Vito recants
If you bought one of Joseph R. Gannascoli's "To Die For" pool cues, it'll probably be worth a fortune someday as a collector's item: The company has just taken them out of production.
I'm calling it: brain in left-corner pocket
Remember Vito, Tony Soprano's gay capo who came to an end unfortunate even by the standards of 
The Sopranos? (It involved a pool cue, in case the Memorably Gruesome Deaths portion of your brain is still fully occupied with the sound that SUV made rolling over Phil Leotardo's skull.) The actor who played Vito, Joseph R. Gannascoli, markets a bunch of products -- cigars, sauces, olive oil -- under the brand "To Die For." And in a truly regrettable decision, he last year added a pool cue to the brand. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, as my pal Steve Rothaus reports, is not amused.
David Chase finally clears up the end of 'The Sopranos'
David Chase stopped by the critics' press tour Saturday night to pick up a couple of awards, and he 
offered three helpful hints for understanding that ending of The Sopranos. Here they are, in order:
"Here's another clue for you all -- the Walrus was Pauly."
To critic Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger: "You're from New Jersey, right? Would you tell everybody that is is possible -- in fact, very likely -- to be sitting in a restaurant in New Jersey and everything just stops?'
And finally:
"Somebody said it would be a good idea if we said something about the ending. I really wasn't going to go into it. But I'll just say this ... When I was going to Stanford University graduate film school, 23 years old, I went and saw Planet of the Apes with my wife. When the movie was over I said, 'Wow, so they had a Statue of Liberty, too.' So that's what you're up against."
Not to flog a dead gangster, but...
It's official: 100 percent of premium-cable executives agree that the blackout that ended The Sopranos was a sucky idea. Here's Showtime bosses Robert Greenblatt and Matthew C. Blank replied when a critic asked them how they felt about the ending:
GREENBLATT: My immediate reaction was --
BLANK: Cable's out.
Mailbag: Where's 'Deadwood'?
The readers write:
If you have any opportunity to inquire about the Deadwood mini-movies promised for this
summer, we would appreciate it. I'm sure you have heard how everyone is anticipating more of Deadwood -- in any form.Toni Newton-Townsend
Jacksonville Beach, FL
When HBO canceled Deadwood last year, it promised the story would continue in two movies. Since then, however, HBO has undergone some management changes, Deadwood producer David Milch has gotten wrapped up in the network's surf noir series John From Cincinnati and the movies have pretty much vanished from public discussion -- until Thursday, when TV critics pressed HBO executives on the subject during a Q&A session in Los Angeles. And I'm afraid it doesn't sound good, Toni.
"I spoke to him the other day," added Plepler. "He's obviously exhausted in concluding this project with John. And I think he wants a little time to think about it."
The chances for the movies may hinge in large part on whether HBO decides to pick up John From Cincinnati for a second season. A month ago, that would have been unadulterated good news for Deadwood fans; the mystical and mysterious John was tanking in the ratings despite its heavy promotion during the final weeks of The Sopranos. But Plepler said the show has rallied, with 4.3 million viewers watching the latest episode. "The show is really finding an audience," Plepler said.
It's hard to know how much of that is spin -- Plepler also claimed HBO is happy with the ratings for its phlegmatic sitcom Flight Of The Conchords, which had less than a million viewers last week -- but a renewal for John From Cincinnati seems at least possible, if not exactly likely. If the show is picked up, the HBO bosses said, Milch will have to go right back to work writing new episodes, and the chances for the Deadwood movies shrink considerably.
That, by the way, led to one of the most interesting asides during the HBO presentation. A critic, noting that The Sopranos sometimes went a year and a half between seasons, wondered why a renewed John From Cincinnati couldn't be put on hold until at least one of the Deadwood movies is done. Lombardo said, quite firmly, that the long gaps between seasons of HBO series are a thing of the past.
"Waiting a year and a half between shows, I think we've discovered, is probably not ideal for the viewer," he said. "I think viewers have expressed that to us." That's exactly 190 degrees the opposite of what HBO executives used to tell us when we asked why it was taking so damn long to produce another season of The Sopranos. Back then, they claimed, all the complaints about long hiatuses were from TV critics, not viewers, who didn't care. On Thursday, HBO finally admitted the truth: They were willing to put up with just about anything in order to get another season of The Sopranos from perennially reluctant producer David Chase, but those days are done.
Anyway, bottom line on the Deadwood: not so good. When we asked for odds on whether the movies will ever be made, Lombardo dodged: "I'm not a betting guy." Plepler guessed about 50-50, but his voice seemed pained. You want to see Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen again, my suggestion is to buy the DVD.
Tales of Marilyn and Tony
For what shall it profit a man if he gains a big long limo ride...
Vincent Curatolo, who played John Sack in The Sopranos, appeared in Hillary Clinton's hilarious political ad spoofing the series finale, the only cast member to do so. So what was it? Her position on Iraq? Her let's-get-tough-with-Big-Pharma stance? Well...
"I got a phone call the evening before, Saturday evening, from one of our directors on The Sopranos, Allen Coulter, who said that a friend of his, a director, was doing something for the Hillary campaign, and they wanted one of The Sopranos stars," Curatolo said on Neil Cavuto's Fox News show Wednesday. "I said, well, you know what? Have them send a big, long car tomorrow morning, and we will go. I'm in northern New Jersey."
Curatolo, by the way, is the only Sopranos star I'm aware of to go on record saying he didn't like the show's end. "I was a little let down," he told Cavuto. "I wanted a little more closure. I think I would've had Carmela and -- and Tony say something to each other that they have never said to each other all these seasons... I would love for her to have said: 'You know what? Come with me. We're going to move to the mountains. We're done with all this, no more SUVs, no more big house. I love you. You love me."' Jeez, what a wussy. No wonder David Chase had him die in a prison bed instead of getting whacked in some really cool way like Phil Leotardo.
It's official: 'Sopranos' geeks are even more psychotic than Trekkies
Here's an analysis of the final episode of The Sopranos that purports to find evidence of Tony's whacking not only in old Steve Van Zandt records but the comic strip Garfield and even the antitrust breakup of AT&T. (Did you really think those pissants at the Justice Department would have dared to screw around with the phone company? David Chase's fingerprints were all over that one.) This piece was called to my attention by Herald film critic Rene Rodriguez, whose belief in it should explain to you why he's only allowed to write about Will Ferrell and not the fine arts like television.
Monday morning jamook: June 10 on 'The Sopranos'
"Lately," Tony Soprano mused plaintively to the boys in the backroom at the Bing in the very first episode in 1999, "I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end." Eight years later, a lot of viewers have the feeling that they left The Sopranos in the middle after the startling blackout that ended the series finale Sunday.
Guess what? That was exactly the point. Sopranos producer David Chase reasons that life doesn't come tied up with neat little bows, and neither should a TV show that aspires to a reasonable imitation of life. Did Tony look wary and a little bit anxious in that final moment on screen? Well, that's life as a mobster. You never know what's coming through the door: a hit man with a pistol, a prosecutor with an arrest warrant, or a stupid son with a crackbrain scheme to learn Arabic off DVDs and then head to Afghanistan to win hearts and minds. You want to know what really happened in those blacked out eight seconds? The answer is in the old Journey song that Tony played on the jukebox during the final scene, Don't Stop Believing:
Working hard to get my fill
Everybody wants a thrill
Paying anything to roll the dice
Just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on...
