The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Like most impulse killings in the series, it’s chaotic, bordering on slapstick—Sil brains Fat Dom with a handheld vacuum, then leaps on his back—while also illustrating just what a mess Tony’s entire Family is in now. Phil is powerful enough that he can brazenly murder a New Jersey Mob captain—a fugitive pariah, but still—and turn his corpse into an object lesson without fearing retaliation. Sil and Carlo are able to murder Fat Dom, but only by complete surprise (and Dom makes a better accounting of himself than you’d expect), and New Jersey is so beholden to New York that the body immediately has to be chopped up, Richie-style. Tony doesn’t know what those two did, but he knows. And more importantly, he knows exactly how deep he’s in now. What’s the first thing he does after performing mental calculus over why Sil wouldn’t let him into Satriale’s and what that means? He calls a construction buddy to get AJ a job, because he fears he may not have much time left to straighten out his reckless, insubordinate son.47

  The sins of the past are catching up with everyone, and the future is cloudy at best. Carmela travels to Paris because with Meadow moving out48 and her spec house business in ruins, she feels there’s nothing to do at home. Melfi asks Tony how he wants to live his life, and he changes the subject because he can’t imagine what he might want—or whether he’ll be around to get it. We know the show is ending, but suddenly it feels as if the characters know it, too.

  Realizing how big she felt in Jersey and how small in Paris, Carmela has an epiphany that she shares with Rosalie: “We worry so much. Sometimes it feels like that’s all we do, but in the end it just gets washed away.” When she goes home, one of the first things we see her do is take a load of laundry downstairs, to the very spot where Christopher ratted Adriana out to Tony. In the end, it all gets washed away, from the dirt on the clothes to the men and women murdered in unspeakable fashion. This, all of this, will someday be forgotten.

  “KAISHA”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 12

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER AND DAVID CHASE AND MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY ALAN TAYLOR

  Least She’s Catholic

  “I got a guy.” —Tony

  “And I got a job.” —AJ

  At times, “Kaisha” functions exactly like a Sopranos season finale would.49 It opens with a tribute to the late John Patterson, who directed the five previous season-enders. It closes, as most prior finales have, on a scene of the Soprano clan celebrating together. It’s bookended by a Rolling Stones song (“Moonlight Mile”), just as season two’s “Funhouse” used the Stones’ “Thru and Thru” as a recurring motif, and as season five’s “All Due Respect” used Van Morrison’s “Glad Tidings.”

  Overall, though, “Kaisha” feels more like one of those episodes the series occasionally pulled out of the oven too soon at mid-season. Other than shelving the building tensions with New York50—and, in a deliberately anticlimactic Sopranos fashion, evoking the ends of seasons three and four, with Phil backing off after barely surviving a heart attack—it’s not particularly interested in resolving various arcs, and largely retreads familiar character and thematic ground. Like the episode’s title character—a fictional black girlfriend Christopher invents to avoid confessing that he and Julianna Skiff have been having an affair behind Tony’s back—it seems to exist more as a promising idea than fully formed accomplishment.

  Nowhere is this more obvious than in watching Christopher and Julianna inexorably pull each other off the wagon. Where previous episodes about Christopher’s drug addiction managed to establish the depths of the problem without wallowing in it, this bender creates the illusion that we’re sober people stuck in the room with these two, watching them get high and incoherent in real time. That Christopher’s doing it with a would-be conquest of Tony’s—payback, intentional or not, for what he believes happened between Tony and Adriana in “Irregular Around the Margins”—livens things up a bit in the light it sheds on the fraying relationship between mentor and protégé, but it still feels like a rehash, and not one that holds up to repeat dramatization as other Sopranos narrative loops have.

  At one point the two addicts go to see Vertigo, and we’re presented with a Hitchcock-ian double exposure of the two of them in the theater and getting high in Julianna’s apartment. Vertigo is about a man trying to turn one woman into another, desperately attempting to redo a tragic event with a happy ending, to set the terms of a phenomenon no one can control: mortality. Kelli’s no Adriana, and neither is Julianna, even if their names rhyme.

