The Sopranos head up to the Baccalieri’s lake-house
to celebrate Tony’s birthday.
A Monopoly game turns into a heavyweight bout.
And Bobby “pops his cherry.”
Episode 78 – Originally aired April 8, 2007
Written by Diane Frolov, Andrew Schneider, David Chase and Matthew Weiner
Directed by Tim Van Patten
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The great American film director Robert Altman made a career out of subverting and twisting genre expectations. His 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which completely subverts and reimagines the tropes of the “American Western,” is probably my favorite movie of all time. Altman himself is one of my favorite directors. Altman passed away in November 2006 but I missed the news of his death, probably because I was busy preparing for my brother’s wedding which took place that same week. I only learned of Altman’s death months later, just before Season 6 Part II of The Sopranos began airing, and that must be why I was thinking of him the first time I saw “Soprano Home Movies.” David Chase had been twisting and subverting our expectations of the gangster genre for six seasons, and he continued to do so in this hour in a way that might have made Robert Altman smile. As we watch the action in this episode move from the usual north Jersey locale to a lakeside property in upstate New York, we may think that we’re in for some peaceful and pastoral leisure and recreation. But that’s not what Chase gives us at all. “Soprano Home Movies” turns into one of the most unexpected and memorable outings of the entire series.
BONUS EPISODES
I’m not exactly sure why Season 6 was split into two parts. Perhaps HBO was trying to extend the run of its most successful series while it sought to fill the void left after Six Feet Under had ended. Or perhaps the network wanted to emulate the formula that had worked so well for them earlier with Sex and the City, which had had its sixth and final season split into two irregular parts. I was convinced at the time that HBO was marketing this Sopranos mini-season as “Part II” as opposed to “Season 7” because David Chase was going to pick up right where “Kaisha” had left off. (But that is not the case; we know that eight months have elapsed since the Christmas Eve that closed “Kaisha,” because the birthday that Tony now celebrates takes place in August. [It was in “Another Toothpick” that we learned that Tony’s birthday is August 24th.]) David Chase has explained that HBO labeled this mini-season as “S6 Part II” instead of “S7” simply as a way to avoid giving pay increases to the actors.
I don’t really care what the reasons behind HBO’s naming and scheduling peccadilloes were, I’m just happy that these “bonus episodes” exist. I think that Part II works very nicely…for the most part. I wasn’t thrilled by Chase’s decision to use Phil Leotardo and the NY famiglia to create tension at the end of a season yet again (although I will admit that I did get a little excited, as many viewers did, at the possibility of seeing Tony and the NJ famiglia finally wipe out their rivals from across the river for good).
Season 6 Part II seems fairly distinct to me. For one thing, it often looks different from the other seasons, and this is partly due to the multitude of new shooting locations. New York’s Putnam Valley and Lake Oscawana give a bright, sunlit atmosphere to the current episode. The next episode features a much colder color palette: cool greys and whites at the medical center/penitentiary that houses Johnny Sac and the cool blues and greys of Manhattan where Cleaver is premiered (as well as the chilly color-graded clips of Cleaver itself). A later episode will be colored by the severe desert light of Nevada and the saturated reds and yellows of Las Vegas casinos. This mini-season also has a more loosey-goosey feel to it; a number of new, quick, standalone storylines make the overall structure of the season feel even more freeform and unpredictable than what we’re used to from Chase—one hour is devoted to Johnny Sac’s final days, another to the difficulties of Vito Spatafore Jr, and another to Corrado’s relationship with a young, unbalanced Asian man. S6 Part II is also more self-reflexive than preceding seasons. This is partly because it is very aware of itself of as The Final Season, but also because its Cleaver storyline (along with HBO’s simultaneous release of a “behind-the-scenes of Cleaver” mockumentary) is the most formally “meta” thing the series has ever done. But enough of the fuckin’ preamble, let me get to the write-up…
“Soprano Home Movies” opens to the sound of some dialogue that might sound a little familiar:
Johnny Sac: He’s gonna want $50, $60k—
Tony: All right, let’s not go backwards, huh?
The joke is that Chase is doing exactly that—going backwards—with this opening scene; just as Tony delivers his line, the opening placard reveals that we are making a visit back to 2004, to a scene that we first saw in episode 5.13 “All Due Respect”:
We all remember the scene from the final minutes of the Season 5 finale “All Due Respect”: Tony is having a wintry-morning meeting with Johnny Sac when the FBI swarm in to arrest Johnny, forcing Tony to abandon his car and hoof it all the way back home. By kicking off this new season now with a scene from the past, Chase is playing to an idea that every Sopranos fan in the world was thinking about at the time—the idea of karmic justice. We all knew that these episodes were the final nine, and we all wondered how it was going to end: was the past finally going to catch up with Tony Soprano? When this scene originally played in “All Due Respect,” there was a moment when Tony got in Johnny Sac’s face and told him “I’ve paid enough, John. I paid a lot.” (Tony was referring to the fact that he had to kill his cousin Blundetto in an effort to appease Phil Leotardo, and therefore was not willing to make any additional cash payment to Phil to keep the peace.) Despite the claim that he had “paid enough,” we wonder now if Tony is going to have to pay even more—will Tony Soprano finally be brought to justice? Chase adds a small but significant beat to the re-purposed scene from 5.13: Tony tosses a gun into the snow, which is noticed by a young man who goes and picks it up. The gun becomes a consequential thing now as Tony is arrested because of the hollow-point bullets it contains. With this opening gambit, Chase immediately suggests that Tony may not be able to run from his past forever.
It had become conventional for a Sopranos season opener to feature a shot of The Star-Ledger in Tony’s driveway. Chase sticks to the convention now, and moreover, he uses the newspaper to transport us back into present day SopranoWorld:
The references to the 2007 budget passing and the Carolina Hurricanes victory confirm that it is 2006 in SopranoWorld (although it was actually 2007 in the real world when this hour originally aired). Another confirmation of the year: Tony celebrates his 47th birthday here, which would have occurred in 2006.
As the authorities bang on the front door of their home, Carmela wonders, “Is this it?” She worries that the long-awaited bill has finally come due. But Tony is arrested only on a (relatively) minor gun charge. Meadow reacts to the arrest with characteristic intelligence and advocacy, demanding to see a warrant. (At this early point in the season, her mother believes that she will go to medical school, but we get the sense here that Meadow is destined to become a lawyer.) AJ behaves as expected too. When we last saw him in “Kaisha” he seemed to be on a path to maturity, but he has gone back to being a whining, hard-hearted jerk.
Tony is released after spending a relatively short amount of time in jail. He and Carmela decide to go to Bacala’s lake house for Tony’s birthday. As they make the drive up, the sweet groove of James Gang’s “Funk #49” can be heard on the car radio, seeming to set the mood for some rollicking good times. (But perhaps the song’s lyric “I think there’s trouble brewin'” is the true omen of what lies ahead.)
As soon as they arrive at the lake house, Carmela says “I’ve had to pee since Glen Falls” and runs off to the bathroom. It is a common thing for characters on The Sopranos to slip away to the restroom; showing the banalities of everyday life is part of the verisimilitude of SopranoWorld, and helps to underscore that these characters are not so different from you and me. Indeed, the Soprano family gathering that takes place in this hour is characterized by many of the traits of a typical American family visit: fishing, eating, drinking, shooting guns, gossiping, bad karaoke, and of course, the presence of long-simmering frustrations that bubble their way up into passive-aggressive criticisms. Family gatherings just like this take place all across America every day. Our own home movies surely have a lot in common with the Soprano’s home movies.
But there are enormous differences between us and them as well. Most of us have never gone into the woods to trim a tree with an 800 round-per-minute AR-10 assault rifle like the one Bobby gives Tony. And our collection of family anecdotes don’t include the one about Dad shooting a bullet through Mom’s beehive hairdo. (It is such a vivid anecdote, I can see almost exactly how it would look as a grainy Super-8 home movie.) It is during a game of Monopoly that the uniqueness of the Soprano family truly comes to light. Bobby takes exception at a particularly nasty insult directed at Janice. “You Sopranos, you go too far,” he exclaims. When Tony sings a very loose (and dirty) cover of The Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk,” all hell breaks loose. Tony and Bobby grapple and swing at each other. Bodies get thrown around the room. Carmela takes a hard fall. Furniture shatters. (It’s a brutal and realistic fight-scene. Steve Schirripa actually did bust Gandolfini’s nose here with a miscalculated head-butt.) While it’s true that many of the scenes that play out in SopranoWorld houses usually have a lot in common with what goes on in our own houses in the real world, rarely do our own houses (or game pieces) get soaked in the same quantity of blood:
Tony can’t stand that he got outmuscled by Bobby. He takes pride in his physical strength—we saw him grin at himself in the mirror after taking down Perry Annunziata (“Muscles Marinara”) last year. Tony is getting older (the plot-point of his birthday celebration emphasizes this point), and with age comes weakness. But this is a difficult thing for him to admit, so he tries to convince himself that Bobby didn’t fight fair. That leaves everyone wondering if Tony is going to seek vengeance, and what form such vengeance might take.
As Tony and Bobby drive ostensibly to a business meeting, it seems very possible that this might be the end of the road for Bacala. (When Bobby says that he “should’ve taken a leak before we left,” it is more than the typically banal comment of the sort that Carmela had made earlier in the hour—we get the sense that Bobby, anxious about his fate, is trying not to piss his pants.) Chase’s camera captures some images of trees as the two men turn off the main road, perhaps recalling the tree-imagery we saw as Silvio drove Adriana to her ultimate fate in “Long Term Parking.”
But Bobby was worrying prematurely—he arrives at the meeting unharmed. The mafioso meet with two Quebecois to work out a deal on expired Fosamax pills. The delivery schedule hits a snag as one of the Canadians has to take care of a problem with his sister’s ex-husband. Tony, ever the opportunist, figures out a way to get a discount on the pills and wreak vengeance on Bobby simultaneously; Tony decides to have his own brother-in-law whack the Canadian’s brother-in-law. But is Tony actually taking revenge on Bobby here? Or is he just focused on maximizing his profit? I think it’s probably a little of both. Tony has always had a talent for managing his affairs, and here he is able to solve his family- and famiglia-affairs neatly with just one stroke. As they drive back to the lake house, Tony looks quite contented. He cheerfully waves to a beautiful water-skier who cheerfully waves right back. But Bobby is clearly uncomfortable and apprehensive as he thinks about carrying out his first hit (or having to “pop his cherry,” as Tony had put it earlier).
Regardless of how uncomfortable he is, Bobby is not going to refuse Tony’s wishes. Bobby tracks down his mark and uses a photograph (which, notably, has a small child in it) to confirm that he has the right man. Bobby corners his victim in a laundry room and puts a bullet in his chest. The dying man clenches Bobby’s shirt before getting finished off with a bullet to the head. Bobby flees the laundry room, leaving a big piece of his shirt—and a bigger piece of his soul—behind.
