Tony places his mother in a nursing home, ahem, “retirement community.”
Chris and Brendan hijack trucks.
Big Pussy pursues a stolen Saturn.
Episode 2 – Originally Aired Jan 17, 1999
Written By David Chase
Directed By Daniel Attias
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This episode is unique in that it is the only one in the entire series that has a scene before the opening credits. Chase may have placed the scene before the credits in order to highlight its differences with the opening scene of the first episode. The Pilot episode began with a disorienting scene, with Tony (and the viewer) in a place of uncomfortable ambiguity. In contrast, this second episode begins with Tony in his milieu, feeling right at home in the backroom of the Bada Bing. Tony has not yet become boss of the famiglia, so he really fits in with the rest of the guys. It is a comfortable atmosphere in the man-cave, and viewers (especially male viewers) can relate—it looks and sounds a lot like this when we’re hanging out with our buddies (minus the handling of extorted money and stolen goods, of course).
The meaning of the episode’s title, “46 Long,” seems to have eluded many viewers, but it is easy to decipher if we pay attention to this early scene. The organized crime (O.C.) expert on the television explains that part of the reason for the mob’s decline is “a disregard within the mob itself for the rules that served the old dons so well.” Tony concurs with this statement by saying “if the shoe fits.” A perfect example of this “disregard within the mob itself for the rules” is Brendan’s hijacking of the Comley truck (filled with men’s suits), even after Boss Jackie had forbidden it. Tony had never ok’d the hijacking and is furious at Brendan for doing it—but he nevertheless benefits from it. By deciding to keep some of the hijacked suits for himself, Tony is complicit—at least on some level—in Brendan’s disregard for mob rules. A man of Tony’s size would wear about a 46 Long; as Tony searches through the rack, we understand that the metaphorical “shoe that fits” is actually, in this case, a suit.
Chase makes it easier for us to decode the episode title by using Silvio to formally connect the pre-credits scene where Tony says “if the shoe fits” with the later scene in which he looks for a suit that fits: in both scenes, Silvio does his “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” impression from The Godfather Part III. By intentionally connecting the two scenes, Chase guides us into seeing just how hypocritical Tony is when he decides to keep a suit for himself.
It’s not just a failure to honor the rules that is weakening a contemporary mob that now finds itself on the cusp of the new millennium; the mob has been slow to understand and adapt to technological changes as well. The guys sound almost Neanderthal when discussing the recent cloning of a sheep. When Chris says “technology comes to the Bing” while delivering stolen DVD players, it emphasizes just how behind the times they are. And the new telephone system, though surely not very complicated, completely befuddles poor Georgie.
There is another, more insidious threat to the mob (and to America, Chase might say): the rise of corporatism. In the future episode “Johnny Cakes” (6.08), Chase rages against the machine, pitting the Mob against Corporations/Big Business; the battle plays out on a smaller scale here. Paulie rails against incorporated coffeehouses for stealing part of Italian culture, and in a David vs. Goliath act, steals a cafetera to help settle the score. David Chase strikes against the Goliath by mocking the coffee shops in a variety of ways:
- A barista tells Pussy that “these stores are everywhere” making them sound like some spreading virus
- A mechanic mistakenly refers to Starbucks as “Buttfucks”
- The logo for Seattle & Tacoma Roasters, displayed prominently on the store window, looks like the warning sign used for toxic materials
Chase’s censure of the generic and noxious nature of these types of corporatized businesses will become more apparent in Season 6.
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It’s not just moblife that is giving Tony agita, it is his personal life as well. The ongoing situation with his mother is putting a lot of stress on him. She causes a kitchen fire, she refuses to answer her phone after dark, she insults and drives away her caretaker, and she’s become a threat behind the wheel of her car. All of these things leave Tony with no choice but to check Livia into the Green Grove retirement community. (He cannot know that this act will directly cause his antagonists to move against him before the end of the season.)