  The injection of Vertigo into an episode featuring Julianna also reminds us of how subconscious repetitive drives have dictated much of Tony’s sex life since we first met him. If Julianna is a re-creation of women the show has featured in the past, they’re ones Tony has slept with (or tried to). Tony even acknowledges this tendency to Melfi when he vents about Christopher succeeding with Julianna (or so he thinks) where he failed. “You know what I been realizing: these women, they’re all sort of the same,” he admits, folding Melfi, Gloria, and Julianna under the same umbrella of “dark complexion, smart, they smell a little bit of money.”

  Melfi sees Tony’s response to the affair—resigned rather than vengeful—as a sign of his progress, on top of his reluctance to sleep with Julianna in the first place. But the latter was at least as much a matter of biology as psychology. And Tony’s unimpressed by the idea that he’s getting better, suggesting that this lingering attraction to the good doctor is the only positive of their relationship at this stage. “Probably the reason I still come here,” he shrugs, “[is] to hang out with you—‘cause nothing really changes with the therapy part.”

  That sense of simply finding ways to fill time hangs over nearly all of “Kaisha.” War with New York is averted only by Phil’s heart attack and Tony’s attempt to impart the lessons of his own hospitalization to his angry Brooklyn counterpart. And the spec house project comes back to life only so Tony can distract Carmela from investigating Adriana’s disappearance. (Tony to Sil: “For all our sakes, my wife needs a career.”)

  The only one to break the cycle is, of all people, AJ. Pressed by Tony into a Mob-affiliated construction job, he takes his own stint with a hard hat more seriously than Finn ever did, and in the process catches the eye of job site receptionist Blanca (Dania Ramirez), a beautiful single mom. Her affections seem to do more to kick-start AJ’s maturity than any of the tough love gambits Tony and Carmela have tried, and if he’s too privileged to fully appreciate the kind of life Blanca has lived, his heart finally seems to be in the right place, as we see when he bribes a group of neighborhood loudmouths with his expensive bicycle so they’ll leave and quit waking up Blanca’s little boy Hector.

  This newly responsible version of their son proves to be a monkey’s paw situation to Tony and especially Carmela, who wanted AJ to start taking life seriously, but doesn’t approve of the root cause of the change, complaining to Tony at the season-ending Christmas party, “She’s ten years older than him, and she’s Puerto Rican?”

  “Dominican, maybe,” Tony shrugs. “Least she’s Catholic.”

  In that way, AJ’s situation isn’t that different from that of Tony’s unofficial other son Christopher, who is also struggling to get better, while being dumped on for the methods he uses along the way. The wiseguys all mock Christopher’s twelve-step activities, which only leaves him more isolated and more inclined to seek the comfort of someone like Julianna,51 while the more Tony and Carmela look down on Blanca and Hector, the more likely AJ seems to prefer their company to those of his parents.

  In the summer of 2006, when fans knew they wouldn’t get more episodes until the following year, “Kaisha” felt exasperating. As part of a modern binge, it still feels like filler, but at least now a viewer can move instantly on to one of the great stretch runs any TV series has ever had.

  * * *

  1 The episode wrings several dark laughs from Agent Sanseverino’s increasingly gloomy mood. First she was Adriana’s handler, and even she has
to know by now that Ade’s pushing up daisies. Then she’s put in charge of Ray Curto, and he kacks right in front of her (just as he’s finally starting to provide useful intel, after years of stringing previous handlers along). By the time she’s introduced to Eugene, she may as well be wearing a black robe and carrying a scythe. This is the character’s final appearance, so we have to imagine her response to learning of Eugene’s suicide, but it probably involves an exasperated sigh and a sentiment like, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  2 More disorientation: the meta touch of having Agent Harris’s new partner Ron Goddard (Michael Kelly) paraphrase H. L. Mencken (“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public”), followed by an ailing Harris (who picked up an intestinal parasite on assignment overseas) lunging from the car and puking on the sidewalk. It’s as if show is admitting that it’s on the verge of getting sick of itself.

  3 And even that sight gag loses its punch here, with Vito considerably svelter after actor Joseph Gannascoli lost a significant amount of weight between seasons.