The final two minutes of the hour rank among the most powerful two-minute sequences of the series. Tony sits on his couch at home, watching the old home movies that Janice gave him for his birthday. He has a look of amusement and nostalgia as he watches himself and his sister play in front of their childhood home in Newark. There is something bittersweet about the footage. There is sweetness in seeing little Janice and Tony cavort together just as any small siblings in the world would do, full of innocence and joy and playfulness. The bitterness comes from the knowledge that little Janice and tiny Tony will grow up in an environment of dysfunction, crime and violence that will leave its mark on their entire lives. Chase cuts from this scene to the scene of Bobby returning to his lake house after performing the hit. Little Nica excitedly runs to her father with arms wide open as soon as she sees him. (Prof. Yacowar notes that this imagery perhaps calls back the image of Meadow rushing to her father when he returned home from jail earlier in the hour.) There is bittersweetness here too: sweetness in seeing father and daughter embrace in one of the all-time great embraces of the series, but bitterness in the knowledge that Bobby has crossed a red line—no matter how tightly he clings to his innocent daughter, he will no longer be able to cling to the idea that he possesses a measure of innocence that the other mobsters lost long ago. And there is bitterness in the knowledge that Little Nica will now grow up in the home of a murderer. And bitterness in the fact that the child of Bobby’s victim, who we saw in an earlier photo, will never be able to hold his father the way that Nica does her own dad now.
Chase pipes in The Drifters’ 1960 hit “This Magic Moment” as Bobby looks out at the lake, holding on to his daughter like his life depended on it. It is a beautiful and moving song, but I think there is also something clever in its selection. 1960 was the first year of what was arguably the most tumultuous, transformative decade in American history, and much of the ensuing music of the Sixties reflected this tumult. “This Magic Moment,” however, still has that sweetness and wholesomeness that we associate more with the 1950s. The song, in a sense, reflects that period in American history when we transitioned from the relative “innocence” of the Fifties to the turbulent experience of the Sixties—and thus poignantly underscores the loss of Bobby’s innocence now. (I wonder how many thousands of backseat teenyboppers in the real world must have lost their innocence—or “popped their cherries”—to this very song?)
When we first met Bobby Baccalieri in episode 2.02 “Do Not Resuscitate,” he did not command much respect. (Tony threatened to shove his quotations book up his fat fuckin’ ass.) And after hearing his Notre Dame/Nostradamus confusion in 4.01, it might have been insulting to rocks to describe him as “dumb as a rock.” But he has become more of a substantial person over the seasons. Tony even hints to him now that he may replace “someone” in the hierarchy who Tony has been grooming to look after the family and la famiglia should something happen to him. (We know that that “someone” is Christopher. There is obviously some sort of beef between Tony and Chris—Tony disgustedly hangs up when Chris calls to wish him Happy Birthday. Perhaps T is still stewing over Christopher’s relationship with Julianna Skiff.) I think it’s possible that one reason why Tony assigns the whacking in this episode to Bobby is because he wants to give Bobby greater responsibility now that his relationship with Chris is in a chilly spot. I had previously found it a little weird that mild-mannered Bobby would want to marry a woman like Janice (even if he does like “the spitfire type”), but now we really see how advantageous—perhaps even a little cunning—it was for him to marry the Boss’ sister. Bobby Bacala has steadily been making his way up the ladder in SopranoWorld, and will continue do so through Season 6.
You’ve come a long way, Bobby. Just try not to think about the fact that every step you take forward as a mobster means you’re taking two steps backward as a human being.
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One of the most interesting things about S6 Part II is how we as viewers approached it. Some TV shows have the misfortune of ignominiously getting cancelled between seasons, and therefore its viewers were never even aware that they were watching its final season. That is definitely not what happened with The Sopranos—we were all very aware that this was gonna be it. And that is probably why we had such a tendency to read into every little detail in The Final Nine, tried to read into how every little thing might predict the ending. This becomes even truer on re-watch; we tend to endow the events of these final episodes with great prophetic significance.
In this context, there are quite a few things in “Soprano Home Movies” that have taken on stupendous importance within Sopranos fandom. Some viewers found a significant parallel in the fact that Tony now turns 47 years old, the same age that Eugene Pontecorvo was in “Members Only.” [This becomes significant for some viewers because the guy in the series finale who wears a Members Only jacket bears some resemblance to Eugene, and Eugene himself died at age 47.] Many viewers have also retroactively loaded great weight onto Bobby’s speculation about what it might be like to be gunned to death: “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens.” This line, the argument goes, may be commenting on the sudden silence that closes out the series.
There is one quick scene here that seems particularly freighted with significance:
This short clip has an almost mythological heft, it is seemingly filled with all sorts of noteworthy stuff. For starters, there is the water, which is endowed with significance on this series because “water” can be linked to the Soprano swimming pool, Pussy’s final resting place, Vin Makazian’s suicide, etc. Then there is the duck (ducks again!) taking flight behind Tony. There is the appearance of the boat, the same boat that Bobby and Tony sat in as they speculated about death earlier in the hour. There is the sound of a bell, which some viewers have subsequently connected to the bell at Holstens Diner.
But are we making too much of all this? In his book The Sopranos, Dana Polan makes note of this scene, but he calls attention to it because it is, in his words, “performing a joke on the viewer’s expectations.” As the dreamy sound of “This Magic Moment” begins to softly swell, we might think that the music is going to guide us into one of Tony’s flashbacks or symbol-laden dreams, but that possibility is quickly cut short when it is revealed that the music is actually coming from a radio that Bobby is fiddling with nearby. Polan cautions us that it may be a fool’s errand to read too much into the series:
The Sopranos flings seeming symbols at the viewer but then disarms the act of interpretation by making the symbols reveal nothing…The Sopranos tantalizes with suggestions of hidden significance, only to show the quest for profound understanding as more than a bit ridiculous and pretentious.
The tail end of the video clip I posted above illustrates just how ridiculous the quest for hidden significance can be, when Janice reads way too much into the way that Tony is sitting on the dock:
Janice: Fuckin’ look at him out there.
Bobby: What?
Janice: I’ve seen that ‘sitting in the chair’ thing.
Bobby: Come on, people sit in chairs.
Janice probably isn’t lying when she says she has seen that ‘sitting in the chair’ thing—she has likely seen Tony stew in anger while sitting in a chair before. (I know that we viewers have seen it before.) Janice is attempting to make meaning in the same way that we all make meaning: by making connections. She connects her previous experience to what she sees in front of her now as she tries to figure out what Tony’s intentions regarding her husband are. In a similar way, viewers began scouring previous episodes after the supremely ambiguous Series Finale, seeking connections and links that might help us to make meaning of that cut-to-black. It’s only natural for us to do so. “Soprano Home Movies” seems to provide some very key links and connections in this regard, but we would be wise—as Polan suggests—to be skeptical of how reliable and meaningful these links actually are.
CONNECTIVITY
In addition to the possible foreshadowing connections to the Series Finale that I outlined above, “Soprano Home Movies” also makes links to other episodes. And it does so in abundance. The opening scene is closely connected to episode 5.13, even using footage from that earlier hour. The dead “boyfriend” that Janice alludes to here must be Richie Aprile, who she shot in episode 2.12. The “gardener” that Janice mentions may be Sal Vitro. Janice tells an anecdote concerning Tippy, the family dog first mentioned in 5.07. Tony brings up the secret tape recording that Janice made of him when they were kids, a story we remember Tony telling Melfi about in 6.10. The “summer place” that Carmela brings up must be Whitecaps. (I think Tony quickly changes the topic because he doesn’t want to go down that particular memory lane: it was just as they were trying to buy Whitecaps that goomar Irina made the vengeful phone call that directly led to Tony and Carmela’s separation.)
Also, the dirty lyric that Tony baits his sister with here (“Under the boardwalk / With a schlong in Jan’s mouth”) connects to previous blowjob-references: it was at the dinner table in 2.02 “Do Not Resuscitate” that Tony made a sly joke about Janice’s propensity for giving oral sex; and it was in 5.03 “Where’s Johnny?” that Tony mentioned her blowing roadies. (“Roadies?!” Bobby exclaimed.)
I think another noteworthy connection may be found here in Carmela’s story about their pharmacist Pradeep, whose little boy suffered brain damage after almost drowning in a swimming pool. The swimming pool has an almost mythic status on this series, it has been a site of several significant moments since the Pilot (see my 5.09 entry for a partial rundown). Carmela’s story about the fate of her pharmacist’s son in the swimming pool seems to portend an event that will befall her own son in their own backyard pool in an upcoming episode.
RX FOR SUCCESS
Even though viewers are meeting the Quebecois for the first time, we learn here that the Canadians had previously supplied the NJ mob with the anti-cholesterol drug Lipitor (is Chase taking a dig at the stereotypical “fat American” with this particular medication?), and now they will supply the mobsters with expired Fosamax pills. The mob is branching their business out into the very lucrative pharmaceuticals market. There is some irony in the fact that Tony had earlier barred Corrado and Richie Aprile from dealing cocaine on their garbage routes (because it was too risky despite the profits, the same reason Vito Corleone resisted trafficking hard drugs in The Godfather) but he now jumps at the opportunity to sell FDA-approved, legal drugs manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry. During the decade in which The Sopranos first aired, there were beginning to be contentious debates and concerns about Big Pharma’s lobbying power, pricing strategies, marketing practices, and influence over doctors and healthcare professionals. In general, I applaud the industry (particularly the folks in research & development) for reducing the amount of death and disease and pain we must suffer. At the same time, I am made uncomfortable by Big Pharma’s role in a massive insurance/industrial/healthcare complex that often seems to prioritize profit over public health. This particular type of complex is pretty unique to the United States, it doesn’t exist anywhere else on quite the same scale.
It is fitting that the Soprano’s pharmacist is named “Pradeep,” as this particular profession has gained immense popularity among Indian-Americans. I would need about 7 hands if I were to try to count on my fingers the number of Indian-American friends and family I have that work as pharmaceutical professionals in one capacity or another. One of my relatives who makes his living as a pharmaceutical sales rep likes to joke that he is a “legal drug dealer.” Tony Soprano, unlike my relative, cannot call himself a legal drug dealer (even though the products T is trafficking were in fact lawfully manufactured). Chase seems to be showing us, yet again, that Tony and the mob have a talent for setting up moneymaking schemes in the margins of very lucrative American industries. There is something almost prescient here in the Fosamax storyline; in the coming years, legally produced drugs would become as much a part of the American drug crisis as illicit drugs have been historically. I won’t dwell any more on the issue of Big Pharma’s power and influence because it is coming out of such a relatively small plot-point, but I think it may be fair to say that the Fosamax storyline here could be part of Chase’s continuing effort in Season 6 to wade into social issues and couch The Sopranos within its American milieu.