In Dr. Melfi’s office, it is becoming increasingly apparent just how toxic Livia is. When Melfi tells Tony that some people are just not “ideal candidates for parenthood,” Tony tries to defend his mother with an anecdote—but the best he can come up with is the story of how she laughed at her husband when he fell off some steps. (Steps, stairs and staircases will be associated with cruel and callous behaviors over the course of the series.) Melfi’s insights into Tony and Livia’s dysfunctional relationship touch a raw nerve, and Tony’s anger swells. Melfi tells him that the way to regain control of his life is to “own the anger instead of displacing it.” In the very next scene, we see him fail to follow Melfi’s advice—Tony displaces the anger he feels towards his mother on to Georgie instead (who, like Livia, doesn’t understand how the telephone works).
In the previous episode, we saw how two explosions functioned as a visual rhyme linking Tony’s professional and personal lives. Similarly, in this episode, two rhyming scenes of Tony lashing out violently with a telephone visually link his professional and personal lives: in the first instance, he repeatedly smashes the phone in fury after learning about the Comley truck hijacking; in the second instance, he vents the anger he feels toward his mother by beating Georgie with the telephone receiver.
Tony’s attack on Georgie at the Bing is brutal, but it’s just B.A.U. (business as usual)—the girls resume their positions on stage and keep on dancing. Goergie is an inoffensive employee of the Bing who will find himself getting in the way of these mobsters and suffering for it repeatedly in episodes to come. The Comley truck drivers are also innocent civilians who are hurt by the mob: one gets beat up and the other is killed by a stray bullet. The phenomenon of civilians being made to suffer by mob actions, either purposely or inadvertently, is one that will repeat over and over.
THE SOPRANOS — A CONTEMPORARY MOB-STORY
The discussion about the “golden age of the mob” in this hour’s opening scene possesses a kind of ironic self-awareness. David Chase is certainly aware that his TV series is appearing after the golden age of the mob-movie, after the era that gave us The Godfather Parts I and II and Mean Streets, and long after the era that produced classics like The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, and Little Caesar. Chase uses The Sopranos to push and pull against the long-developed expectations that we have of the gangster genre. Chase began bucking our expectations right from the opening scene of the Pilot episode. Susann Cokal, in her essay “Narrative Ergonomics and the Functions of Feminine Space in The Sopranos,” writes of the Pilot’s opening scene that it announces that “the series will use feminized spaces for defining and refining male characters. In this first sequence alone, women both confine Tony (tightly between the statue’s legs) and allow him to expand (the therapist’s invitation to speak).”
The Pilot establishes that “feminized spaces”—the Soprano home, Melfi’s office, Livia’s house—are important parts of SopranoWorld, and absolutely integral to the overall narrative. This second episode opens contrapuntally to the first, in a very masculine space: the back office of the Bada Bing. “46 Long” contains storylines that fit into our conventional expectations of a mob tale: trucks hijacked at gunpoint, trafficking of stolen goods, tensions among the tough guys over the famiglia hierarchy. But much time is also given to the story of a teacher’s stolen Saturn. The effort that goes into recovering the vehicle somehow feels petty, it doesn’t quite live up to our expectations of what tough-guy mobsters are supposed to be doing with their time. As he tracks down the car, Big Pussy voices his own disappointment at having to do such small-time work when he grumbles, “I’m fuckin’ Rockford over here.”
Interestingly, it may have been during his time with The Rockford Files that David Chase first began to think about how notions of “masculinity” and “femininity” play upon TV narratives. In his essay “Driving in Circles: The Rockford Files,” Robert Gross argues that Jim Rockford was part of a group of newfangled American heroes who showed…
…the influence of 70s feminism and an emerging critique of traditional American masculinity on the popular imagination…Rockford is a fantasy figure that can reconcile both old and new values for men: good with cars and his fists, yet competent in his relationships and in touch with his feelings…The new values, the series implies, can simply be added onto the earlier ones without any tension or contradiction…
I am not suggesting that the men of The Sopranos are sensitive figures who are deeply in touch with their feelings. I am saying that SopranoWorld, like RockfordWorld, exists in a post-feminist period in which the character of Tony Soprano cannot function as a male fantasy-figure the way that Gary Cooper and Michael Corleone might have functioned in earlier periods. Michael Corleone was always too busy doing macho stuff—avenging his brother’s murder or warring with rivals or expanding his gambling empire—to ever worry about recovering some teacher’s stolen car. But Tony Soprano, alas, is not exempt from worrying about such domestic (some might say “trivial”) things.