  4 This line—the whole Costa Mesa adventure, in fact—was inspired by something longtime Sopranos director John Patterson mysteriously said while hospitalized and dying of cancer in between production of seasons five and six.

  5 The adjective “orange” is loaded with associations for Sopranos viewers. On an emergency preparedness chart, it’s one level below red, the color typically indicating the worst conditions, and that happens to be the color of fire and most modern representations of Satan (when he’s not pitch-black). Also, the Godfather trilogy has an entire mythology built around oranges, which usually herald an impending death or comment on greed and arrogance.

  6 Vito, projecting about his friend’s motivation for killing himself: “Maybe he was a homo, felt there was no one he could talk to about it. That happens, too.”

  7 AJ also hurls out a perfectly Livia-esque “Poor you!” in the middle of an argument with Meadow about hybrid cars.

  8 Bonus credit to Michael Imperioli, who looks nearly as devastated as Christopher wraps his arms around Carmela to both show his support and find comfort over what he thinks is the impending loss of his uncle and mentor.

  9 We learn that Vito and Phil Leotardo are related via Vito’s wife Marie (played by Elizabeth Bracco, Lorraine’s sister), a familial connection no doubt emboldening Vito’s talk of insurrection.

  10 Christopher’s plans provide an opportunity for the show to bring back poor JT Dolan, who’s pressed into writing the Cleaver screenplay in exchange for the erasure of his debts.

  11 Legendary character actor Holbrook was yet another Sopranos guest best known for his work in gritty ’70s cinema, most famously for portraying Deep Throat in All the President’s Men.

  12 If Costa Mesa was just a product of Tony’s unconscious mind, his childhood love of Kung Fu might explain the presence of bald monks as opponents of Kevin Finnerty.

  13 The subplot that gives the episode its title involves Bacala offering to boost the career prospects of Da Lux’s sidekick Marvin, played by Naughty By Nature front man Anthony “Treach” Criss, by shooting him in the leg to boost his street cred. This is played for broad laughs, as Bacala’s usual expert marksmanship goes awry and he hits Marvin in the buttocks.

  14 Carmela’s behavior in the episode also shows that people can change, as she does something very out of character by warning Tony about Vito, when usually she’s been content to stay as far out of her husband’s business as possible while enjoying the spoils. Perhaps confessing to Dr. Melfi in “Mayham” that she had no illusions about Tony’s career—and that she was attracted to that part of him in the first place—encouraged her to stop playing Kay Corleone and aspire for a moment to Lady Macbeth?

  15 In the very first episode of the Sopranos, Tony and Carmela’s marriage is introduced with a scene of the two of them in the kitchen, Carmela pressing him to commit to finishing work early and intimating that he’d better not stay out with his mistress while Tony’s head is buried in a book. It’s about birds. Carmela gets his attention by calling him “birdman.”

  16 Though Joseph Gannascoli sometimes seems to struggle with the physical facts of Vito’s homosexuality, the discomfort suits this moment in Vito’s life, and something authentic and surprisingly sweet comes through in his performance—along with torment.

  17 When Tony leaves the hospital, he hears church bells ringing.

  18 An oblique Godfather reference, perhaps: the episode-ending song is “Every Day of the Week” by The Students, which runs through the names of the days in the proper order, rather than Apollonia’s, “Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, Saturday.”

  19 When Carmela picks up the Star-Ledger from the end of the driveway (sparing Tony the long walk in his condition), she sees a banner headline about Junior: “Cushy Psych Lock-Up for ‘Don Squirrel-Leone.’”

  20 Johnny’s other daughter Catherine is played by Cristin Milioti, who would soon be a star of Broadway (Once) and television (she wound up as the title character on How I Met Your Mother).

  21 Tony, returning to the good doctor’s care, again makes her laugh deeply by opening their first session of the episode with, “So let me ask you right off, is there any chance of a mercy fuck?”

  22 Kevin Finnerty sold defective heating units, we were told.

  23 The Dartford scenes were filmed in Boonton, New Jersey, a quiet suburb with a picturesque main street on a hill. In The Sopranos universe, Jackie Jr. was hiding out in the (wholly fictional) Boonton projects when he was shot—by Vito.