Another cultural issue that Chase puts his spotlight on in a much greater and more obvious way is the issue of terrorism…
THE WAR ON TERROR
Terrorism and its related matters have been recurring subjects in Season 6, and Chase brings them more to the foreground in the Final Nine. Just in this episode:
- Paulie compares Tony returning home from jail to the return of soldiers fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan
- Bobby wants to see our national borders more secured (even though his father was able to get into the U.S. only because the northern border is so porous)
- Reports of recent Iraqi and American deaths in Baghdad are heard over a radio broadcast
Chase uses the threat of terrorism as a way to build more tension into these last episodes, but I think Chase’s larger objective is to show that life goes on in SopranoWorld, lavish and luxurious as always, despite the threat and our ongoing efforts to defend ourselves. SopranoWorld characters may make comments about terrorism here and there, but there is a notable lack of any meaningful political or civic engagement by them. They’re not alone in their apathy—the War on Terror was raging at the time this series originally aired, but many Americans, including myself, largely detached ourselves from it. (I can tell you off the top of my head roughly how many American soldiers died in the Civil War, WWII and Vietnam, but I can’t tell you how many died in Iraq or Afghanistan without turning to Google.) SopranoWorld characters may not be all that different from the rest of us in how they pushed the threat of terrorism to the periphery of their thoughts while they continued to grab with both hands at all the various luxuries and goodies before them. “Gimme Gimme Gimme” remains the prevailing mantra of American life even at a time when American life is existentially jeopardized by terrorism.
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This episode earned an ‘Outstanding Drama’ Emmy for the series in 2007. “Soprano Home Movies” was also nominated for ‘Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series’ but failed to win. Despite the loss, the episode is an outstanding piece of film-art. Shooting for the episode was a bit complicated, as cinematographer Phil Abraham explains at Kodak.com:
The lake house was a location that we tried to exploit by blending interior and exterior scenes as much as we could. The biggest challenge was the endless Monopoly game that unfolds in one boozy night of family fun. Not only was it a challenge to light and stage this scene in a small practical location but due to Jim Gandolfini’s then recent knee surgery, it became clear that he could not give it his convincing-all during the drunken brawl with his brother-in-law. The solution was to match and build the location on a stage six months later. By the time the first punch is thrown, we cut to the stage work where the rest of the fight unfolds. Bob Shaw, our production designer, did an amazing job of recreating the environment. I am particularly happy with the seamless integration of the two.
An episode from Rome won the Cinematography Emmy that year. I haven’t really watched much of Rome but it’s hard for me to imagine that any episode of that series could be more memorable or gorgeous than this hour of The Sopranos. (I take some comfort in the fact that that winning episode of Rome was shot by Sopranos-regular Alik Sakharov.) “Soprano Home Movies” is an all-round extraordinary episode and it gets Season 6B up-and-running with a bang.
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ADDITIONAL POINTS:
- Real-life prosecutor Dan Castleman reprises his role as “District Attorney Castleman” here. (We saw him in about 8 episodes prior to this one. Dan also worked as technical/legal advisor to David Chase in previous seasons.)
- Back in “Boca” (1.09), we learned that Tony gives Carmela head exactly once a year; I’m guessing it would be on her birthday. In the current episode, we see Carm return the favor on Tony’s birthday. (The scene is constructed similarly to the BJ scene in “Cold Stones” (6.11), in that we think at first that Tony is having another one of his panic attacks, but then realize he is just convulsing with pleasure.)
- The fuckin regularness of life…in jail: When a man pulls his pants down and squats behind him, Tony is made to remember that when you have to take a shit in the cell, you have to take a shit in plain sight of everyone in the cell with you.
- Monopoly as real-life #1: During the game, Carm groans, “Aw fuck! Income tax!” (Their whole life is spent in avoidance of reporting income tax.)
- Monopoly as real-life #2: According to Soprano family rules, money that should go into the Community Chest is instead put into the middle of the board where one lucky player can win it. We’ve actually seen Soprano family members raid community dollars in their real lives, with Medicare insurance scams, a HUD housing scam, Janice scamming welfare checks…
- Take 5: Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is fittingly playing on the sound-system when Tony sneaks $500 from the bank during the Monopoly game.
- Clever sound editing: As Bobby enters the apartment complex where his victim lives, we hear a kind of repetitive thumping. We assume its coming from a drum set, because it was mentioned earlier that Bobby’s mark is a drummer. But the sound turns out to be coming from the tumbling of some sneakers inside a clothes dryer. One of Bobby’s bullets goes into the dryer, leaving us to wonder if a forensic investigation will eventually lead to Bacala’s downfall.
- Most viewers also wonder, on their first viewing, if the scrap of shirt that Bobby leaves behind in his victim’s hand is going to lead to him getting busted (especially because some dialogue earlier in the hour had Bobby mentioning something about “DNA evidence.”) But Chase is not interested in turning his series into a procedural—there are already enough Law & Order spinoffs out there.
- Steve Schirripa does a DVD commentary track for this episode. Just as his character delivers the line that prompted so much discussion after the Series Finale—“You probably don’t even hear it when it happens”—Schirripa mentions that Chase and the writers pay great attention to details and nuances, which further seems to bolster the importance of this bit of dialogue. But then on the other hand: in a February 2015 interview, Schirripa told Scott Shannon on WCBS 101.1 that “My opinion of the ending was that Tony Soprano was alive… I think life went on. What you saw is what you got, and that was it. Life goes on, he’s back with his family and just keeps movin’ on.”
- My header pic is a detail from a Robert Rohrich painting of Lake Oscawana, the actual lake that was used in the filming of this episode.
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/lake-oscawana-robert-rohrich.html - Coming back to Robert Altman for a second… I think Altman would have been happy to see how David Chase partnered with HBO to produce a series that completely stretches our understanding of what the gangster-genre can do. It was with HBO that Altman produced Tanner ’88, a show that practically created an entirely new genre: the TV serial-mockumentary. Chase and HBO produced a short mockumentary of their own, Making Cleaver, which (if I remember correctly) aired in conjunction with the upcoming episode, “Stage 5″…
Sopranos Autopsy 
This is one of my favorite episodes!! Any family gathering is rife with old resentments. Tony is simmering about a lot of things that have to do with Janice. She brings up the gardener, criticizing that Tony cancelled him, she tells a story that he doesn’t like to remember….Bobby protects Janice’s feelings, even though she could care less, a lot of things were going on in Tony’s mind. Bobby did sucker punch Tony, but then he got the best of him in the fight fairly. I can see that both women were worried about what was going to happen to Bobby when he is alone with Tony. Tony was angry, and knows he can’t really kill him because he’s married to Janice, and it would be too obvious…but he kills his “innocence” instead. I’m surprised you didn’t mention Janice’s parenting skills with Nica, how it highlights Janice’s similarities to her mother. Remember, Janice is all about speaking up and telling truths when she first comes to town…, but doesn’t allow the baby to express her anger when she has to get out of the lake..because Tony made her nervous with his story of drowning…again we feel his reach. Tony mentions that story about the kid drowning in the pool AFTER he sees NIca playing with the Nanny. He said it to upset Janice because she brought up how he’s changed since the accident…the whole episode shows Tony’s pettiness and vindictiveness. It’s interesting to me how Carmela knows Tony is vindictive and possibly might hurt Bobby, but denies it to Janice. Is she protecting him or herself when she denies Tony’s spitefulness to Janice? They both know what he is capable of. Also, the whole reason he decided to go upstate is because he didn’t like to see AJ with Blanca’s son and AJ explaining that in “Our Neighborhood people don’t come out so fast” when she comments that “He’s out already?” when Tony comes back from jail. Also, it’s very true of Italian families to have a big blow-out and forget it the next day or the next half hour…(I know this from experience.) “I made a frittata!” Food soothes the savage breast in Soprano world. I guess Janice’s cooking skills have improved.
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I don’t know if you were meaning to call back episode 2.02 with that “savage breast” reference, but it’s a fitting callback: it was in that episode that we first really saw the similarities between Livia and Janice, and some of those unfortunate similarities can also be seen in this hour as you note..
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I love the scene with Tony in the chair on the dock…when the bell rings he takes notice and looks over his shoulder at it. Interesting theory that it was a premonition of his death….if he had done the same in Holstens when the bell rang he may have avoided being shot by Members Only guy.
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Thanks Ron!
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👍🏼
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Back during the HUD scam, Tony told Zellman that he wasn’t a businessman because he wasn’t looking for maximum value. Talk about maximum value in the situation with assigning Bobby the hit on the brother-in-law. Like you said, a little revenge for the Monopoly fight and a little boost in responsibility, and I think there’s another angle. It seems that Tony is giving up on Christopher and looking to Bobby as a replacement. There’s no way Bobby will be accepted unless he’s got a hit under his belt. As cruel as it was to assign the hit to Bobby, it was to his advantage career-wise.
This is a great episode, loaded with tension, and like so many other episodes, there are countless details. I had noticed Dave Brubeck playing in the background, but I didn’t connect it to the money Tony was sneaking from the bank. And when Tony hung up mid-sentence on Christopher, that was hilarious. Also, I think that we see more of the loose ends in Tony’s life that might get snagged. The tension with Christopher, the childhood issues with Jan, the gun charge, and Tony’s personnel problems are all things in his life that are fraying and in desperate need of fixing. He’s not spinning out of control, but things are definitely complicated.
Edie Falco should probably win some sort of award for how awful she sang in that episode.
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Lol I’ve praised Falco for going without makeup when the scene calls for it, and her singing here is sort of the vocal equivalent of that… she just opens herself right up..
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Her choice of song is also significant. “Love Hurts.”
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I remember watching this when it first aired and thinking throughout the show “what’s with that bell?”. I thought maybe it was one of those things that bug some people and isn’t even noticed by others. Ever been with people and one says something like “What is that humming?!” It’s driving them nuts, but to me it’s the fridge or something I’m used to or something that isn’t even coming up on my radar. So, when Tony finally turned and looked at the source of the bell–and it got its own camera shot–I thought “Ok, it is purposely prominent. Awesome.” But, then it really didn’t turn into anything; unless, of course, there is a link to the Holsten’s bell. I remember right after it aired, I thought “they did a great job having that bell ring throughout the episode, only to directly call our attention to it at the end; can’t wait to see what it means.” …and then I missed it. Haha I either missed it or it wasn’t as significant as I felt it was on first viewing. We’ll see…
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“Love Hurts” by Nazareth was on the “Hair of the Dog” album. The morning after the Tony/Bobby fight, Bobby offered them a drink as he remarked, “Hair of the dog.”
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Good catch!!
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Love the review. One of the most interesting things about this episode is the subtle reference to Fredo’s death at Lake Tahoe in GFII. Tony sitting on the side of the lake seems to be meditating a similar revenge. And I had to admit that the camera shot of the empty boat rocking fooled me for more than a minute.
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Yes, definitely some Lake Tahoe vibes in this episode…
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Everytime i check and see you’ve added another write-up, I get a Cosby smile, lol. Thanks for these, Ron. I look forward to every one.
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😄
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I think this final scene, in which Bobby comes home to, at the very least, a fresh and powerful reminder of what life’s most precious gifts are, will contrast powerfully with Tony’s supposed relegation in the desert, when he claims to “Get it!” Comparing those two final moments dramatizes which character is actually “getting it.”
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I’m almost certain that “This Magic Moment” is one of the songs Tony spins through on the jukebox at Holsten’s. What does it mean? I dunno.