That's what happened in the final eight seconds-- life went on. We don't know exactly which way, but we got a rough roadmap during the previous hour:
** The grief that ravaged Tony's sister Janice after her husband Bobby Bacala seemed authentic -- she looked wan and wasted when Tony visited her -- but you could already see her conniving Livia-lite soul starting to mend itself. When she turned down Tony's offer of a pastry with a morbid wisecrack -- "Need to watch my weight. Need to snag another husband" -- it didn't seem entirely like a joke.
** A.J.'s fixation on suicide bombers, like his earlier fascination with Nietzsche and flirtation with junior mobsterhood, turned out to be shallow and short-lived. One minute he was ranting that the American dream has been replaced with bling; the next, he's happily wheeling around in the new Beamer with which Mommy and Daddy have bribed him.
** Paulie Walnuts wasn't the traitor I expected, just the same superstitious fool, fretting that he once had a vision of the Virgin Mary at the Bing (and what marvelous restraint Chase showed in not depicting it in a dream sequence with the Blessed Virgin working the pole) and worrying that a stray cat was the reincarnation of Christopher Moltisanti. Though the cat was a little weird, and the vision of Christopher spending an eternity eating mice has a certain attraction.
** Tony had a sort of reincarnation experience of his own during a family-counseling visit with A.J.'s therapist, whose short skirts and shapely but primly crossed legs certainly recalled Dr. Melfi's. Therapy whore Tony quickly refocused the session from A.J. to himself ("I could never please my mother...") while Carmela rolled her eyes.
In short, little has changed in the world of The Sopranos in eight years. People die, of course -- sometimes in immensely satisfying ways, as Phil Leotardo discovered Sunday night -- but everybody and everything else goes on pretty much the same, older, a little worse for the ware, but only rarely much wiser.
Tony did seem to absorb one lesson. In a visit to Uncle Junior, now warehoused in a seedy mental facility, Tony realized for the first time that Junior wasn't faking his senility. Junior literally had forgotten his own life. "This thing of ours?" murmured Tony, prompting Junior with gangster jargon for the Mafia. "I was involved with that?" replied the confused old man. Everything passes and dies, even The Sopranos.
Final scorecard: One shooting and one skull crushed like an egg by a runaway SUV. And they both happened to the same guy, giving Phil Leotardo the undisputed record for most lurid demise ever on The Sopranos, though for a minute it looked like it wouldn't stand long. But A.J. and his new girlfriend Rhiannon barely escaped being cooked to death in an SUV while having sex. Man, A.J. can't do anything right.
Sunday night's biggest loser: Carmela, maybe. Did you see her face tighten at the casual mention that a local political hack had been indicted for construction flim-flammery? That wouldn't have anything to do with those houses Carmela has been rehabbing, would it? Wouldn't it be ironic if, after some future prison conjugal visit, Tony is the spouse who goes home?
Sunday night's biggest winner: A.J. Not only did he not ship out for Afghanistan or become a fornicating french fry, his parents got him a junior executive deal to work on a Carmine Lupertazzi-financed movie about virtual hookers being murdered on the Internet. My prediction: It will turn out to be The Sopranos movie sequel, and David Chase will wind up working for A.J. Talk about bad karma.
Was that 'The Sopranos" or "The Outer Limits"?
All we were missing was the sonorous baritone of that announcer -- There is nothing wrong with your television set, do not attempt to adjust the picture -- and that blackout that ended The Sopranos 
Sunday night would have been complete. Here's my review of the series finale, and I'll be along towards daylight with the last of my regular Monday-morning blog posts on the show. But right now I want to go play You Keep Me Hanging On by the Vanilla Fudge, the psychedelic slooooooooooowdown of the Supremes' tune, which 40 years ago I think would have been the unanimous selection of America's 20 million teenagers as The Song Least Likely Ever To Be Played On Network Television Unless Someone Slips Acid Into Dick Clark's Clearasil. And yet there it was on The Sopranos, teasing us to Phil Leotardo's unfortunate encounter with an SUV. (I guess Al Gore was right about those things.)
And hey, remember that contest we were running asking you to write your own ending to The Sopranos? Well, here's a story about all the entries. If your name is in it, by the way, we've probably already alerted local mental-health authorities of your whereabouts and relative degree of dangerousness.
Except Carmela will be played by Amy Grant and Tony by Donny Osmond
It occurs to me that you cheapskates who don't have HBO must wonder what all the fascination with The Sopranos is. Well, don't worry; it'll be coming soon to a broadcast TV station near you.
PS: My pal Kim Sartori at CBS Paramount demands she get a shout-out as the one who passed this item along to me. Silly me. I assumed she wouldn't want her bosses to know that she spends all day eating chocolates and browsing YouTube at her desk.
Monday morning jamook: June 3 on 'The Sopranos'
There were all kinds of subtle signs in Sunday night's episode that The Sopranos is down to its final episode. One was the girls at the Bada Bing dancing to the funereal strains of The Doors' When The Music's Over, not exactly your typical stripper bump and grind. Another was the derailment of a model train at Bobby 
Bacala's favorite hobby store, a hint that everything's gone of the tracks. Oh yeah, and the brutal murder of practically everybody Tony knows at the hands of Phil Leotardo's henchmen.
That's an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Leotardo's crew killed Bobby Bacala and shot up Silvio Dante so badly that he was left in a coma. With most of his other senior lieutenants dead by his own hands -- Big Pussy, Ralphie Cifaretto, Christopher Moltisanti, his cousin Tony Blundetto -- Tony's fate may now rest in the dubious hands of Paulie Walnuts. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, no small achievement when writing about an episode that roared along like a freight train.
It opened with Sil's surprise strangulation of one of Tony's men, Burt Gervasi. Seems Burt had warned Sil that he had "misgivings" about Tony's leadership, fostered by rabble-rousing from Leotardo's family. "Measures were taken," Sil assures Tony, but adds: "Burt wasn't speaking for just himself." For Tony, it's just confirmation of a tip he's already gotten from the FBI agent who's always hanging around Satriale's: Leotardo's family is about to launch a sneak attack.
"We gotta move first," Tony decides. Bobby, nodding gravely like he's Winston Churchill delivering history's verdict on Neville Chamberlain, agrees: "With a [bleep] like Phil, appeasement don't work." They decide to bring in buttonmen from Sicily to shoot Leotardo during his regular Friday visit to his Ukrainian mistress. The Sicilians, unfortunately (unless you're some kind of misfit who roots for Leotardo), mistake the mistress' father for Leotardo and wind up killing the wrong guy.