In a sense, television is a medium that favors small-scale stories. Big, dramatic stories are perhaps better told on the big screen, in movie theaters. TV is better at getting at the nitty-gritty intimacies of everyday life. In his essay, “‘TV Ruined the Movies’: Television, Tarantino and the Intimate World of The Sopranos,” Glen Creeber says that…
…The Sopranos implicitly critiques the ‘televisionization’ of the gangster genre—parodying its gradual development from cinematic epic to standard video or television fare…its constant self-reflexive referencing to its own generic history reveals a television narrative desperately trying to re-invent and re-examine itself; searching for the means by which it can both deconstruct and possibly reconstruct its own narrative dynamics.
It seems to me that the dynamic of The Sopranos undergoes a change from the first episode to the second. The series settles down a bit; it goes, to borrow Creeber’s terms, from “cinematic epic” to more standard “television fare.” The Pilot had some unorthodox camera angles and wild steadicam/dolly movements, but the camera is far more restrained in “46 Long.” The Pilot also featured weird tones (probably through the use of lens filters) and heavy stylization (like at the MRI clinic) which are absent in the current hour. It is understandable that the first episode was more “dramatic”—most Pilot episodes need to be more eye-catching and heart-pounding in order to win viewer (and network) interest. With this second episode, The Sopranos begins to settle into its truer, less cinematic, more televisual personality.
The surest example of this is found in Tony’s therapy scenes. In the Pilot, Tony’s first therapy session was used to frame the scene of him dramatically running down deadbeat gambler Mahaffey (with the cinematic action of the chase scored to a toe-tapping Doo-wop song). In contrast, none of the therapy scenes in “46 Long” are used as a framing gimmick for other scenes. Dr. Melfi’s office will no longer be used for exposition in the dramatic way that it was used in the Pilot. Melfi’s office (one of those “feminized” spaces) is becoming a place of great importance in and of itself within the series.
___________________________________
MORE POINTS, CONNECTIONS & REFERENCES:
- Chase, an audiophile and musician, had seriously considered using a different song to open each episode every week. HBO balked at this, perhaps worried about additional licensing fees. This second episode establishes the convention of using “Woke Up This Morning” to open each episode, and cemented the opening sequence as one of the most memorable in TV history. The Rockford Files, the series in which David Chase began to learn the craft, also featured a driving sequence and catchy song in its opening credits.
- AJ’s mention of his teacher “Mr. Miller” prompts Tony to sing a line from Procol Harum’s most famous song: “…while the miller told his tale…” Procol Harum’s line is itself a reference to The Canterbury Tales, in which the Miller’s Tale is the second; perhaps a parallel is that this episode is the second of the series. More importantly, we are introduced to Tony’s love of classic rock.
- Chase has said that GoodFellas is his Koran; his “prophet” makes an appearance here—Martin Scorsese (actually an actor playing him) rushes past the crowd into a nightclub. There will be many references and allusions to Scorsese films throughout the series, and Chase will cast many of Scorsese’s players in Sopranos, the most important being Lorraine Bracco. In GoodFellas, she played a hot-blooded gangster wife, but here she is cast against type, playing the even-tempered Dr. Melfi.
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Tony references Franki Valli when he tells his mother that Valli uses the same florist that he does. Valli, of course, appears on the series later as “Rusty Millio.”
- Ugly pun: Brendan refers to cancer-stricken Jackie as “chemo-sabe.”
- It’s ironic that it is at the Bada Bing that the guys watch the mob expert talk about the decline of the Golden Age, because the strip joint gets its name from the signature film about the Mob’s golden days: in The Godfather, Sonny tells Michael, “You gotta get up close like this and ‘bada bing’, you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit!”
- When Pussy and Paulie track down Mr. Miller’s stolen Saturn, the trail leads them to a gay man named Eddie Arnaz. That last name, of course, explains why Paulie calls his boyfriend “Lucy.”