I love the casual conversation about murder while Tony and Bobby are on the boat. “My pop never wanted it for me”…like he was talking about masonry or used car sales or factory work or something. Not only does Bobby beat Tony in a fight, but a) he doesn’t have any murders on his conscience and b) he actually enjoys his family and their company. Ordering Bobby to perform that hit was one of the cruelest things Tony ever did, which becomes something of a theme in 6B. That conversation also sort of frames “fathers and sons”, another major 6B theme, obviously.
The kid who finds Tony’s gun looks a little like teenage Tony from his Tony B. memories in season 5. Interesting, though meaningless (probably LOL). And given how it eventually worked out, is it fair to say that Bobby might have been better off with Mikey Palmice’s ex instead of Janice?
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Yes, it was cruel, but it is organized crime, and I’m sure he would be called upon to kill somebody as he rises in the ranks. Bobby may be the nicest of a very bad bunch..but he’s no angel either. It really doesn’t make sense that Bobby is made when he hasn’t killed anyone…I thought that was a rule. Who he killed was what made it even worse, somebody who is blameless and unconnected to organized crime. Who knows if that story is true about the custody issue? They know nothing about it except what those Canadian guys told them…We’ll never know and neither will Bobby. That’s the life he chose…and the wife he chose and so that’s that. He has to deal with it.
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Orange – I also questioned why Bobby was a ‘made man’. He became acting capo when Junior made Murf Lupo step down in the ‘For all debts’ episode (Wikipedia.com). Apparently, Bobby was also the ‘de facto underboss’. This still doesn’t make any sense, as you have to ‘make your bones’ (kill someone) before you can become a capo. I found the only coherent explanation on movies.stackexchange.com, which says “Heavy earners or experienced associates have become made men … [and for that] they are sometimes derided or mocked”. And we all know about the teasing Bobby has put up with over the years.
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PS. I was watching the final episode of the wonderful series ‘Columbo’ (2003) this morning, and dropped my jaw when I saw none other than Steve Schirripa making a very brief appearance as mob messenger ‘Freddie’! Odd that I didn’t even ‘see’ (recognize) him until now. I guess we come to associate an actor only by his/her most famous character in such an acclaimed series (Sopranos).
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“And given how it eventually worked out, is it fair to say that Bobby might have been better off with Mikey Palmice’s ex instead of Janice?”
I’d say it’s very fair to say that marrying a woman who’s maybe a bit dumb but also pretty hot (Exhibit A: http://i.imgur.com/Ih5LVHB.gifv) over an unattractive woman who’s manipulative, controlling and murdered her previous boyfriend, yea.
But to each their own.
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I’m not sure that’s true. Bobby wouldn’t have risen in the mob without Janice’s influence. Plus, I doubt he was in love with her in the same way as his first wife. She fooled him at first, and manipulated him, but he caught on. He had the daughter who loved him so much, and I think Janice cared for him as much as she was capable of. The whole family is rotten with evil really.
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“Bobby wouldn’t have risen in the mob without Janice’s influence.”
True. But by that logic, when they were targeting the top 3 guys in the final episodes, then Bobby would’ve never had a hit taken out on him. So still alive and hot wife vs more money/power but dead younger and.. Janice. That’s not a very strong argument
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But he didn’t marry Mikey Palmice’s wife. I don’t think he would have even married again. That would have been the smartest thing. He did better with Janice because she’s the bosses sister. He probably would have just stayed a low level mob guy without her. Alive yes, but he chose Janice, and prospered no matter how bad she was.
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Aaaand we’re back with Ron, our man in Sopranoland, for the home stretch. Whaddya know, whaddya say?
Tony’s pettiness and vindictiveness have, of course, always been a part of the show, but man does shit go down the tank from here on out. It’s a bellwether of the demonic Tony to come. There’s some interesting Bobby/Chris mirroring here. The “happy” ending of “Kaisha” sets it up; for all the feelgood family dinner vibes, we have, as you noted, Tony already brooding about the decay (TVDW’s word for it) of his relationship with Chris, who’s over there hogging all that ice. But what does Chris have that Tony doesn’t? Not much. Interesting he’s in that beret in the scene, besides the obvious laugh factor, it’s unlike Tony. He wasn’t feeling like himself after the shooting, he dreamed he was another man, and when he lobs his veiled criticism at Chrissie, he doesn’t look like his usual self. Every day is no longer a gift, it must be taken, just as before. He’s got to hog all the ice himself, hold a vig over Hesh’s head, burn the bridge with his nephew. He has to assert his dominance w/ Bobby, who seems happier w/ his family, who’s perhaps stronger than him. Unlike Chris, he has things Tony does not. At the same time, Tony sets up a new #2. Tony wins two ways, four if you count the Quebecois angle. In “For All Debts…,” Tony spoke of binding Chris to him, and Chris will later rage about giving up pieces of his soul and “going to hell” for Tony. Yet the Barry Haydew hit was presented to Chris as a sort of gift; Chris cites it as such in “The Strong Silent Type.” Something is given. For Bobby, the murder he’s tasked with is a punishment, something is taken. But again, we have the binding. Demonic Tony finalizes another Faustian bargain, but in the opposite way. Guess talk therapy really did make him a better criminal.
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Great episode, great recap! I love the power dynamic between Tony and Bobby. Bobby takes so many insults before lashing out during the Monopoly game and the next day he is forced to go along with the fiction that he sucker punched his boss. Tony often complains about it being lonely at the top but he’s not above pulling rank in order to save face.
Question: is the lake tinted red at the end??
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I think they play a little bit with color levels and saturation this season, and the tint could be a side effect of that.. it could also just be the natural color of the water at that time of day.
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I think he did sucker punch him. How could Tony expect that when he is so horrible all the time and nobody checks him? Tony says its because he caught him by surprise to save face, and knowing no one will disagree. Bobby got the best of him.
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Naah. Even though Bobby hit him without warning, Tony was winning until Carmela interfered. Then Bobby hit Tony right where his surgical incision had been. If Carmela hadn’t jumped in, Bobby would never have gotten off the wall.
“How could Tony expect that when he is so horrible all the time and nobody checks him?”
He’s the boss. It’s a proscribed thing. It can bring a death sentence. You’re not supposed to hit another made guy at all, actually…but a boss?? Let alone your own!
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I guess I look at it like Tony felt Sucker punched because nobody would dare to check him. Add in that they were all drunk, and he was insulting Janice. It was a perfect storm.
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Hate to be that guy, but actually Steve Schrippa says that the team took great pains not to make it look like Carmela threw the fight in Bobby’s favor. Tony still gets a good grip on him after she gets thrown to the floor. It was the head butt that beat him back, and Schrippa actually tore cartilage in Gandolfini’s nose, as he had failed to move his face. They took him to the hospital but the nose wasn’t quite broken. Of course you can judge for yourself but that’s coming from behind the scenes…
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Great. Thank you.
6pt II is one strange beast indeed. Heavy bass blues.
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I think Tony’s birthday is August 22, 1959. David Chase’s b-day is 8/22/45. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZqLLfpxZkY&t=95s)
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Ok that looks right… never realized he shared a birthday with Chase.
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I know this is a little off topic but I’m curious… if Tony was born in ’59, and Many Saints of Newark is set in the ’60s, any speculation how James Gandofini’s son can play him in the movie? He’s in his 20’s, isn’t he?
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Many people are wondering about this. I’m guessing Many Saints will also be set in the 70s or 80s as well. Or maybe T hits a giant growth spurt circa 1967…
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Maybe it’s like rocky junior aging seven years while his old man is bringing down the USSR in rocky 4?
No, I keep thinking about this too and my uneducated guess is that he is in the movie briefly as a cameo at the end.
Speaking of the movie, this is gonna be very interesting…one of the central themes of the show is the decline of Italian American identity, the mafia, the homogenization of America, etc. In 1967, the mafia was still at its zenith, there were still huge pockets of Italians in the east coast, and Italians had yet to be romanticized and mythologized by shows and movies like The Godfather, happy days, rocky, etc.
What does chase want to say about this? Knowing him, there have to be ruminations, explorations, etc..
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Shout out to the awesome way Carmella flicks the blood stained Monopoly piece off of Tony’s body after the big fight.
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I thought about gif-ing it. I wonder how many tries it took for the piece to land precisely within the camera frame.
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More than likely, she flicked, then some crew member tossed it or another Monopoly piece where they wanted it to go.
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I just thought Tony was re-playing everything that happened and brooding about it. And how he could get back at Bobby without killing him. It seems like he was exhausted from the whole thing. I don’t know if reading so much into every scene is really what Chase or the writers expected at the time. Some stuff is not murky, its just obvious.
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I think it’s a rule in general but like Johnny Sac said, they break more rules than the church. Which is part of the point of the show ….they break ruies when it’s expedient for them to do so. One of the reasons Albert Anastasia got clipped is supposedly he was selling memberships. Like the popes selling indulgences. The Catholic Church and the mafia have their roots in the same ancient Roman origins after all. This is why the books were closed in the sixties.
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I agree and I also think he was depressed about getting older , he mentions this to Carmela after this I think. Bobby too.
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This is certainly one of the greatest television episodes of all time. “Soprano Home Movies” can be viewed peacefully as a movie, regardless of the rest of the story.
The sixth season is the final reason why The Sopranos is the greatest opera of popular culture ever. If until the fourth season we could talk about an exceptional show, certainly the competition was very fierce, with Lost on all (personal opinion: The Wire was too high at the time), it is from the fifth season that The Sopranos becomes completely unattainable . What show would have risked blocking the plot (and annoying the audience) with magnificent episodes like “The Test Dream”, “In Camelot”, “Cold Cuts” or “All Due Respect”? With this last we witnessed one of the most sensational endings of the season that could be achieved: Tony Blundetto is killed with a gunshot to the head, the very one who started the hostilities between New Jersey and New York (Steve Buscemi appeared only for a few episodes!!!); Johnny Sack is arrested in the last few moments, Tony Soprano manages to escape, but at the beginning of the following season Corrado “Junior” will shoot him, almost killing him.
Now, any director would have decided to end the season with Tony Soprano who, dying, drags himself towards the telephone in the kitchen. Any TV director (watch the finale of the third season of “Gomorra” to understand how fearful and lacking courage are the creators of that bad series).
Not David Chase.
And I think “Soprano Home Movies” is yet another demonstration of courage, impudence and intransigence of The Sopranos, almost a opera by Dostoevsky.
POST SCRIPTUM.
Sorry for my bad-bad-bad english, ragazzi…
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*MISSING PART
Johnny Sack is arrested in the last few moments, Tony Soprano manages to escape, but at the beginning of the following season Corrado “Junior” will shoot him, almost killing him.
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You are spot on. The thing with blundetto is this: in life, in history, in personal relationships, many tragedies are set off by innocuous or unpredictable occurrences. And once set in motion, they engulf all in their wake. And the fact that key instigators are gone means nothing. Look at the Vietnam war. In the span of a couple weeks in November of 1963, the presidents of both south VN and the US were assassinated. It the war went on anyway.