But Leotardo's crew has better luck, They gun down Bobby Bacala while he's buying a new car for his model trains, then hit Sil in the parking lot of the strip club. By nightfall, Tony is lying on a mattress in a safehouse, a rifle clutched to his chest, while Paulie Walnuts and a couple of other members of the crew are downstairs ordering in; no crisis on The Sopranos is ever so severe that it can't be eased by a couple of slices of pizza.
Perhaps because everything moved so quickly, Tony doesn't seem to be wondering how his plan for a first strike went so disastrously wrong. One obvious answer, at least to paranoids and TV critics: Leotardo has a mole in Tony's crew. My nominee is Paulie Walnuts, who in seasons past has made overtures to the New York family now controlled by Leotardo. (It was Paulie who blabbed to New York's then-boss John Sack that the Soprano crew was making wisecracks about his wife's weight.)
Sunday night's show dangled some tantalizing hints about Paulie. He was obviously angered that he hadn't been included in the war council where Tony and the others decide to attack Leotardo; he demanded to know for sure that Tony had ordered the hit; and he was in charge of setting up the abortive ambush of Leotardo. One other clue: When Leotardo announced the Soprano family targets he wanted to strike -- Bobby, Sil and Tony -- one of his men asked if Paulie shouldn't be included on the list. Leotardo brusquely dismissed the idea. Hmmm. I guess I could be mistaken; maybe Phil was just having one of those humanitarian impulses which have struck him so frequently over the years.
In between all the gunplay Sunday, some loose threads were snipped but a couple of others continued to dangle. Uncle Junior's money finally ran out and he got word he'll be kicked out of his expensive nursing home; Tony declined to help. And Dr. Melfi, increasingly convinced that her therapy has simply made Tony a more effectively manipulative sociopath, fired him as a patient. Tony was unconvinced. "I'm chalking this all up to female menopausal situations," he said, injured, then added a line that doubtless made Bob Dylan either beam with pride or blanch in horror: "You don't need a gynecologist to know which way the wind blows."
Speaking of ineffectual shrinks, A.J. was released from the mental hospital where he was committed after a suicide attempt. While there he ran into a friend from his brief college sojourn, a willowy blond named Rhiannon. (You know The Sopranos is winding down when the allusions turn from the 4 Seasons to Fleetwood Mac.) Back at home, the two of them consult websites about suicide bombers, a subject that also fascinates A.J. every time it comes on television. If Paulie Walnuts doesn't do Tony in next week, A.J. might.
Final scorecard: Three bloody gunshot murders -- Leotardo's Russian mistress, her father and Bobby Bacala -- and a near-miss on Sil. And Tony administered a long overdue smacking to A.J. when he greeted the news that his Uncle Bobby was dead and the family would have to go into hiding by whining: "This is really depressing to me."
Sunday night's biggest winner: The arguments for an immigration crackdown. That cheap immigrant labor Tony employed for his attempted hit on Leotardo muffed the job, while Phil's Buy American! tactics paid off.
Honorable mention winner: The conservative Jamestown Foundation. A.J. and Rhiannon were reading up on suicide bombers on its website, and when I checked the site after the show, sure enough there was an article entitled A Report From The Field: Gaging The Impact of Taliban Suicide Bombing.
Sunday night's biggest loser: Ultimately, I'm betting it's going to be Phil Leotardo. The last guy to kill somebody in the Bada Bing parking lot was Ralphie Cifaretto, who beat a stripped to death a couple of seasons ago ("Disrespecting the Bing!" as the scandalized Tony put it) and he wound up losing his head. Nobody disses the Bing.
Honorable mention loser: The ducks, whose flight from Tony's swimming pool eight years triggered his anxiety attack and started us down this long, loopy path. After Melfi kicked him out of her office Sunday, Tony was seen draining and covering the pool. Take that, Freud.
Update: Talk about ripped from the headlines! That Jamestown Foundation web page that A.J. and Rhiannon were reading in Sunday night's episode was a report on suspected al Qaeda nuclear terrorist Adnan Shukrijumah. Though the episode was shot weeks ago, Shukrijumah has emerged as a leading suspect in the plot to attack JFK International. He's all over the front page of Monday's New York Post.
Monday morning jamook: 'The Sopranos' take off Memorial Day
No doubt Tony and the guys went to fly a flag over Lucky Luciano's grave in honor of his work policing the New York waterfront against Axis spies in World War II. They'll be back next week. Meanwhile, while chatting last week with Steve van Zandt, the former E Street Band guitarist who plays family consigliore 
The question seemed daft to van Zandt. "The 4 Seasons were an extraordinarily important part of growing up in New Jersey,'' he said, "particularly if you were Italian. Frankie Valli was the Frank Sinatra of our generation, the classy guy coming out of doo wop. And the records were so polished: Walk Like A Man, Rag Doll, those were beautifully produced. The 4 Seasons sort of reflect The Sopranos sensibility. And now the success of Jersey Boys has been a validation of that to the whole nation." To which I hastily agreed, because everybody on The Sopranos takes aesthetic judgments very seriously, as Christopher Moltisanti certainly learned a couple of weeks ago.
Monday morning jamook: May 20 on 'The Sopranos'
This final season of The Sopranos has been mostly about Tony's nearest and dearest being steadily pared away. Tony's pal John Sack died in prison of cancer, he murdered his protege Christopher Moltisanti, thought seriously about killing his one-time father figure Paulie Walnuts, alienated his old friend and financier Hesh in a spat over money, and got in a savage fistfight with brother-in-law Bobby 
Bacala. In Sunday's episode, the blade cut close to the core: The blowback from Tony's life roared through his family like a gale, endangering his children and threatening to implode his marriage.
AJ's suicide attempt, given his depression since breaking up with his girlfriend Blanca, may not have been exactly surprising, but that didn't make it any less dramatic or harrowing. With the house deserted, AJ tied a plastic bag over his head, weighted himself down with a cinderblock, and threw himself into the deep end of the family swimming pool. Only Tony's unexpected return home for lunch saved him.
AJ was motivated to take the big plunge after listening to his English professor's dramatic recital of W.B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming. (Lucky for AJ the professor wasn't a Wallace Stevens fan; he might have taken a chainsaw to himself.) Written in the aftermath of World War I, The Second Coming includes some chillingly bleak imagery ("What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"), but nearly a century later Yeats' fears that the breakdown of imperial Europe presaged the end of Western civilization seem naive and arrogant -- a description that fits AJ to a T, pardon the patrial pun. In the days before his aquatic adventure, AJ was a fountain of sophomoric cynicism about everything from U.S. foreign policy to food processing. "Twenty years he won't crack a book," scoffs Tony rather accurately, "all the sudden he's the world's foremost authority."
Carmela's reaction to the suicide attempt was, initially, total denial: "He was always so happy," she says of AJ, a fanciful description of a kid who has been a sullen, spoiled little punk from the very first of The Sopranos eight years ago. Her second was to blame Tony's defective genes: "He didn't get it from my family, that's all I'm gonna say." When Tony protests that depression is an illness, Carmela is spitefully dismissive. "You've been playing the depression card until it is worn to shreds," she berates him, "and now you've got our son doing it."