- Cinephiles take note: In what is almost certainly a nod to Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel, the remains of the stolen Saturn is found at Bunuel Bros. Body Shop. In May 2013, a list of David Chase’s “must-see movies” appeared at NPR.org, and it included Bunuel’s Viridiana (1961) and Tristana (1970).
- After Livia is checked into Green Grove, Tony wistfully looks at some pictures of his mother, including one of her smoking at a much younger age. ]This image takes on a particular poignancy in hindsight as we know that actress Nancy Marchand died of emphysema and lung cancer about 17 months after this episode aired.
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Sopranos Autopsy 
I think it’s worth noting, that at the begining, Lorraine Bracco was casted as Carmela Soprano, but she decided that she wants Dr. Melfi role instead, so she had to prepare for a new type of character (i think it was in one of the videos from the complete set)
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The concept of 46 Long makes me think of Tony telling Meadow in response to her talking rather explicitly about the Lewinsky scandal that outside of the house, it’s the 1990s, but inside, it’s the 1950s. While Tony played quite the old school dad at home, in the mob, Tony himself was part of the new school. And, his willingness to accept one of the suits from Brandon and Chris’s illadvised robbery confirms this. Throughout the series, established baby boomers and GI geners like Uncle Junior, Johnny Sac, and Phil Leotardo would look dismayed at Tony’s sophomoric, more Gen X gestures. It’s as if they wanted to tell him, “In the civilian world, it’s 1999. In our thing, it’s 1950”,
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Tony bashing the payphone reminded me a lot of Robert DeNiro’s payphone bashing in Goodfellas (when he learns that Joe Pesci’s character has been killed).
I do a Sopranos re-watch every few years. This is a fantastic blog. Cheers!
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Much appreciated, Trauma..
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This is great. I love your observation regarding the pairing of Silvio’s line and Tony’s hypocrisy. Tony doesn’t even realize it.
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I never watched this show during its original airing because I didn’t have HBO, and then I was busy having babies snap-crackle-pop during the first decade of the 2000s. I am now starting to binge via Prime and found your blog, which I am enjoying immensely already. The title of this episode is interesting; the 46 long is obviously a suit size. But maybe because I’m a woman not used to that sizing, and I was born in N.J. (turns out my Gram lived less than a mile from the Bada Bing), what struck me about the 46 part first was that it could refer to the frightening Route 46, a road that gives me sensory overload — the focus in this episode on trucking, and the shot of Tony on the side of a busy highway. Possibly overthinking, but that’s half the fun!
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Agreed, overthinking it is definitely half the fun!
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What is the actual saying interference to the “chemo sabe” pun?
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“Kemosabe” means ‘friend’ or something like that. I remember hearing it on The Lone Ranger a lot when I was a kid.
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Got ii! Thank you Ron. I just finished the series. Your website is fascinating! Great stuff.
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Any thoughts on Route 46? And Route 3, where they filmed? What about that Tool song, 46 x 2. The archetypes?
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Maybe Susan above has a point about the trucking connection, but I can’t be sure – I’ve driven on 46 but I’m not very familiar with the area…
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Ron – According to Wikipedia, Route 46 is slightly over 75 miles long, runs East to West entirely across the State of NJ, and crosses over the Passaic River 4 times. I don’t think it’s important to the storyline; it just seems to be the route that Tony takes home from NYC or other towns in NJ.
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Yes but the Route does somehow capture the feel of north Jersey..
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Ron – Your’e absolutely correct!
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I’m very familiar with the area. Tony likely would avoid taking 46 home, way too jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive. He’d try to stay on 80 as long as he could to exit 52
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Nice Review Ron.
It’s interesting to see how in the SopranoWorld – after the golden age of the mob – mobsters don’t care about hurting civilians (we will later see dozens of civilians hurt for nothing) while the old fashion mobster movies – during the golden age – sometimes emphasize the hypocrite idea of not harming civilians
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Yes, I think Chase’s dark realism is at work here, he knows that civilians in proximity to these mobsters are bound to be hurt. Even when civilians are not physically hurt, the community still gets harmed by the mob’s schemes (like busting out Davey’s store or defrauding HUD)…
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Ron – Re: Mafia and Civilians. According to a KQED.org article (Dec 2013), there’s a Russian game that involves 14 people (1 narrator, 1 doctor, 1 detective, 3 mafia, 8 civilians) who don’t know each other’s characters. The object of the 3-day long marathon game is for the civilians to kill all mafia members or for the mafia to outnumber civilians. Just goes to show you … in Russia, at least, the mob can kill civilians (and vice versa)!