Chase and his crew seemed to get this and you nailed it with your comment about tony B starting the war and being long gone before it’s finished.
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Hey Ron, great to see you back! Maybe Chase will expand on the Dominic Tedesco fight he mentions to Carm in this episode in “Newark”; HAHA!
Keep up the great work!
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Tony mentions**
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Thanks
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Hey Ron,
I’ve been keeping along with your analysis forever and I’ve always wanted to ask you this. In the scene where Carmela and Janice are talking in the kitchen, there’s what seems to be a central focus placed on a barrel placed in the corner of the kitchen counter. You can see a shot of it here: https://i.imgur.com/8zaQ1hq.png
While it’s in the background, there’s very clearly an inverted pentagram painted onto it. I was seriously creeped out when I first noticed this because on its face it’s not particularly thematically significant, it’s just there. After some Googling I found that another one appeared way back in 4×07, “Watching Too Much Television”. It’s in the scene where Tony sees Irina’s red high heels in Zellman’s house. Image here: https://i.imgur.com/f9PXLJQ.png
You can see pretty clearly that there’s a ‘3’ placed in the center of it.
Any idea of the significance, beyond some sort of freakshow symbolism?
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Hmm that’s interesting, but I’m not sure that Chase was “hiding” such secret symbols like that in his work. Even if he was, I imagine he would be doing it playfully, tongue-in-cheek, the way Led Zeppelin or Ozzy used to…
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Actually, there was nothing nothing tongue and cheek about Jimmy Page’s interest in the occult from all accounts. Dude bought alister Crowley’s house….and ozzy wrote an ode to the man….
Motley Crue however, I would agree used the pentagram for shock reasons only….
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Haha yes Crue is a better example
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I can’t make out the three on my phone, but I can see there’s something else in the middle of the pentagram in Sopranos Home Movies as well. Maybe it’s meant to point to parallels in those two scenes. Maybe a comparison of Janice to Irina? Or, the belt lashing Tony gave Zellman compared to the ass-whoopin’ he got from Bobby lol
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3 o clock?
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1. I always thought that by this stage, Christopher and Tony had grown apart since that by the start of 6×14, Cleaver is essentially finished, which probably meant Chris spent most of the hiatus working on it.
2. Tony bringing up the drowned baby intertwines him closer to his mother’s personality and her fixation of family death (“you’re always with the babies out tha windows”)
3. Carmella tells Tony he “gets away with murder” because he’s Bobby’s boss in this episode – and he literally does by making Bobby kill the drummer
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Good points
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Remember when Tony went to Junior about what to do with Chris and junior said put him down like a dog? That a heroin addict is a total liability? Tony didn’t have the heart to do it then…but he did tell Chris he was worried about him flipping over a five dollar bag of powder in the hospital right?
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I think Tony’s fixation on the drowned kid is in line with his affection for kids and animals. Like when the little kid says mommy at the park? After the BEVILAQUA hit?
This isn’t explored much in other than the test dream, but Tony seems to have wanted to be a football coach. The beauty of the character is that Tony could have been a great one, with his personality and warmth and charisma…and his seemingly genuine interest in kids…
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I think he said it to upset Janice, because she made the remark about him changing after the shooting. She got under his skin, and so he retaliated by giving her horrors about her own little girl possibly drowning. That’s why she got upset about her daughter being in the lake in the last part of the episode. Tony knows what buttons to push on Janice…. Its just pettiness and family bullshit. Yes, Tony has a soft spot for kids and animals, but this remark was not about that. He wanted to freak Janice out. Diabolical!!
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“You’re always with the babies out the windows!” It not only connects to Livia’s obsession with morbidity and babies, but was indeed meant to freak out Janice.
The other thing that interests me: He’s not even the one that told the story. He brought it up, for Carm to tell. And when Janice asks what he’s referring to, Carm says, “You don’t wanna know…”
But then she immediately tells her! 😆
That scene, to me, is not just about connecting Tony to Livia’s own morbidity, or Tony’s pettiness, but about how we, as people, LOVE to share awful stories of the “unthinkable”… it’s both a way to individually try to work thru those fears of the worst tragedy, and, strangely, a way to bond as a group, to collectively grieve. But there’s also a morbid thrill many get in having tragic news to drop on someone. Even Carm couldn’t resist, it seems…
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Have you considered writing in-depth character analyses? I’d love to continue reading your thoughts far after you’ve finished analyzing the episodes and seasons.
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Thanks, but probably not—I want to move on to other projects once I’m done with the episodes. (I suppose if I ever write the novel that’s bouncing around in my head, that would contain some character analysis—because that is essentially what most novels are…)
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I would buy the shit out of any novel you write, Ron. Youre an incredible writer and now that we’re all quarantined you can write it. Don’t tease us like this, make it happen
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👍
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The conversation between Bobby and Tony in the boat still gives me goosebumps to this day. I know most fixate on the statement bobby makes about not hearing “it” until it happens. But even more interesting is the exchange about bobby not having committed murder, despite his dad having been the terminator. There is SO much going on here, especially when you study Tony’s reaction. I believe Tony is jealous of Bobby and the protection his dad tried to provide – “He never wanted this for me’. It seems that Tony’s awareness of how his own father cost him his innocence is growing. Chopping off Satriale’s finger, assigning Tony his first hit, Johnny boy made his son a murderer. This started back with “In Camelot” when Johnny Boy was exposed as being much less than the great guy tony has memorialized him to be.
But the resentment towards father figures is not limited to his biological dad – it includes father figures like uncle june (tried to kill tony 2x), Paulie (accompanied tony on his first murder) and Dickie Moltisanti (more of a mentor to tony than johnny boy).
All of tony’s “fathers” have done him wrong, been poor role models, encouraged immoral behavior. I think a very strong case can be made that this is one of the prevailing themes of the final season… Tony wanting to kill his inner gangster, which is a direct product of all the poor paternal influence he received in his life. This can be observed in the test dream, his subliminal urges to kill paulie in florida, and even his justification for killing chris (with zero regret or emotion I might add)… any coincidence that after killing Chris, Tony exclaims “I get it!” as the sun (son) is rising? I am getting ahead of myself, but this type of connectivity is why this is the greatest show ever created.
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I think the Tony and Bobby relationship is an underrated thread in the series. Tony at first mocks him relentlessly but seems to be a little jealous and admiring of his dedication to his wife and his duty to Junior. He seems to appeciate Bobby taking care of junior as well at least until he’s shot.
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Ok, haven’t read the article yet – saving it as a treat for tonight’s shift – but welcome back and glad to see you are writing again ! So many more delicious goodies to come, I’m sure.
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Thanks
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“There is the sound of a bell, which some viewers have subsequently connected to the bell at Holstens Diner.”
Back in “Everybody Hurts” in Season Four, there’s a bell ringing in Tony’s dream after Gloria’s suicide and then the next day when Brian comes over to sign the papers for the living will. Is Chase conditioning us to associate the sound of a bell with death as far back as Season Four or are these random coincidences?
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The bell tolls a few other notable times in the episode too. Right after says brain dead, then again when hes lying prone on the bed after the beating.
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Your comment on the border is very good. There is very little said but there are deep meanings here. Fact is that a LOT of Italian were snuggled into the US and esp thru Canada. When Salvatore maranzano was killed in 1931 he was said to have been a massive alien smuggling coordinator. Even into the 80s, a lot of itals were smuggled in not the US to be untraceable ghost soldiers for the mob…esp the Gambino and bonanno families.
When Bobby says build the wall now he’s saying keep out Mexicans. His people were ok but keep out the Mexicans. Although it’s funny cuz some times you can’t tell the difference between integrated Mexican and Italian Americans at all…
Great lines..
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Janice knows all about the positive reinforcement you get from those one eyed Willie Wonka Laffy Taffies. Just sayin.
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😄
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Amazing episode! I found it interesting in a podcast Steve Schirripa was a part of (not sure which one but it always shows up in my recommended so other Soprano fans have probably seen it) he said that he shot the murder scene for this episode but David Chase decided that the actor who played the victim wasn’t right so they reshot the entire scene months later.
A, I feel bad for that original actor haha and B, I wonder what “it” was that David Chase wanted to convey? Ive never agreed with or liked the Harpo theory but it’s an interesting bit of trivia either way.
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I remember someone floated the theory that Bobby’s victim was actually Harpo soon after this episode aired. We remember that Harpo is French-Canadian because of that memorable scene of Tony mocking Janice last season, “I wonder what’s French Canadian for ‘I grew up without my mother?’ Sacre bleu, where is me mama?!” (The scene happened to be a pretty popular meme on social media today because today is Mother’s Day.)
But yeah, the theory is pretty whack…
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I had never noticed the “Hurricanes Win 2nd Consecutive Cup” headline on the Star-Ledger. They won their first Cup in June of 2006, so if this episode is set in August of 2006, this event wouldn’t be possible, as the next Stanley Cup wouldn’t have been handed out until June 2007.
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Hmm good catch. In any case, the Hurricanes never won two consecutive Finals so I guess the production dept messed up. Or it’s “Fake News”…
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Another little trivia is when Carmela comes in and Janice ask’s her if she wants a drink…Carmela says “Pelegrino…and Janice calls out “Shop Rite Sparkling?” or some other generic brand, which is another dig about their money situation. Carmela drinks designer water…Janice and Bobby can’t afford it. Just like the gardener remark…subtle…but so well written!
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Yeah I thought the same thing
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“There is bittersweetness here too: sweetness in seeing father and daughter embrace in one of the all-time great embraces of the series, but bitterness in the knowledge that Bobby has crossed a red line—no matter how tightly he clings to his innocent daughter, he will no longer be able to cling to the idea that he possesses a measure of innocence that the other mobsters lost long ago”
Wasn’t Meadow a baby when Tony committed his first murder (I forget which episode recapped it)? I wonder if he went through the same emotions that Bobby does as he returned home to face his family. I can picture Tony trudging up to the house, pausing, getting back in character as he opens the front door and announces he’s home. A sad, endless cycle
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Bobby’s emotional embrace of his daughter felt like a gut punch. Well done.
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After the Bobby and Tony fight is over, Carmela helps bloody Tony up to their bed and the alarm clock says 11:42pm.
Janice rages at Bobby next door in their room. “…he is head of the family, do you think he is just going to wake up tomorrow and forget about this?”
Tony awakens abruptly the next day and looks at the alarm clock. The brand name of General Electric is half washed out in light and we can see only “General” and the time is 4:04; a good internet error message to say that the browser cannot connect with the information requested!
He’s rather portly to be Napoleon.
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Another take on the Pradeep story is as a reference to Livia, who was constantly bringing up tragic stories involving children. In this way, now Tony is the one showing similarities with the mother. Later in the episode Janice talks about how their mother would “wait in the weeds,” which seems to parallel Tony’s own simmering vindictiveness. I think this is the same conversation where Janice tells Carmela that she (Janice) is “more like my father.” Carmela seems to take this as a sort of back-handed emasculation of Tony, which leads her to refer back to the prior fight and its perceived unfair nature.