"Card? CARD?" Tony bellows, incredulous. The argument ends with them throwing both curses and objects at one another, and though we've seen it all before, there was a sense Sunday that they've crossed some irretrievable line of mutual contempt.
Tony, by the way, got a more sympathetic hearing from the gang at the Bing. When he admitted AJ's suicide attempt, everybody chimed in to say that, yeah, their kid was a depraved mess, too, sort of a "I'm Spartacus!" of manic depressive disorder. Paulie Walnuts, with no kids of his own to mess up, offered an alternative theory: "Between the mercury in fish alone, it's a wonder there ain't more kids jumping off bridges." Next week, it will probably turn out that Phil Leotardo's New York family has bought off the FDA.
Speaking of Phil Leotardo, his ongoing dispute with Tony over dumping asbestos at his garbage facility has only gotten worse -- and it led to the other threat to one of Tony's children. When Leotardo brushed off Tony's counterproposal to his demand for 25 percent of the action in return for accepting the asbestos, Tony retaliated by suspending other business with Leotardo's crew. Two of Leotardo's captains upped the ante by beating and robbing the foreman of Tony's sanitation company.
Soon after that, one of them -- Coco Cogliano -- made an obscene and somewhat threatening remark to Meadow Soprano during a chance encounter in a Little Italy restaurant. Tony had the last word; in one of the most terrifyingly violent scenes in the show's history, he literally broke Coco's face. Tony was still picking stray teeth out of his cuffs hours later at a meeting with AJ's shrink. If you ask me, we've seen where Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell are headed.
Final scorecard: Two savage beatings, one suicide attempt, and a profoundly disturbing vision supplied by Paulie Walnuts, who described dropping acid while listening to Jerry Vale. Talk about bad trips.
Big winner: The American Association of Orthodontics. Did you see what Tony did to Coco's mouth? It looked like he broke open a pinata full of teeth.
Big loser: Psychiatry. First Dr. Melfi's own shrink, Eliot Kupferburg, warns her of research that therapy not only won't help a sociopath like Tony but may actually make him worse because he can practice new techniques of manipulation on the therapist. Then Carmela dismisses all Tony's talk about depression as an illness as a big bore. And finally, when Dr. Melfi speculates in best Freudian fashion that AJ's suicide attempt may not have been serious but simply "a cry for help...On some level he may have known the rope was too long to keep him submerged," Tony offers a more acute analysis: "Or he could just be a [bleeping] idiot. Historically, that's been the case."
'The Sopranos': Last call
WIN A ZILLION DOLLARS: Well, okay, that's an exaggeration of about $99 gajillion. But honest, we're giving away a set of DVDs of The Sopranos' first six seasons, and we've extended the deadline for the contest to midnight Pacific time on May 18. All you gotta do: Tell me how the show will end. RICO indictments? Shallow graves in the woods? Sexual reassignment surgery for Paulie Walnuts? Email me your idea of how it all will end at ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com
'The Sopranos': Upon further review...
Here's what I wrote in Monday's weekly blog item on The Sopranos:
The episode ends with Tony out in the desert like a wiseguy version version of Carlos Castaneda, watching the sun rise and cackling as he shouts, "I did i!" You can almost hear the faint echo bouncing back: And you got away with it...
But after hearing some dissenting voices from viewers, I rechecked my TiVo recording, and I was 
WIN A ZILLION DOLLARS: Well, okay, that's an exaggeration of about $99 gajillion. But honest, we're giving away a set of DVDs of The Sopranos' first six seasons, and we've extended the deadline for the contest to May 18. All you gotta do: Tell me how the show will end. RICO indictments? Shallow graves in the woods? Sexual reassignment surgery for Paulie Walnuts? Email me your idea of how it all will end at ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com.
Monday morning jamook: May 13 on 'The Sopranos'
Short -- barely 49 minutes -- and anything but sweet, Sunday night's episode of The Sopranos was nonetheless one of the most significant in the show's 10-year run. Like a bolt of lightning over a cemetery that reveals a bony hand digging its way out of a grave, it revealed what creator David Chase regards as the ugly secret of life: God, if he ever existed, has taken the redeye to Vegas. There is no 
justice, there is no karma. You can get away with anything. You can even kill your own son.
No, not AJ. But Tony coldly murdered Christopher Moltisanti, the protege who's been like his son (granted, a lazy, stupid, self-pitying, bullying, racist, heroin-addicted son; but that's family for you) since the first night of The Sopranos. And guess what? The earth did split open to reveal the hellfire below; no cloven hoof plucked Tony up and plunged him headfirst into the drooling sulfurous mouth of Satan. He didn't even get so much as a hard look from Dr. Melfi.
It happened during the show's opening moments. Driving back from a contentious meeting in New York with Phil Leotardo, who is demanding more money after discovering that Tony's illegal dumping at his construction sites contains loads of asbestos, Christopher is fiddling with his CD player going into a curve and nearly crosses the road to hit an oncoming vehicle. Jerking his SUV back the other way, he flips it off a hillside.
Tony, though battered, is okay. But Christopher is immobilized; his ribs were crushed when the airbag deployed, he's choking on his own blood, and he begs Tony to get him out of the driver's seat: A blood test will reveal he's high on cocaine and he'll lose his license. Tony stares at him for a moment, then pinches his nostrils tightly shut. Christopher dies in seconds, his eyes locked on Tony's.
It's the perfect murder. Neither prying cops nor heartbroken Carmela (Christopher was her cousin) will ever figure out that it was anything but an auto accident. Tony's only punishment is having to endure a lot of cloying, hypocritical grief-babble from people like Paulie Walnuts who actually detested Christopher. In a confession to Dr. Melfi that's no less truthful for taking place during a dream, Tony admits: "I'm [bleeping] relieved...The biggest blunder of my career is now gone, and I don't have to be confronted by that fact no more."
Tired of playacting, Tony heads for Las Vegas, purportedly to inform and comfort one of Christopher's old stripper girlfriends. True to form, most of his sympathy is extended in a prone position. He and the girl take some peyote, which initially doesn't seem like a great idea: The first stop on Tony's voyage of psychotropic self-discovery is a toilet bowl, where he can gaze upon his own vomit. (Talk about cheap symbolism.) Later, though, the two of them wander the casino, where Tony repeatedly hits his number at roulette. Karma, it seems, is not a bitch but a party girl. The episode ends with Tony out in the desert like a wiseguy version version of Carlos Castaneda, watching the sun rise and cackling as he shouts, "I did i!" You can almost hear the faint echo bouncing back: And you got away with it...
Final scorecard: One murder and one stroke victim -- Paulie Walnuts' mother keeled over after a visit up to New York from the nursing home to see Jersey Boys. (Another Frankie Valli allusion!) Oh, and one beat-up Somali immigrant kid, knocked from his bicycle when one of AJ's junior mafia pals opened the door of his car without looking. When the kid protest, the whole pack of thuglets, including AJ, jumped him. Later, though, AJ suffers the guilt pangs that eluded his dad. "Can't we all just get along" he asks his shrink. Wonder if there's a medication to treat somebody with delusions that he's starring in a Lifetime show?