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Good review Ron, made me look at this in a different perspective.
I like the section on the mob’s decline. I believe that greed has played a huge role in it’s decline. It would be hard to find many other characters who demonstrate more greed that the ones David Chase has created for us in this wonderful series. Lots of truth to what you said, and as always, Chase delivers here in top form. This divide, if you care to call it that, can be observed throughout the entire series. The divide between the old and new (Junior and Paulie to Chris and Brendan). While true they all have the same selfish traits and tendencies, they are quiet different. Characters like Junior, Paulie, they were perhaps born into this thing; we certainly know this is true for Johnny Boy and Tony. But Chris, Brendan, seem like wanna -be wise guys. Looking to be accepted, noticed and move up without putting in their time. There are more of these characters who come and “GO” in this series. An above comment about Tony being part of the new school I think is very accurate, and can be seen in future episodes such as how he handled the Vito thing. We can all guess how Johnny Boy would have handled a “fag” in his crew.
This episode really sets the viewer up for many things, some that run and take a long time to play out, if at all. Its one of the things I love most about this series. The science teachers “Sat-UN.” His response to AJ..”…you’re Uncle…Pussy? LOL priceless. (Wonder what the guy did next knowing the car was most likely stolen, he seemed terrified to actually have his stolen car returned.) This episode reinforces the reality that being in the mob, and in this “contemporary mob story” is definitely not glitz and glam, and Chase’s world of a NJ crime family does not take place in the hay day of the mafia. We are reminded of that here a few times: Pussy’s assignment of finding the car, Paulie stealing a coffee maker. Kind of mundane and boring, but I laughed my ass off at Paulie’s rant about the Italians missing out and the “Spice Girls” scene. Perhaps the most compelling part of this episode is how it hones in on Tony’s and Olivia’s relationship. Viewing this I felt Tony has real love and concern for his mother’s well being, which is all going to unravel by the end of the season.
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Re: Luis Bunuel
The famous (or infamous) article that came out a few years ago in which Chase supposedly said that Tony isn’t killed in the end cites Bunuel’s influence on him. Chase even asked one of his directors to watch some Luis Bunuel films so he could understand what his vision for the show was.
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You’re right… Martha Nochimson’s article for Vox became famous for what Chase supposedly told her (Vox printed a pseudo-retraction soon after) but nobody paid much attention to the article beyond that supposed bombshell, which is a shame because it is full of insight on Chase’s influences and concepts within the series…
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Why do you think Tony lies to Melfi about Carmela not allowing Livia to live with them? Is it because he’s guilty because he doesn’t want her there? I think Carmela is sincere when she asks her. Also I noticed a flaw. When Tony asks about Lucia coming over for dinner….Carmela says Lucia is picking up her parents. In future episodes they repeatedly mention that they suffered under her influence and that she estranged them from Carmela. Why would she be picking them up?
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He may feel guilty, he tries to think of himself as the devoted and dutiful Italian son
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Ron – Or maybe Tony’s trying to win the love he never received from his mother. Some people are so desperate for attention that they go out of their way to get what they need. Of course, Livia does the same thing, except she caustically and viciously attacks and maligns them. And she gets a lot of attention.
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Pfft, I actually thought Tony was being truthful for once here. People say one thing whilst showing with all their actions they really mean another, especially when it comes to in-laws.. I say Carmela did *not* want Livia in the house.
“I know when I’m not wanted!”
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Another notation of this show is when Tony starts dancing with Carmela in the kitchen, while they were talking about the stolen Saturn. He starts singing while he dances… which comes later on when he has flashbacks of his parents dancing like that when they were kids. The more I watch the show, the more connections I keep making.