Another interesting thing is that the Beehive hairdo story is seen as the instigation that leads to the fistfight. While this is definitely the trigger, I think it really begins with the bday gift Janice gives, hence the episode title “Soprano Home Movies.” In a previous episode Tony brings up the fact that Janice videotaped him and his other sister fighting, then blackmailed him with the tape. Tony goads Melfi into validating this, saying something like “don’t you understand what this means, to tape somebody in my family.” I think the text is referring to govt surveillance and/or evidence, etc. In hindsight, theres seems to be some psychological subtext. Tony receives the git, and maybe even he doesn’t realize, from that point he is just “waiting in the weeds” to strike back.
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Interesting take, and you make a good case for it
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I’m always puzzled by your high-opinion of Meadow, Ron. At this point, she appears to be a dilettante and little more. Is she even in school anymore and how does a serious student keep switching between two demanding academic pursuits? She doesn’t work, doesn’t seem to do or know anything, and in every serious family dilemma all she has to offer is some silly line to demonstrate her “knowledge”. She always makes me wince in embarrassment.
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Sounds a lot like me at her age lol…
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Watching talking Sopranos and Jamie-Lynn Sigler said essentially the same thing. She was playing a role with the whole Ivy-League persona, being what she thought she wanted and what she thought her parents wanted while rebelling at the same time. In reality she fit in to the mob world just fine. Much like many of us at that age, true! Of course she eventually ends up in a relationship with an Aprile.
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I’m surprised again how good Tony was with Math when they were negotiating the price of Fosamax with the canadians. I literally used a calculator to find out how much Tony saved by bringing down the price to $35k (20,000 tablets for $10 per four pieces is $50K thus they gained $15k)
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Bobby lashing out at Janice before going to pop his cherry reminisces Pussy screaming at his wife before going to whack that guy he saw at the store, or even when he was shaving his chest to wear a wire.
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Great parallel
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Where are Bobbie’s other two kids? They are mentioned in the episode but their absence is not explained.
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I always kind of figured they were away at summer camp or something. Maybe a little late in the season for it, but I would imagine they would be there or maybe visiting with relatives, something along those lines. They’re not so little anymore, Janice mentions Bobby’s Jr’s mouthing off since he’s becoming a teen, maybe he thought going to the lake with the family was “lame” or something and stayed home with his sister and they someone look in on them.
I personally don’t think their presence would’ve really added anything to this episode.
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whack – Well, let’s just be glad that Livia isn’t babysitting them, LOL.
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I know there has been some discussion about whether Tony and Carmela would support Trump. This is no guarantee either way, just an observation. When Bobby is talking about how his family member came over from Canada as an ‘illegal’ he adds that “they should build a wall now though’ and Carmela says “Amen.”
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Of course since Bobby is third generation and a murderer and thief, that is the best argument to build a wall. Keep illegals out and their descendants who are raised to be criminals and a threat to society.
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This episode plays with some recurring themes – the power memory, the loss of our innocence, and the limitations of our personal mythologies. Beginning with a flashback/flash-forward, it immediately disrupts our sense of clean, linear narrative. To a degree, we all live in the rear view mirror, looking backwards and forward at the same time. Yet memories are often faulty, self-mythologized, and largely grounded in our needs of the present moment. At the lake house, Tony and Janice traverse the familiar family narrative – their family living under the yoke of the terrorizing and manipulative Livia. Janice’s revelation that their gangster father actually shot at their relentless mother (in a car!) breaks with the usual story line, causing Tony some real discomfort. As we know from his sessions with Melfi, Tony avoids facing his father’s violence and how Livia, in her extreme narcissism, failed to protect him. Throughout the episode – with its idyllic lakeside setting, breaking with the usual North Jersey grit – there lies the tension between the innocence of a mythologized family unit and the terrorizing reality of domestic violence. Bobby’s break with his own innocence means the loss of another father’s life; Tony’s gains viewership of the sweet and idyllic home movies only after a literal wrestling match with his present-day family, not to mention after being shot and nearly killed by his uncle. Ron, as you point out, this is a dynamic that is almost universal as we mythologize our own families: the glowing nostalgia versus a harsher (or maybe just more banal) reality. “Soprano Home Movies” takes us on a brief vacation – a change of scenery and a look back in time – but it won’t allow the inhabitants of Soprano-world to outrun their past, nor escape their violent present. These ideas are a heavy presence throughout 6B and are faced again, head on, in “Remember When”.
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Yes, I think that for most of us, our first real experience of dealing with mythologies occurs through our families. We all have some version of “the aunt who is adventurous” or “the cousin who is the black sheep” etc. These myths about our relatives (and ourselves) may not be well-grounded in reality, but they acquire a kind of truth through the echo chamber of the family.
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totally agree…and Tony, much like Livia, is anti-nostalgic, as you illustrate in your excellent write-up of “Remember When.” I find this quality attractive really, and I have a hunch that David Chase does as well.
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jzs – I think that Tony is nostalgic for the past; the golden age of the mob, when men were ‘real men’. He does speak with nostalgia during his conversations with Dr. Melfi (i.e., telling her stories about himself and a young Christopher). Basically, Tony’s an extremely anxious and depressed man who prefers to deal with his emotional turmoil in acts of rage, rather than honesty. Then again, the capo cannot be honest about anything, especially his emotions.
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All those lines from Tony about _la cerva_ mounted on Bobby and Janice’s wall makes me wonder if perhaps it was always the fate of another _la Cerva_ to get shot in the woods…
Do you think Sil had her stuffed, too?
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Haha she’s buried with her Uncle Richie on a hill, overlooking a river with pine cones all around..
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Tony forcing Bobby to kill the French-Canadian father was retribution against Janice, not Bobby. Janice had killed before, as alluded to in this episode – her spouse hadn’t. She had a better life than Tony’s spouse because her husband didn’t live in a hell world where he always had to balance his love for his kids against the fact that he kills other kids’ fathers. In this case Bobby was forced, spiritually, to take co-responsibility for Janice’s French-Canadian son’s abandonment, in the same way Carmela spiritually takes co-responsibility for Tony’s crimes. As always, and as seen in the home movies, ever since Livia split them, they had to fight. But it’s unlikely Tony is conscious of this displacement, he seems to have to almost force himself to muster anger at Bobby instead of the true source of his irritation, his strategically saccharine sister. We’ve seen this before, when Janice goes to anger management, but her happiness here was more authentic.
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Did you guys know that the original title for the episode was “Chew the Fat” but was changed right before it aired to “Soprano Home Movies”
https://ibb.co/FHpCF6J < – – – – – Here are a few proofs displaying the original episode title.
Which if anyone is actually on here, and takes the time to read and appreciate the excellent writeups that Ron provides us with, then you probably know this little fact already. I'm glad they went with "Soprano Home Movies" I think it is a Much more fitting title than "Chew the Fat" As many of the moments that happen in the hour could literally be 'Sopranos Home Movies' The fight and other 'family' moments etc. But the old home videos that Janice has transferred onto DVD for Tony's birthday is the true origin and what a thoughtful kind gift from Janice.
We hear Tony say this ('Chew the Fat') when he is on the phone with Bobby returning home from prison (for the hour or so he was there) debating whether to take the trip up to the lake house for his birthday. But other than hearing him state this phrase, I really don't see any other references throughtout the hour. But might have to take it for another spin/viewing this week. Usually with the particular title names in each hour of The Sopranos there are more than enough references to be seen. Not that there has to be references or that it really even matters, but I just wondered what you guys/gals thought about the original title name .. ???
But this episode truly is one of my favorites and I have quite a few but this hour is certainly a top 10 episode for me ..
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Thanks for a pic of the call sheet, that’s interesting. I wonder if “Chew the Fat” was just a working title, which they sometimes use to help keep storylines secret or because they haven’t decided the actual title yet. In any case, “Soprano Home Movies” is one of the great episodes and great episode titles of the series..
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Thanks, Ron, for all the great work on the series, which I am coming to for the first time after years of living without a TV. I haven’t read the comments to see if anyone has raised this point, but there’s something one might also note about Bobby Baccala’s evolution. Yes, he is the butt of jokes and often characterized as the sweet, dumb guy. In the famous “Pine Barrens” episode (3.11), Bobby again seems ridiculous (remember Tony cracking up at Bobby’s hunting gear, Gandolfini’s reaction aided by the dildo that Schirripa surreptitiously attached below the camera angle). But it turns out Bobby has skills that aid considerably in extricating Christopher and Paulie from their wilderness dilemma.
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I like your write ups a lot but do find it annoying how hard you work to argue against the ‘definitive explanation of the end’ In all the many analyses I’ve read of the sopranos, yours is by the far the one I’ve thought to myself the most ‘wow you are really reaching there’ I understand you always give a disclaimer that we never really know anything and you might be wrong, but that’s sort of implied no matter who is writing about the sopranos unless it’s David chase. I prefer a writing style of someone making an argument and standing behind it, everyone knows that person can’t possibly know for sure but the point of his piece is to argue a specific point. It’s obvious that kind of writing bothers you which is why you issue disclaimers so often, but to reach so far in so many situations to make connections and assign symbolic meaning, then take a whole bunch of obvious symbols/callbacks/connections in an episode and say ‘but we have to be careful because maybe it all means nothing’ I find very frustrating, like what are we doing here. It seems like you just hate that anyone would speak definitively about what happened on the show so you’re going to argue against it
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There are a lot of ideas I believe in that I’m willing to stand “definitively” behind, like “man-made climate change is real” or “democracy good, fascism bad.” But I’m not willing to be so definitive about interpretations of a TV show–and I don’t think anyone else should be either. Maybe I do put up too many “disclaimers” as you call it, but I don’t ever want to be mistaken as someone who insists that I know the absolute truth about something whose truth simply cannot be absolutely known…
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Well, I think it gives us the opportunity to comment and give our point of view. I also think a lot of the comments take the meaning and the why of the story too far as well. I don’t always agree with the way the show is interpreted, but it gives us all a platform to express what we think. The show had a lot of nuances, but it’s also very straightforward as well. That’s the beauty of it. 😃
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I think you undersold Tony’s decision to make Bobby do the hit. It was a horribly cruel act of vengeance, coming straight from the cut with Janice and Carmela talking. Janice was implying she has her father’s hot temper, but Tony is like their mother who would ‘lie like a snake in the grass [waiting to strike]’ … Carmela replies ‘my husband is not vindictive’. This come later after a contented Tony expresses genuine goodwill to Bobby that he never has to suffer with the haunting feelings of doing that.
Janice comment is also ironic given her prior snakey symbolisms.
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Didn’t see this mentioned anywhere, so I will add this observation: when Tony and Bobby are sitting in the boat, Tony is suggesting that Bobby may take a greater role in mob affairs as Chris has let him down repeatedly. Bobby is potentially going to be the ‘family link’ who he could (potentially) trust that will insulate him from rats, FBI, someone looking to whack him etc . If it isn’t already obvious that he has been referring to Chris, the final shot of that scene shows the name of the boat – ‘Chris and Geoff’, although it only really shows ‘Chris’.