Sunday night's biggest winner: Christopher, the hack screenwriter, finally said something that was both trenchant and prescient. Just before his car went off the road, he told Tony: "Life's too short." No kidding.
Sunday night's biggest loser: Paulie, screwed by Christopher one last time. Because the funeral viewings of Paulie's mom and Christopher were scheduled for the same time, hardly anybody showed to console Paulie. "It's a fundamental lack of respect and I'm never gonna [bleeping] forget it," fumes Paulie, who has conveniently forgotten that he was so enraged when he discovered last season that his mother was really his aunt (his real mom was a nun, which in retrospect was a pretty good clue about the whole God-is-dead business) that he threw her TV out a second-story window. Kids.
WIN A ZILLION DOLLARS: Well, okay, that's an exaggeration of about $99 gajillion. But honest, we're giving away a set of DVDs of The Sopranos' first six seasons, and we've extended the deadline for the contest to May 18. All you gotta do: Tell me how the show will end. RICO indictments? Shallow graves in the woods? Sexual reassignment surgery for Paulie Walnuts? Email me your idea of how it all will end at ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com.
Monday morning jamook: May 6 on 'The Sopranos'
Sunday night's episode of The Sopranos not only gave us a road map to the rest of the series, it also clarified who will be the most bereft person in America when the show concludes next month. Not David Chase, who never wanted to do The Sopranos in the first place; not James Gandolfini, who would probably be delighted if he never had to hear another question from reporters and fans about Tony the 
rest of his life; not even Tony's oft-featured morning newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, where the marketing department is doubtless pondering how to exploit the paper's demographic bulge in Wiseguys aged 18-to-49.
Nope, the guy who will be wracked with grief is Frankie Valli, who not only appeared in seven episodes as buttonman Rusty Milio before getting whacked in Season 6, but has sold some old 4 Seasons records to Chase for the soundtrack and even managed to have two episodes named for his songs: Big Girls Don't Cry in Season 2, and Sunday night's Walk Like A Man. Hmmm, wonder if there's a clue hidden there? At the end of the final show, Tony, Carmela and Paulie Walnuts break into a chorus of Let's Hang On! as David Chase announces he's doing one more season after all?
(It's moments like this when I realize my mother was right, I did spend too much time listening to rock and roll records.)
Putting aside Frankie Valli's angst, it now seems inescapable that the conclusion of The Sopranos will be based on the collision of four different story lines: Christopher Moltisanti's increasing alienation from Tony and the rest of the family; Tony's possible brush with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; A.J.'s fledgling ambitions to be a junior wiseguy; and the estrangement between Tony and Phil Leotardo, now boss of the New York family.
The trajectories of all those stories except the last advanced significantly Sunday night. The most dramatic was that of Christopher. Not only did his longtime feud with Paulie Walnuts grow more violent, he fell off the wagon, came close to spilling family secrets to outsiders, and finally committed a senseless murder that will likely be tracked back to him.
The conflict with Paulie Walnuts concerns matters both great (enraged that Paulie's goons are stealing goods from his father-in-law's home improvement store, Christopher throws one of them out a second-story window) and small (Paulie taunts the alcoholic Christopher about refusing to drink or even join him for a prime-rib dinner: "You watching your cholesterol now too?")
Trying to ease the tension, Christopher has a scotch with Paulie, then several, but through a drunken haze the other mobsters look even worse -- like leering gargoyles rather than friends. Christopher lurches over to the apartment of J.T., the screenwriter he befriended in AA and has been abusing and extorting ever since. Christopher, expecting sympathy, starts shouting that he could tell J.T. stories 
about (Tony's murder victims) Ralph Cifaretto and Adriana La Cerva. But when J.T. tries to hush him instead, Christopher whips out a pistol and shoots him in the head.
If Christopher is thinking about blabbing family business (during his tirade to J.T., he actually mentions the FBI's witness protection program longingly), Tony is actually doing. Spotting the two FBI agents who are eternally dogging him having lunch at Satriale's, Tony finally explains what he was gazing at so intently as he drove through a Middle Eastern neighborhood in the April 29 episode: he spotted Ahmed and Muhammad, a couple of Arabs who bought guns and credit cards from Christopher in Season 6. They used to be regulars at the Bing, drinking and whoring around, Tony says. But "a week or so ago
I see them with these other guys, with the headgear and the beard and the whole fundamentalist bit." The agents accept their names and a cell phone number from Tony with interest.
That's not the only thing Tony's got on his mind. A.J., inconsolable over being dumped by his fiance-for-
a-day Blanca, has quit his job and spends most of his time lying on the couch watching TV. (I looked carefully for the obvious HBO cross-promotion, but there was no sign of Rome.) Carmela's attempt to comfort him with mom-phorisms is unsuccessful: Told that "it's better to have loved and lost," A.J screeches "What?!!!'' Too bad she didn't try, "If you love someone, set them free. If they don't come back to you..." which in Sopranos logic would have ended "....hunt them down and kill them."
Tony's only-slightly-more-plausible suggestion to A.J. to engage in a sex act still technically illegal in many states is no more successful. Devastated, Tony rages to Dr. Melfi that all her therapy hasn't prevented her from passing his chronic depression along to A.J. "It's in his blood, this miserable [bleepin'] existence. My rotten [bleepin'] putrid genes have infected my son's soul," he says, uncharacteristically near tears. "That's my gift to my son."
Tony's more right than he can possibly know. A.J., moping around at a party given by the college-kid sons of some other mobsters, is drawn along when they go off to collect from a deadbeat who owes them money from their campus gambling operation. He helps hold down the boy while the others mutilate him. And suddenly A.J., like his old man, has found purpose in life.
Final scorecard: One murder, though in Hollywood screenwriters are generally regarded as something less than fully human. (Old joke: Didja hear about the actress who was so dumb she slept with the screenwriter?) One broken back. One sulfuric acid pedicure. In other words, for The Sopranos, a peaceful weekend.
The real carnage was emotional. From Christopher's father-in-law, whose innocent purchase of some cut-rate power tools from his son-in-law has inadvertently drawn him into the concentric circles of mob violence and corruption, to the hellbound in a hurry A.J., everybody touched by Tony and his men comes away damaged or dead. Tony's view of his own world has a simple but diamond clarity: "Everything turns to [bleep]."
Sunday night's biggest winner: The landscaper who's going to get the $40,000 job repairing Christopher's front yard, which looked like a moonscape after Paula Walnuts did a few donuts there in retaliation for his guy being tossed out the window.
Sunday night's biggest loser: Law & Order, which will be one episode short this season: J.T. was trying to finish a script for the show when Christopher shot him. You think Dick Wolf will send McCoy and Van Buren after Christoper?
WIN A ZILLION DOLLARS: Well, okay, that's an exaggeration of about $99 gajillion. But honest, we're giving away a set of DVDs of The Sopranos' first six seasons, and we've extended the deadline for the contest to May 18. All you gotta do: Tell me how the show will end. RICO indictments? Shallow graves in the woods? Sexual reassignment surgery for Paulie Walnuts? Email me your idea of how it all will end at ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com.