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Carmela’s concern about the teacher’s stolen car is a nice example of her doublethink, because somewhere in her mind she knows that her husband has committed far worse crimes, and the family is living comfortably on the proceeds from them. She doesn’t know this, but we learn later that Tony himself deals in stolen cars.
It reminds me of an incident in “Another Toothpick” (3, 5), when Tony is stopped for speeding. She grumbles, like any proper middle-class lady, “You’d think they’d be out arresting dope dealers.”
– – – – –
Livia suspects her Trinidadian nurse / companion: “She’s stealing! That beautiful plate that Aunt Septimia [?] took from that restaurant in Rome – it’s gone!”
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The opening scene also serves as foreshadowing for Big Pussy. “I think it’s drug trafficking and I think that ruined everything. You’re looking at a mandatory 35 to life in prison. Guys started to rat on each other just so they could avoid prosecution.”
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Yes very possible
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I found your page looking for the meaning of 46 long. I figured suit size also, but being a large person myself, there is no way that Tony is a 46. 46 is the low end of XL and Tony is clearly 2XL if not 3XL.
P.S. DVD players came out in the U.S. in 1997 and this episode was filmed in 1998 – so the Bing isn’t out of date.
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I think a guy about 6′ tall and around 215 pounds could fit nicely into a 46L. It would be virtually impossible for season 6 Tony to fit into the suit, but we’re still early in season 1..
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It’s reported that Gandolfini was wearing size 4XL by the end of this series. Hard to believe that this once handsome actor became so loathsome (in real life – and his character persona) and … well, ugly during this series. 😢
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-Do we know why Chase hits reset and makes Tony a capo? I mean, obviously for the Junior conflict, but that’s already established in the pilot. Not that I don’t like Jackie, whatever he is in the way of a character and not a mere plot device. Before Many Saints was announced, I thought a prequel about a young cool Jackie with Tony more peripheral might be an interesting experiment. I bet MSoN ends with the La Manna card game.
-J. D. Williams, Bodie in the Wire, is “You can’t drive a Fisher-Price” guy at the second Comley hit.
-Brenda is such a tailor-made HBO side character. A hits & tits caricature of a guy that in fact oh yeah totally exists. It’s just so weird to see his type of man so perfectly distilled, but like Jackie he is mostly an archetype. (cue Livia: “How much complaining can you do?”).
-Rewatched w/ a newbie friend, and it was very interesting to see how amusing he found Livia. She’s so maudlin I don’t always think of her shenanigans as necessarily funny, more obtuse like Cohen or Lynch….both of which can be very funny. But he had me laughing at shit I’d mostly just taken as grim before.
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Karen – Tony became ‘made’ (a capo) at age 22, shortly after killing Willie Overall with Paulie.
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Hello, does anyone know the name of the song is playing background when ”Chris says “technology comes to the Bing” Thank you.
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Cenk – I think it was ‘Trippy Señorita’, sung by Rick Thibodeau.
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Pingback: The Soprano Onceover: #53. “46 Long” (S1E2) | janiojala
I’m very late to your great site and want to say how much I appreciate it. Thanks! You mention the television vs. big screen aspect in this episode. Here’s an interesting recent interview where Chase certainly isn’t happy with the preque “The Many Saints of Newark” having a simultaneous streaming and theatrical release. I seem to remember him saying somewhere else that if he knew this was their strategy, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to be involved.
https://deadline.com/2021/09/david-chase-sopranos-revival-the-many-saints-of-newark-disdain-day-date-bow-interested-in-another-prequel-film-1234828184/#comments
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Thanks Dennis. I had read earlier somewhere that Chase wasn’t happy about the streaming, but I’m seeing that story about his last name for the first time..
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I was quite impressed by Scorsese showing up at the nightclub. It wasn’t until recently that I not only found out that it wasn’t him (it was look-alike, Anthony Caso), but that Scorsese reportedly ‘hated’ the Sopranos! According to Independent.ie.com, he “couldn’t identify with that generation of the underworld”. This from the guy who made ‘Casino’ and ‘Goodfellas’. Go figure.
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I’m not sure anyone else in the comments mentioned it but the logo that you said looks like a toxic logo is actually a radiation hazard logo. I only know that from working in radiology 🙂 love the site!