Also, the bells…as you have previously mentioned, there is a lot of allusion to Asian culture and Buddhism throughout the latter seasons. Bells are used by Buddhists when meditating to remind them to concentrate on the here and now, to keep their minds clear. Like at the lake and in Holstein’s, the bells were put there by Chase to remind Tony that he should be enjoying the time he is spending with his family – not stewing over the fight with Bobby or looking at the fucking menu or mini jukebox. He is so caught up in his thoughts that he doesn’t appreciate what he has, even it could be taken away at any moment. Chase has made many quotes about this and how it relates to the Holstein’s scene.
I think that is why Chase gets so miffed at the question of whether he died in Holstein’s – that’s not the point he was making! It’s more about where his focus is and how he’s wasting his life, he’s not ‘present’ with his family, which is arguably his biggest failure as a person, regardless of all the horrible shit he’s done. His famiglia is more important to him than his family and it COULD be taken away from him at any moment. Yet, he is constantly distracted by ephemera and thus failing to give much attention to his actual family.
I do think the boat scene and this episode in general is key to the ending, but perhaps not in the way that many people assume it is, as they are too fixated on whether he gets whacked or not.
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It says “Chris Craft.” It’s the boat manufacturer.
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Tony gazing at the lake, and the foreshadowing of the last scene in the series with Bobby (Tony’s death, which, Chase confirmed actually as if it wasn’t obvious enough as it is) in a boat, on the lake… Can’t help but think of that huge lake as an ocean, and can’t help but think of the ocean as a big nothing. He stares at death, and then radio music takes him, and us, out of it. The last scene in Made in America is a radio song taking him and us in the moment of Tony’s death, mirroring this one. In fact, opening/title sequence to the series is him driving a car, also listening to yet another song on the car radio, bringing us into every single episode, so how else to end it but with an outro song. Bobby is the harbinger of death. He foreshadows the “you don’t feel a thing, everything goes to black” series ending scene, but also, the radio song: it’s him fiddling with the radio in this episode. His own death is very auditory, too. The train sounds and sirens. Bobby beats Tony in a fight because you can’t beat death, nor the harbinger of it. And how unassuming, the guy everybody laughed at becomes a signal for something that’s as serious as it can get. He also fucks his sister, as if it wasn’t enough bad news with Bobby. And then, his last name: Baccala, or Gadus morhua, a type of fish. Fish, in SopranosWorld, at the lake? Sleeping with the fishes? Who better for the job than Bobby to send you out to your big sleep.
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We can take it even further: Bobby doesn’t kill anyone on the show, but he does shoot that phony rapper in his ass. I think the rapper developed a sepsis in the hospital and died a tragic death, coz the harbinger of death doesn’t miss, nor fakes a killing. Then, as a confirmation of his assignment from Death itself, he ends up surviving an attempt at his own life, with just a scratch that goes away. He is the messenger of Gods, and cannot get hurt until his mission is done. He is… Bobby Baccalieri, the voice from the other side.
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Bobby also looks as a big, dark cloud, and is exceptionally unlucky himself: he loses a good wife, then marries fucking Janice. Even Chandler wouldn’t marry Janice. And this is not the first time that Bobby put Tony in deathbed: he was the sole reason for Tony getting shot by uncle Jun.
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I don’t know which Janice was more annoying 🤣
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A not so slight correction: the final scene of the show is Tony fiddling with the jukebox (not radio), in the same manner that Bobby fiddled with the radio on the lake, we get a close up and it’s a definite mirrored type a thing that makes the case even stronger that Tony is staring at his death. The other thing is symmetry, this being the first episode of the last season (S6 Part 2), and Made in America being the last. Something was bound to be mirrored, just for the sake of it, but this makes the ending even better for me, and I already thought the world of it.
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A couple of afterthoughts… This entire episode if filled with Young vs. Old, and Life vs. Death motifs. Structurally, this is the last part of the last season, so death and recapitulation are bound to be the theme, yet it is going on all the time. In the episode’s beginning that stupid kid whom finds the gun? Tony and his lawyer especially hate that little scumbag. Tony goes to jail, only to be reminded that he is too old for that shit, Jails are for younger people. Then the lake house, which again, is a place where teens and college kids go to do “whatever is that they do when their parents are not there”, but also, every lake house/country house is a ghost-house: nobody lives there except 3 to 10 days a year, and those sheetless mattress that Carmela lays on are the perfect signifier of this. The episode title is also a play at this, birthday theme, the fight, Tony complaining that it is his years, and only then him being shot, were the reason he lost the fight. Then, his comment about a kid (young kid) drowning to spite Janice, only to have that shot of him looking at Nica later in the episode, detesting her youth and Bobby and Janice being “young” parents and all of their ducks not away. On top of all of that, there is that one shot that everybody take for granted, when he is driving Bobby to/from the city, and a young girl is sea skiing, having the time of her life, staying on top of that lake (Death), he smiles and looks at Bobby who is NOT happy. He spites Bobby and makes him a Man by popping his cherry, forcing him to do it. Then, that drummer, he is so very young, deliberately, but you covered that part about murderous fathers wonderfully. Then, Tony’s famous stare at the lake, lake being the Death, if there ever was a reference to Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, that was one. In the next scene, Bobby even talks about fishing, again… it is too much. But… The best scenes in the episode that have to do with the lake, in my opinion, aside from the Tony’s contemplation with the lake and the trees, is Carmela and Janice sitting at the edge of the lake, discussing if Tony is going to whack Bobby for hitting him in the face. It’s amazing, I always hated how Janice walks with her shoes half in, half outside of the lake, and why in heavens would anybody do that, if the lake weren’t representing Death and Bobby being on the edge of it at that moment. Then Carmela joins her, and Valerian tea scene ensues, only this time, Carmela calls it and says to her directly that she has nothing to worry about, walking from the lake, and Janice standing up to the lake, knowing it’s been averted (a nice set up for the ending scene). Oh, the irony that Carmela would call Tony not vindictive after season 5… In the ending scene, you touched on Bobby’s shirt being ripped of by a dying young drummer: it’s a conclusion of the Old vs. Young theme, even younger father than Bobby is dying, death staring back at Bobby and marking him, that he too is going to leave his children too early. Also, leading to the ending scene that you elaborated perfectly on, with only two details I would add: Bobby takes Nica and stares at the lake like Tony and Janice before him, staring at Death with Nica pressing his chest where the shirt was ripped off, and looking in the opposite direction. This you can also see was very intentional, because the child actress was obviously distracted to look at someone standing behind the camera and instructing her to not turn around and face the lake, nor look at Bobby, but to keep looking away from the lake, as if Bobby was shielding her from it. Yet another tie in with the father theme and young vs. old is Bobby’s father plot, that dealt with this exclusively, and that is mentioned in the boat scene in this episode. Also, the only reason that Bobby survived the aftermath of that fight was shawn on Tony’s cheek: Tony might have been the head of la famiglia, but Bobby was the head of the house that Tony insulted, with Bobby’s kid sleeping upstairs. If that was not the case, he would have joined other Janice’s boyfriends, no doubt.
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Youth gone is of course present in the homevideo at the end, but also Janice mentions their cousin that is now old and on steroids, and used to be hot. On a side note, the black and white colour coding is present again with the cars: Tony’s is white, as he didn’t really kill anyone, in fact, he outsourced it to Bobby, who hit, killed, possibly fucked Janice that night, but also was the barbecue man, which in SopranoWorld means boss, atl least for a second. Just as he was setting it up, Tony intrudes and takes him out of it, telling Janice and Carmela that they are going “golfing”. The emasculation with the barbacue is fantastic, especially knowing that it is always Tony who does it, and the only other time that he wasn’t was when he himself got emasculated by Cusamano and his highbrow friends. Tony took the Man of the House, and made him his bitch just after promising him more power on the boat. This is the same conclusion as with Chris, and every other character: when Tony “gives” you more power, you are going to lose all the power that you had, have no doubts about that. Paulie didn’t, and it is exactly why he sold Tony out. He knew that everybody around Tony is destined to lose, and he wouldn’t have it.
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…and Bobby’s car is black. *
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Great and intriguing ideas..
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I’m amazed at how much people want Tony to die! Witness protection is what’s next because he is going to trial and then jail if he doesn’t flip. I’m sure he will flip, all his allies are dead. That’s the “Death” in the series. Tony’s crew and the life of crime.
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Well, I guess we will just have to wait and see, won’t we 🙂
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No, that’s just my opinion. We’ll never really know. I remember thinking when I first saw the last episode, I felt the story was over. The song by journey, “The movie never ends it goes on and on..” I took it to mean the story can’t go any further all the main players are gone and he will just continue lifestyle or go to jail.
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Tony dies in the last scene, though. It’s been confirmed many, many times.
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Hmm…
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I remember when back in the day, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 even, there were no debates about this. Once the show was released on Blu-ray and everyone could binge it in high detail with enough time passed after the TV premiere, it was over. Tony was dead (and it wasn’t the audience that killed him, neither). Then all of a sudden, Chase starts thinking about the movie, and starts muddying the waters on how the show ended. So, until cca 2016 he had no doubts about how he himself ended it (this implies he has alzheimer’s), then all of a sudden, he is ambivalent. How come he wasn’t ambivalent up to that point? He was so clear in the series themself that he wouldn’t even VERBALLY answer it FOR the audiance, then, suddenly, he’s so confused once he’s planing a prequel and in need of keeping “the debate” alive, that he gives a clear VERBAL answer that the ending isn’t clear. He cheapened it, as everybody else did, for the sake of profit; Breaking Bad, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, the list is so long… Coz that feature money is so good. The same happened to the Blade Runner (1982) debate once the sequel was in production, and is bound to happen with The Matrix 4. It’s obvious. Everything the viewer (and I mean every viewer that carefully watched the series) has to know is IN that scene. And it is not ambivalent, at all. It has a name. It’s called palimpsest. The problem is, no one in their right mind would do it to their own writings. It’s the others that do it, and Chase is watching the entire world do it close to a decade and a half. And that’s OK, as long as he doesn’t add to it, coz he can’t. It’s a done deal, he killed him, and now want’s to go back and change it. Can’t do such a thing and then accuse the viewer of reading it wrong. We read it right, it’s him that is playing games, and those games suck and are pure marketing and nothing else, even though he caters it to this idea of ambivalence. Ain’t no ambivalence in literature, it’s the proffesors that introduce it to explain the work, and it’s only the bad ones that do it to muddy the work – every writter writes with a purpose – that’s the whole point of writing anything. Ain’t no ambivalence in the religious texts, either, we just don’t get them fully because they are too old to understand properly – they were written by a human being, and human beings communicate not as Gods, but within the limitations of a language/text. But that is NOT the case here. And Chase knows it. He was always so smug in his little interviews, but he got a pass for being an amazing writter, but at this point, it’s sad. He misused his absolute power as a pantocrator of his universe, and now wants us to go along with it. Nah. Focus on the content, and you will see what happened. Focus on the gossip and cheap talk, and you will have doubts about everything. The wrong kind of doubts, not the ones that lead to a revelation, but the ones that make you naive. Art historians have a bad reputation exactly for this reason: they read too much into it, but add nothing, and don’t get the difference between what matters, and what is just a coincidence. But at least they have an honest motive for doing so, unlike Chase.
