coma, and the deaths of Jackie, Jackie Jr., and poor Cosette and Adriana, who appear to Carmela in a dream.

  Like Tony in “Funhouse” and “The Test Dream,” Carmela has to travel to accept a truth that’s long been staring her in the face: as the French policeman in the dream puts it while nodding toward Ade, “Your friend? Somebody needs to tell her she’s dead.” And like the alternate Tony in Costa Mesa, she looks out her hotel room and sees a beacon, this time for the Eiffel Tower instead of the house where Tony B wanted to send our Tony.

  The trip is both dream and nightmare for Carm. She feels insignificant in this beautiful and ancient place. And as Rosalie laments after Carm brings up the deaths of her husband and son during dinner,43 she can’t help bringing New Jersey to the City of Lights. She’s getting closer to accepting the truth about Ade, as well as her own complicity in evil for comfort’s sake. But the stunning vistas can’t heal the sickness inside her.


  Those sharp cuts from the majesty of Paris to the muck of Essex County are about more than just sick humor. They show the roots of Carmela’s unease. The Jersey violence ranks with the show’s ugliest, particularly the gruesome sequence where Phil and his goons murder Vito, torturing him to death while he’s bound and gagged44 and leaving a pool cue jammed up his anus to remove any doubt as to why he was murdered. The murder is an especially theatrical production by Phil, not only with the pool cue, but with Phil literally coming out of a closet to let Vito know just how screwed he is.45 But Vito’s fate is left to our disturbed imaginations, whereas the retaliatory murder of New York wiseguy Fat Dom Gamiello (Tony Cucci) by Carlo and Silvio gets play-by-play scrutiny. Tony’s two top guys murder Fat Dom with pork store implements after Dom makes one taunt too many,46 while also implying that the homophobic Carlo shares Vito’s orientation.