Monday morning jamook: April 29 on 'The Sopranos'
If you're one of those people who gets bored with The Sopranos when 30 minutes go by without a decapitation or disembowelment, then Sunday night's episode was an hour in hell. But if you're interested in character development or understand that stories advance in stages, rather than hopscotching between murders, then it was a satisfying night.
The episode's main theme and major revelation are established in the opening scene in a casino, where Tony has just a roulette number straight up and won a small fortune. He lets his chips ride on the number for another spin, and of course loses everything. That same scene is played out several times over the course of the episode, with Tony losing huge bets on horse races, harness races and football games. How huge? It turns out gambling debts have forced Tony to borrow $200,000 from his own loanshark, Hesh, at an interest rate (1.5 percent a week) that would make Alan Greenspan drool. Even paying the $3,000 a week vig is a strain on Tony's finances.
The debt has not only strained his relations with Hesh, who has grown frankly fearful at Tony's testiness over the payments (‘‘Get them cornered," he observes of his Mafia pals, "you're getting nothing more than an animal... At what point is it cheaper for him to settle it another way?") but complicates other business, both Family and family.
Some of it is poignant, or at least as poignant as anything ever gets in the wolfish world of The Sopranos. Last season's homophobic murder of uncloseted Soprano captain Vito Spatafore has unhinged his young son Vito Jr., who learned that his father was not a heroic spy as family legend had it but a gay mobster instead. Now a goth kid whose hobbies are toppling tombstones and crucifying cats, Vito Jr. has his mother at wit's end, and she asks Tony for $100,000 to relocate the family and start over.
Tony, deeply touched "Apparently Vito Jr.'s a wack job," he tells his consigliore Silvio). tries to dodge the request by passing it along to New York boss Phil Leotardo, who not is related to Vito's widow Marie but is also the one who had him killed. Phil instead offers his inimitable services as a counselor. Meeting Vito Jr., who's in full goth uniform -- black clothing, black mascara, black fingernail polish and black lipstick -- Phil starts the conversation by noting that "You look like a Puerto Rican whore." It's all downhill from there.
Tony's attempt to get through to Vito Jr. by mentioning his dad is no more successful. ‘‘We were friends, you know?" Tony says. "Butt buddies?" shoots back Vito Jr., striking home by unknowingly aping the homophobic jeers that Tony and his own men privately threw around about Vito Sr. It's a pyrrhic victory: Tony, lowballing Marie Spatafore's request, puts up $18,000 to send Vito Jr. to one of those boot camps for delinquents in Idaho. (Cheer up, kid, it could have been worse: You might have wound up in Bay County.)
If the episode with Vito Jr. is a snapshot that offers a glimpse of Tony's reptilian heart, the argument that follows between Tony and Carmela is an X-ray of his soul. Carmela has finally sold the house she remodeled, to a young couple expecting their first child. By cutting costs on construction materials and bribing her way through the permit process, she's turned a cool $600,000 profit.
Tony wants to bet the money on a football game. When Carmela objects, Tony offers an amendment: "Just my half." To Tony, even his own family is an engine for economic exploitation, foot soldiers who owe him a taste. Carmela's protest that the house deal was all hers enrages him. Shaking her like one of his punks at the Bing, he shouts: "The fact is you're a [bleepy] businesswoman who built a piece of [bleep] house that's gonna cave in and kill that [bleepin'] unborn baby any day." Carmela's riposte -- hitting him with a ceramic gimcrack -- doesn't bely the essential truth of what he's said. Tony and Carmela are two sides of the same coin, and as The Sopranos moves into its end game, the naked
greed at their core is burning through everything else.
Final scorecard: No killings and no fistfights; one revenge defecation. That stray plot line about Islamic terrorism bobbed up again, with Tony staring intently as his driver takes him through a Muslim neighborhood, his gaze intense but unreadable. And if there was any doubt that Tony and Phil Leotardo are on a collision course, Tony's anger about the Spatafore situation -- a problem, as far as he's concerned, that Phil created and now will not help solve -- should lay it to rest.
Sunday night's biggest winner: Vito Jr., who sent a pack of bullies fleeing from his school locker room with his own personal WMD.
Sunday night's biggest loser: Jay Feely. Tony lost a $100,000 football bet when a Dolphin kicker got off his sick bed to win the game.
Honorable mention winner: A.J., who persuaded his Dominican sweetie to marry him with a giant pear-shaped diamond.
Honorable mention loser: A.J, who got dumped by his Dominican sweetie a few days later while taking her kid to a Latin Pride parade. Man, neither money nor multiculturalism nor male sensitivity worked. What do women want?
Monday morning jamook: April 22 on 'The Sopranos'
Either David Chase was trying out for a job with Western Union Sunday night, or he was telegraphing some pretty clear hints of where the six remaining episodes of The Sopranos are headed. The repeated 
references to people who talk too much, and what happens to them (hint: it doesn't involve graceful expiration at home in bed) were so frequent that they turned into a kind of grim mantra.
It started with the opening scene, when Paulie Walnuts show up at Tony's house to warn him that someone has told the cops about the 1982 murder of a delinquent bookie -- Tony's first mob killing, carried out under Paulie's supervision. Unsure what evidence the police may find with the corpse, Paulie and Tony do what comes naturally to murderous sociopaths: They head for Miami. (Or, more precisely, North Bay Village, Hollywood and Hallandale, where some scenes were shot.)
Along the way, Tony's impatience with Paulie's garrulousness -- sometimes merely annoying, sometimes actually dangerous as he gives away their destination to strangers and even jokes about old murders -- turns into a seething anger. It also makes him wonder if Paulie might have been the one spilling secrets to Johnny Sack and the New York family back around in Season 5, but try as he might, Tony's unable to bait Paulie into admitting it.
Tony also seems to be realizing for the first time what the rest of us have known since back in the Clinton administration: that Paulie is an idiot. He's horrified to glimpse Paulie through the window of a hotel room, crouched in front of a TV and laughing maniacally at an old episode of Three's Company -- which, in my opinion, is by itself grounds for inflicting slow and painful death.
The thought certainly crossed Tony's mind. With the news that the informer who steered the cops to the bookie's body has blamed the murder on the now-deceased Richie Aprile, Tony suggests they celebrate by renting a boat for some sportfishing. Paulie, recalling that he helped Tony kill their former pal Big Pussy Bonpensiero on a boat after they learned he was an informer, is nervous. But Tony, though he casts some yearning looks at knives and hatchets aboard the boat, ultimately holds back.
Paulie clearly senses how close he came to sleeping with the fishes. Safely back at home, he's visited by Big Pussy in a dream and -- recalling that in his final Moments, Big Pussy was so scared he collapsed into a chair -- asks him: "When my time comes, tell me: Will I stand up?" Paulie awakes before hearing the reply.