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👍
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YES, thank you. More specifically, a fallout shelter sign (but upside-down)
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My quick take on what unifies all the plot threads: “46 Long” appears to me as a story about actual and perceived theft. Chris and Brendan steal goods from Junior’s truck routes, causing a rift between Tony and Junior. AJ’s science teacher’s car is stolen; Paulie gripes about the coffee shop’s theft of Italian culture (he steals an item from the shop himself); their solution to the mission is to get Eddie to steal a license plate and a new Saturn. And Livia feels that Tony is stealing whatever independence and quality of life she has left by hiring a housekeeper (who she thinks is stealing from her) and then sending her to Green Grove. Tony feels ripped off by Livia as well, with her admission that she gave her diamonds (stolen by Johnny) to cousin Josephine instead of saving them for his family to sell. There are many things that Livia has likely stolen from Tony, spiritually or otherwise, though he is as yet unlikely to acknowledge it consciously.
Trivia:
1. The cold open contains the first instance where Paulie repeats an offensive joke to another character. A distancing effect that makes perhaps 0.002% of the viewers examine themselves for a split second if they laughed initially. It’s so important to know that the writers are not just telling these jokes to be funny.
2. Ex-Mobster Vincent Rizzo’s mention of violent crime packing its bags and “going the way of the dodo bird” feels like an echo of the duck stuff in the first episode, this time applied to Tony’s work life. Ehhh, maybe that’s a weak link.
3. Livia’s car is strikingly green, like the trees in her neighborhood. I just like it. Pretty. Wow, I am getting worse at this analysis thing the longer I sit here.
4. In a scene about fancy stolen suits, Chris and Brendan are dressed almost identically–like street punks–when Tony confronts them about the second stolen truck. Chris, in this particular case, has not established himself as anything much more than Brendan in Tony’s eyes, and Tony sees Chris as a failure for his lack of guidance to Brendan (though Chris did warn him off at the last minute).
Huh, I’m enjoying coming up with these items. Years ago I tried to create a complete concordance of everything on the show, EVERYTHING, including character write-ups, notable quotes, music info, and everything else that a year later I realized was more or less already done on that Sopranos wiki. I was also trying to incorporate themes, symbolism, meanings, which that wiki most certainly does not do. But then I found your site and saw you did that way better than me (and everyone else I’ve seen).
But my Sopranos habit still calls to me like a drug. Hence these little footnotes. Wonder why I’m so into this show, still don’t exactly understand. I haven’t been so obsessed since Stanley Kubrick was alive. I guess Chase loved Kubrick too but…
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Good points
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▪ As if uneducated, meth/coke-snorting addicts Christopher and Brendan would know the meaning of ‘unscathed’, LOL!
▪ After the stove fire at her house, Livia loudly complains “how can I live like this?”, but bitches about a $4,000 per month retirement ‘community’. (Nothing short of Tony’s death would put a smile on that witch’s ugly puss.)
▪ As much as I think that Livia’s completely capable (crazy enough) of running her gal pal down with a car, I highly doubt she did it on purpose (this time, at least).
▪ Oddly enough, I believe that Chris may have said something important – that “people don’t know who to kick up to in some cases”.
▪ And Livia was probably correct when she told Tony that the only reason a nice room was available “is because someone died”.
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• There’s a menu on the wall at Satriale’s for a place called ‘Baliza BarBQ’. It’s an actual restaurant in Kearny, NJ, right near Satriale’s (long since demolished), and is still open for business!
• Starting an unfortunate trend in this series, two ‘unidentified black males’ help Brendan hijack yet another Comley truck (and accidentally kill the driver).
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Silvio trivia:
According to Caitlin Leal (Jan 2018), Van Zandt “knew he needed an authentic look [for his character] and went to John Gotti’s tailor. He also gained 70 pounds in order to transform himself from rock musician to a member of ‘The Sopranos’ crew”. 😎
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doing my yearly rewatch and as always I’m here reading your posts … this is the only blog for Sopranos info episode to episode.. you are a legend 👏🙏
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Thanks 👍
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