  24 This closing shot also harkens back to many images on the show that feel like commentary on the show’s mix of high and low art, starting with the pilot’s opening scene in Melfi’s waiting room. Vito, a tacky gangster who steals and kills, has an instinctive discerning eye.

  25 With four of the show’s best writers getting script credit, you knew this one was going to bring the funny, and it delivered. Among the laughs: Christopher and Tony separately insisting they always knew Vito’s secret, Tony’s panic over whether Melfi believed he slept with men in jail, Paulie’s disgusted reaction to the full Vito story (“How much more betrayal can I take?”), and Christopher rationalizing that his Arab clients can’t be terrorists because one of them owns a springer spaniel.

  26 Remember all that talk of dinosaurs and birds in this season’s “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh”?

  27 In parallel, we see Meadow working a pro bono case with an Afghan family facing a similar situation, having escaped the rules of one society for another that’s not as free as it claims to be.

  28 Not only is Finn shanghaied into testifying at the pork store, but he and Meadow now seem utterly miserable together. Their engagement was prompted in part by Finn’s desire to insulate himself from Vito; with Vito now persona non grata in the Tri-State Area, the strongest bond these two kids had left has been dissolved.

  29 Loosely mirroring the Soprano marriage, the two reconciled between seasons five and six.

  30 Also discussed by the creative team for this role, per Sopranos casting associate Meredith Tucker: Michael Douglas, Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin, and Michael Gambon.

  31 Kevin Gable’s friend Duffy on Kevin Can Wait; one of those character actors with a tough guy face, a cocky grin, the East Coast bona fides to play a wide variety of character roles, and a résumé dating all the way back to The Equalizer.

  32 The show considered several candidates to be the famous old lady Christopher punched, and at one point the script had Little Carmine singing the praises of Dame Maggie Smith’s work in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Bacall works perfectly, though, because she represents a very specific kind of old Hollywood glamour and toughness that would be particularly appealing to Christopher. Also, she’s a great sport to endure such on-screen mortification in her eighties.

  33 Also doing a lot of plane travel: the two Naples hitmen Tony brings over to take out Rusty Millio. On the trip bac
k to Italy—seated opposite the Naples man David Chase played back in season two’s “Commendatori”—the two marvel at how cheaply, thanks to the weak U.S. dollar, they were able to buy gifts for home, like a Mont Blanc pen. To them, the things that make Christopher sweat and despair are cheap trinkets.

  34 Sirk’s 1959 classic Imitation of Life, about an white aspiring actress who befriends an African American widow whose daughter tries to pass for white as a teenager, plays on the Spatafores’ TV after the Sacrimoni wedding.

  35 Even a few years after she left her ER role as heroic nurse Carol Hathaway, Margulies was still among the most famous actresses on television when The Sopranos cast her. Julianna Skiff isn’t exactly her playing against type (Carol had her problems, too), but Tony’s world was so much grubbier and meaner than the well-meaning halls of County General Hospital that it was startling to see her pop up in it.

  36 Piazza would later play legendary gangster Lucky Luciano on Sopranos writer Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire.

  37 Like Fredo in the first two Godfather films, a man whom others see as worthless except for his connections to power.

  38 We get one of our longer and more amusing Melfi–Kupferberg scenes in this one, as she rightly scolds him for always trying to change the subject to Patient X no matter what she’s interested in. (“I’m talking about my father, Elliot,” she insists when he brings up Tony again. “I thought you were done,” he shrugs.) Elliot cares about her as a patient and as a friend, but he’s even more of an excited voyeur about the Mob drama than Melfi was when the series began.

  39 Of the handful of Sopranos actors Matthew Weiner brought over to Mad Men, Buono wound up with by far the biggest role, as the eloquent and refined psychologist Dr. Faye Miller, who confesses to Don Draper that her father was “a two-bit gangster.” In terms of tone and themes, Tony Soprano fathered everybody on that series, as well as on Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire, Todd Kessler’s Damages, the Edie Falco–starrer Nurse Jackie, and countless other series about sympathetic antiheroes.