Almost as loud as the drumbeat of informer references Sunday night were the repeated references to advancing age. When Tony tells Carmela he's going to have to lie low for a while -- to dodge an old gambling charge, he says -- her frustration is palpable: "This is what life is still like, at our age?" Later, when a Miami mobster sets Tony up with a young blond, she regards the dinner-table chatter about the 1960s as something akin to tales of dinosaurs. "I wasn't even born yet," she notes innocently, to devastating effect.
But it's Uncle Junior for whom the hourglass is really low. The medication they're giving him at the nursing home to which he's confined have made him lucid enough that he's organizing illegal card games among the other inmates, not to mention fleecing them to the tune of $5 a can for bootleg Coca-Cola. ("The real kind, not that diet [bleep]!")
He's even acquired a lieutenant of sorts, a young Chinese-American named Carter Chong who's been institutionalized with some kind of anger-management problem. (Imagine the squirming that must have gone on at HBO in deciding whether to air an episode with this character barely a week after the Virginia Tech killings).
Chong not only assists Junior with the myriad difficulties of running a poker game where the players are prone to Alzheimer's blackouts and psychotic breaks, but even handles his correspondence as he seeks a pardon for shooting Tony last year. "Dear Vice President Cheney," begins one. "As a powerful man all too familiar with accidental gunplay, i am writing in the hope that you will intervene in my case..."
But Junior's posturing as the capo of the cuckoo's nest is undercut by his tendency to wet himself or interrupt tough-guy speeches with complaints that his new medication makes him drool. When the doctors warn them that if he keeps skipping his meds they'll kick him out, his meek compliance so enrages Chong that he gives Junior a savage beating. The episode ends with Junior, encased in casts, slumped in a wheelchair and stroking a pussycat, the vulgar allusion anything but unintentional.
Final scorecard: One murder -- Phil Leotardo, who last episode said his health problems had sapped his ambition to succeed John Sack as boss of the New York family, changed his mind and whacked acting boss Doc Santoro who vulgarly ate off Leotardo's plate during lunch. Just because you're in the Mafia doesn't mean you don't need manners. Two fabulously violent nursing home beatings, one by Uncle Junior of a patient who ratted out his poker game, one of Junior by Chong.
Sunday night's biggest winner: Carmela. Paulie Walnuts was so grateful to Tony for not killing him that he sent Carmela a $2,000 espresso machine to replace her dinky, defective one. Yeah, Paulie, that'll save you.
Sunday night's biggest loser: Rutgers University. That guy Junior beat up was a Rutgers English professor institutionalized after he stabbed his dean. Man, first Don Imus, now this.
Monday morning jamook: April 15 on 'The Sopranos'
If you're one of those people who think The Sopranos is boring if somebody doesn't get whacked every half hour, Sunday's episode certainly had the requisite number of corpses. John Sack's captain Gerry 
Torciano was gunned down by a rival as the struggle for control of the New York family turned violent. And a fictional (doubly fictional, I guess) version of Tony wound up with a literally splitting headache in Christopher Moltisanti's long-awaited gangster/slasher/zombie flick, Cleaver, which finally debuted to mixed reviews -- more on that in a minute.
More importantly, though, the stage was set for what looks like some fearsome violence to come. The simmering estrangement between Tony and his erratic protege Christopher reached a low boil; Sack's underboss Phil Leotardo confessed that his thirst for revenge against Tony is unslaked; and, perhaps most significantly, Sopranos producer David Chase signaled unmistakeably that his characters have no hope of redemption, that they decided their own fates long ago, and that they might as well go out with a bang (or at least a cleaver in the head) as a whimper.
The redemption theme came up twice. The first was in the demise of Sack, who for years looked like a prime candidate for a whacking by Tony but instead died quietly in a prison bed night Sunday night of lung cancer. Sack reflects that changing his evil (health) ways didn't do him any good: In prison he quit smoking, exercised and ate a balanced diet. ‘‘For what?" he says bitterly.
After being told in the episode's opening moments that he has only a couple of months to live, Sack is given some false hope by a former oncologist -- played by Sydney Pollack, the director of Out of Africa and Tootsie -- working as an orderly in the prison hospital after being convicted of three murders. (He shot his unfaithful wife, then her aunt who accidentally witnessed the murder, and then a mailman on principle: "At that point I had to fully commit.") But it's soon apparent that only a miracle would save him, and Sack says miracles don't happen -- "not to this family." Or any other on The Sopranos, he
could have added.
The ineffectuality of expiation is also on the mind of Sack's underboss, Leotardo. His ambition withered by heart surgery, Leotardo stands by in disinterested contempt as other Sack lieutenants jockey for control of the now decapitated family. (One of them, Torciano, is memorably assassinated while dining in an upscale restaurant with Tony's startled consigliore Silvio Dante.) "I'd like to do it over, boy, let me tell you," he broods to another mobster. "I [bleeping] compromised everything." But it's clear Leotardo is not expressing a wish he'd become a neurosurgeon or a dot-com entrepreneur; what he regrets is
going through life taking guff from lesser men, starting with the immigration officer at Ellis Island who changed the family name from Leonardo to "a ballet costume'' and ending with Tony Soprano, whose cousin murdered Phil's brother back in Season 5. "No more," Leotardo mutters grimly.
Whatever Leotardo is planning for Tony will be hard to top what happened to his fictional counterpart in Christopher's movie Cleaver. At the movie's premiere screening, it doesn't take long before much of the audience -- including Carmela, Silvio, Paulie Walnuts and Tony himself -- to figure out who Sal, the portly mob boss strutting around in his undershirt throwing flowerpots and ranting threats, was based on. But unlike everybody else, Tony is slow to pick up on the roman-a-clef implications: You don't have to be Pauline Kael to figure out that when the Sal character sleeps with the girlfriend of his young protege, we're really talking about Christopher and Adriana, and you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to see the blade embedded Sal's head by the protege as more than a plot device. (As Freud might have said, sometimes a meat cleaver in the head is just a meat cleaver in the head.) "It's a revenge fantasy," the furious Carmela tells Tony.
Tony won't buy it at first, but when Christopher sends his screenwriter pal J.T. around to take the blame for the romantic-triangle plot line (J.T. hilariously claims to have stolen it from Born Yesterday, in which Broderick Crawford and Judy Holiday do indeed resemble caricatured versions of Tony and Adriana) Tony sees through it immediately. ‘‘This is the image of me he leaves to the world," Tony tells his shrink, Dr. Melfi. ‘‘All I am to him is some [bleephole] bully...All I did for this [bleepin'] kid and he
[bleepin'] hates me so much."
Melfi replies with a shot at deconstructionism -- "Is it possible on some level you're reading into all this?" -- that gave me a critical epiphany: The Sopranos will end with Christopher hunting down and killing all the critics who pan it. Hey, Christopher, I've got Rene Rodriguez's address right here.
Final scorecard: One fictional murder, one real murder, one cancer death, and one brutal sucker punch, delivered by Christopher to J.T. in an effort to persuade him to take the rap for the Tony-boinked-Adriana stuff. For the second straight week a suggestive allusion to The Godfather. The final scene of Sunday's episode showed Christopher and Tony embracing at the christening of Christopher's daughter, each wearing a grimace unseen to the other. Were the characters themselves thinking of the christening scene that climaxes The Godfather, where Michael Corleone hitmen settle a host of scores with family enemies as a priest blesses his new baby? And also, a couple of stray plot lines bobbed up again: The FBI once more asked Tony for help in sniffing out Middle Eastern terrorists moving money or weapons through New York, and Carmen wondered aloud to Christopher if Adriana might be dead.
Sunday night's biggest winner: George Cukor. I'll bet Netflix and Blockbuster can't keep Born Yesterday in stock this week.
Sunday night's biggest loser: The English language. When Carmela mused that Adriana might be dead, Christopher furiously replied, "I don't like what you're inferring." He meant implying. Or was it interring?
Monday morning jamook: April 8 on 'The Sopranos'
Welcome to the first of my weekly Sopranos post-mortems, to make a little mordant wordplay. As the final nine episodes unspool, I’ll be writing about each one in a blog item, because…well, because an editor 
said so. Trying to reason with a Herald editor is sort of like trying to talk Paulie Walnuts out of killing you, except Paulie’s slightly more articulate and less likely to misuse apostrophes. Warning: If you haven't seen Sunday's show yet and don't want to the spoil the surprise of Tony's abduction and subsequent anal probe by space aliens, better not read any further.
Anyway, here's a recap of Sunday's episode, Soprano Home Movies. The title is a double entendre: It's a literal reference to Janice's present to Tony on his 47th birthday (digitized copies of 8 mm home movies of their childhood) and, more figuratively, a description of the episode's content, which revolves mostly around family life.
The episode starts with a flashback to the day in 2004 when FBI agents busted New York boss John Sack on a RICO indictment. Tony, who was at Sack's home for a meeting that day, fled into the woods at the sight of the agents, dropping a gun into a snowbank on the way. Turns out a neighborhood teenager spotted it -- and three years later, when police pop him on a drug bust, bargains with the cops by telling them where he got the weapon and the illegal hollow-point ammo with which it's loaded. Tony's promptly busted. Making bail within hours, he returns home to a family dinner, where A.J.'s new Latin girlfriend exclaims in wonder and perhaps a little disgust: ""They let him out already?'' She's gonna be great with the grandkids.
In a brief detour from the domestic course of the episode, we see that John Sack's chief capo Phil Leotardo (with whom Tony has a relationship that ranges from prickly to lethal) has returned from double bypass surgery following the heart attack that felled him at the end of last season. His sense of humor is as lively and creative as ever ("Why don't you get a bike, you fat [fornication]?" he quips to another boss, provoking laughter from a crowd that knows a bon mot when it hears one), but he still seems preoccupied with health issues. More ahead on that, I suspect.
Back to Tony and Carmela, who are celebrating his birthday at the lakeside hideaway of his sister Janice and her husband Bobby Bacala. The wooded lake is a lovely, pastoral setting, so Tony and Bobby naturally start shooting it up with an automatic rifle, one of his birthday presents. Tony wonders what the rifle would do to a deer (perhaps foreshadowing HBO's new animated series for kids, Bambi's Mom: The Uncut Version), but Bobby piously swears he'd never use the thing on a little forest creature. He offers no such assurance about people, however.
This macabre parody of normality continues at Tony's birthday party, where the ladies sing karaoke (Carmela's version of Love Hurts will make you think twice about speaking ill of Sanjaya) and Janice relates warm stories of their childhood, including the time she got Tony to eat a dog biscuit by telling him it was a cookie. When she talks about the cherished incident in which their dad gently suggested to their mom that she shut up by firing a bullet through her beehive hairdo, the injured Tony protests: "It makes us look like a [fornicatin'] dysfunctional family." Words fail me.
The evening continues with both couples settling into a game of Monopoly. Bobby Bacala is appalled at the Soprano family practice of putting all the game's fines and penalties into the middle of the board to be won by anybody landing on the Free Parking space, which he correctly notes is not part of the rules: "The Parker Brothers took time to think this all out. We should respect that." The Free Parking deviation turns out to be the least of it; Tony steals from the bank and delivers his own unique postscripts to the contents of the Chance and Community Chest cards, most of which include X-rated insults to his sister. When he starts singing the old Drifters tune Under The Boardwalk with new lyrics about Janice's youthful adventures in human biology, Bobby not only slugs him but administers the show's most savage beating since Ralph Cifaretto kicked that pregnant stripper to death in Season 3.
Tony initially tells Bobby they're okay: "You beat me fair and square." Far more convincing is Janice's unrhetorical question to Bobby: "Do you think he's just gonna wake up tomorrow and forget about this?" The men have a business conference the next day -- they strike a deal with some Canadian crooks to market expired medicine in the States, with Tony getting a reduced price in return for promising to rub out one of the Canadians' estranged son in law -- and both Carmela and Janice are visibly relieved when they return with Bobby still in one piece. For now.
Tony and Carmela return home, where Tony finds out his gun charge has been dismissed by the local prosecutor but refiled by the feds, which his attorney correctly figures is the prelude to a RICO indictment -- that case the FBI has been building against Tony for all these years is finally getting close to fruition. Meanwhile, Bobby goes goes to Canada to carry out that murder, the first of his mobster career, the assignment Tony's apparent revenge for the beating. The episode ends with Bobby returning to a family barbecue in the backyard while This Magic Moment swells ironically on the soundtrack.
Final scorecard: One murder, one brutal beating. Two allusions that perhaps foreshadow something to come. First Tony and Bobby are seen quietly talking shop in a rowboat on the lake, suspiciously evocative of the scene in Godfather II in which Michael Corleone murders his wimpy brother Fredo, who's been leaking information to another crime family. (For that matter, it also recalls the murder of FBI informant Big Pussy on Tony's boat in Season 2.) Later, after the beating, Tony hears his little niece singing a nursery rhyme -- four little ducks went out one day, over the hills and far away -- that's clearly a reminder of his fainting spell that launched the series eight years ago, a panic attack triggered by a family of wild ducks leaving his swimming pool to fly south.
Sunday night's biggest winner: Bobby. He really pounded Tony in that fight.
Sunday night's biggest loser: Bobby. He really pounded Tony in that fight.
Honorable mention winner: The Drifters, who got two songs (Under The Boardwalk and This Magic Moment) into a single episode.
Honorable mention loser: Tony's cousin-by-marriage Christopher Moltisanti, who noticeably failed to stop by the house after Tony was released on bail. When he called the next day, Tony hung up on him. Talk about foreshadowing.
'The Sopranos': The end is near
Here's the review of Sunday's return of The Sopranos that I mentioned in an earlier post, and here' s the character guide.
Did I hear somebody say whack?
The Sopranos is back Sunday, airing the first of its nine final episodes. We'll have a review in the Sunday Herald, along with a guide to the characters in case you have trouble remembering just who has robbed, raped or killed who. During your breathless wait, here's a little computer game called Whack A Soprano to waste your time with. It's a lot more time if you play at work, not that I've ever done that, or hidden a bottle of Jack Daniel's in my desk, or kicked an editor's puppy while they weren't looking.