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Also, this idea that when it comes to endings, “we never really know”. Ok. How about the beginnings? Are we able to really know anything about them? Or the middle? Or the names of the characters, or their stories up to the end? We know how Blundetto ended, don’t we? We also know the ending of the series, unless the show doesn’t have it. Then, it is purposefully (or for the reasons like running out of money or canceling the show) ambivalent, coz it didn’t end. The whole point of having an ending is to end something. There are many ways, but it’s over after that. You can add to it later, but what was going to end, simply ended right then and there. New series can begin, but the old ones ended with a shot to the head, and that’s that. It’s so funny how we can comprehend everything UP to the last scene, but then it all of a sudden it becomes this impossible to decode that one moment in the history of television, that requires a genius to properly understand. It amazes me how naive that view is. We suddenly lost IQ and are unable to do it, as if the scene itself is outside everything that we saw up to that point. Including The Test Dream scene with the men’s room and gun not being there, and how dreams were a key component throughout the series, we are now just throwing all of that out the window, and are becoming these good little middle-ages Christians who really can’t know anything because it’s the works of an incomprehensible God. How come science, then? It’s ridiculous. Also, think about the name of the episode: whenever something in our house breaks Earlier Than Expected, we raise the question of: where was it made? China? Oh, well, then, of course it broke. It’s cheap. When Tony dies, the way he died, in a show obsessed with the American Dream, and the author says “well, when you go like that, you were Made In America”, we are all of a sudden unable to “really know”. It’s mystical. It’s unknown. It’s out of our reach. The Holstein’s are the only place in the entire SopranoWorld out of our reach, oh, how convenient for the production team of the prequel movie. And many people buy this! “It’s Art, Dave. We never know with art”. Yes, we do. We wouldn’t have art if it was comprehensible just until the end. We would have nothing then, and muddying the ending is doing exactly that: it shits on everything in the series that made sense, and that is pretty much, everything. So, no, the ending is clear, it uses the same perspective as every show intro that you watched for 83 times and for 8 years, the first person perspective. It ends just the way it started, he drove, he ate, he killed, he died. And the first season finale was tied with this, wonderfully, by Tony saying “it’s the moments like this” before having dinner with his family. Several season after, he reminisces on it with Artie. The song itself, just to provide a little backing in defense of common sense here, is NOT used in the same way others were throughout the show, and which can be divided into several categories 1) doubling on the scene’s meaning not with character of the music but with the topic of the lyrics, 2) instrumental songs that were used for outros and credits, that had no lyrics but set the tone 3) uncredited songs, usually heard in Bada Bing’s office coming from the main room and 4) songs heard on the radio/jukebox/in-film source, like with the intro. The song in the final scene, obviously, falls into the fourth category, but it ALSO falls into the first: until the black screen that stops it, because it stops the person perceiving it; it stops because the listener through whom’s ears we were experiencing it simply dies. So, instead of ascribing too much to the lyrics, perhaps think about how once you are dead, you can’t hear or see, which is EXACTLY what we experienced. It’s so simple, yet we are still debating this. But on the topic of lyrics, it does continue. Life continues, as Chase pointed out, for Carmela and the kids, but not for Tony. Also, he LITERALLY said “Tony is not coming back, that’s for sure”. Well, he did come back in the prequel, but I guess that’s not the Gandolfini Sr.’s Tony. Then Chase says how Gandolfini hated doing the show, but he leaves his character alive? Makes no sense. And why the Test Dream scene in the restroom? Just for kicks? Why reference Godfather all the way throughout the series, final scene included, but then make it “ambivalent”? Black screens are not ambivalent. They signify the end in cinema since forever, but I guess that’s also up to a debate. It was all a dream, then, since it can be anything and is “left for interpretation”.
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And just one last though: the Russian. Everybody keeps bringing Valery up whenever the ending is debated. This is just wrong. What happened at the end of Pine Barrens? Tony explicitly says to Paule: IF the Russian comes back, he’s your problem. If he’s dead, nothing to worry about. Does he not? So, no room for interpretation there, what so ever. No loose endings. That is an OPEN ending that can go either way, yes but the final scene of the series? That is NOT.
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I also have to add this, especially before we see your take on the ending, just as a thing that should be said because Chase is out there bombarding people with pure and utter bullshit every now and then: in literature, and even in music, whenever a piece is athematical, when it lacks one coherent narrative or a musical theme that gets transformed, modified, diminished, liquidated, then repeated in a different key/setting, with changed time signatures/periods of time in prose, dissolved and so on… That piece is not lacking a theme; rather, the entirety of the piece is one. huge. theme. If this is not something obviously true of the Sopranos, I do not know where it applies, since from the first season until the last, we are watching one and the same thing: Tony thinking. Tony thinking in dialogue, Tony thinking in his rage and panic attacks caused by thought overload, Tony thinking at therapy, Tony thinking at his house, in his bed, with Carmela, while he eats ice cream, while he pisses, Tony thinking about shit in his dreams. He is constantly thinking, and we are constantly watching. So, the ending scene… Once again, he is thinking. Where is Carmela? Oh, here she is. What about AJ? Oh, there he is. Where is my daughter, is she late? Wonder where she be. And while he is thinking about his family, just in that regularness of everyday life, a fucking hit-man sits in his view, counting on that tacit truce and that “(nobody’s going to) hit a bone fide colored lady on a Sunday, as she is going to church”, to quote Slim Charles from The Wire. How amazing is that? And then, the show ends with his inability to think. He ceases to exist. No more therapy, no more thinking about The Sopranos, his own family that is also literally the name of the show. No more uncle Jun, just, no more. And this is somehow ambivalent? Nah. In fact, every season, and that includes 6A as a separate one, is characterized by an increase in Tony’s rethinking of life. Every single one, shit gets weird with his decisions and general life: he starts thinking extra hard. This one is the ultimate fade out. The abrupt fade out of human consciousness, as the machine that drives it is being splattered all over that diner table. La Fin.
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Sure, that’s one way of looking at it. But not the only way…
(I’m itching to get to the final write-up but am still having laptop issues. I may soon post the email/phone number of the computer tech that’s been giving me the runaround for the last 3 months—maybe Autopsy readers can get this guy to fix my laptop once and for all…)
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Paragraphs, man, paragraphs…
You make many interesting points and I’ve come to look forward to reading them, but a massive block of text is difficult to read.
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😐
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It has been “confirmed” zero times, because it does not happen on the series. The rest is just speculation.
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Thank you!! We will never really know.
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You’re correct, we will never really know. I believe The Sopranos is a series meant to be thought provoking, as well as inspire feelings. Chase and his team created high art, not a Rubik’s Cube to be solved in 20 moves or less. If someone wants to believe Tony is dead, or he’s selling patio furniture and Carm is a Walmart greeter, that’s fine with me….just don’t tell me it’s the only way, like a Jehovahs Witness at my door or Pastor Bob.
It’s also funny how some viewers could swear they caught a glimpse of Meadow entering Holsten’s, it’s like our brains automatically and instantaneously filling in missing or misplaced letters in a sentence. And maybe when we go back and look at the series frame by frame, it’s like particle beams turning into waves when observed.
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Many Saints of Newark (2021) scene with Dickie Moltisanti drowning a certain someone after walking on the edge of the ocean and after an argument gone bad pretty much confirms the lake-death/big nothing symbolism 100%, along with the “walking the line” in the Janice-Carmela scene in this episode debating Bobby’s future at the edge of the lake and also in the final scene, with Bobby looking at the lake/turning his daughter’s head away from it/death/murder he just did.
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Also from Many Saints: we get to see the story that Janice tells in this episode about her father shooting his gun through Livia’s hairdo (which I’d completely forgotten about until rewatching this episode just the other day) as it actually happened. Madonn’.
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Yeah… and unfortunately it was an absolute atrocity. My God, soooo 🤬 bad!
That scene is a perfect example of the total failure that is Saints Of Newark. A famous incident talked about in the series, but never portrayed, is given to us in about 10 seconds, with no real care, with no rhythm, and NO REAL POINT. Like basically all the scenes… no real point, except ridiculous Easter Eggs for fans:
“Oh look, Junior says ‘Your sister’s c*nt!’ when he falls… JUST LIKE IN THE SERIES!” (🤣🤣🤣… 😒)
One of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever had with a film. That last scene was laugh-out-loud stupid, with the series’ theme song, and the little pinky-swear. Just… 🤦♂️
And speaking of laughing out loud… (spoiler alert)
Junior has Dickie killed for laughing at him?!? OK!
SMH What a mess. Too bad they wouldn’t let Chase make a movie about the Newark Riots like he wanted to. When the creator of The Sopranos can’t get a movie financed unless it’s Soprano-related, what hope is there for everyone else?
I’m shocked at the number of people who claimed to have liked it.
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Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) must have inspired The Sopranos in many ways, but the jail scene in this episode is very, very reminiscent of the one in that movie, the wide shots of sitting at a bar, the beach scenes, at times in the first couple of seasons, I had a feeling that Chase is making Jersey feel and look like 70’s neo-noir LA. And, also, I don’t really care, but still, the ending of the movie, and how it was changed by Altman and so on…
The only theory, weak and unwarranted as it may be, on the ending of the show that I may be willing to consider has to do with what Altman did with The Long Goodbye: he changed the ending to further spoof the genre of film noir. So, having said that, I am willing to consider that it was a spoof on Chase’s part too, a little bit of dark humor that got out of control in the writing room: everything is as is, but New York never whacks Tony, because he’s not that important (Butch “The Little Guy” DeConcini attests to this: the shortest gangster since Joe Pesci, but looks down on Tony all the time). After all, Tony’s just a leader of a glorified crew, he ain’t worth the effort; which in return would make the entire show about a paranoid low-level gangster who suffers narcissism and megalomania, which is kind of backed by all of JFK assassination references; it’s all in his head, he’s safe, yet he goes to a psychiatrist twice a week.
But then again, not only does it not account for the “blackout”, it goes heavily against chase’s mimetic aesthetic that he followed up to the ending, and would be extremely out place, so, no. It is what it is, what you see is what you get, and if the main character is all of a sudden both blind and deaf, he dead, too, no matter the hype.
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Chase just wants to see his name in the news, and ambivalence works.
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Of all the episodes on this series, this one is the saddest, followed by ‘The Second Coming’ (AJ’s suicide attempt). What should have been a happy get-together for the family turned out to be so twisted and deadly. Granted, the Sopranos have never really known pure joy or true happiness, but nothing has prevented them from pursuing stability – other than the characters themselves. How much hatred, vitriol, greed, misogyny, and evil doing does it take before someone – anyone – throws up her/his hands in disgust, accepts responsibility for the mess, and changes for the better? Yeah, yeah, I know – ‘it’s just not meant to be’. Bobby was a good man at heart, until Tony warped him that is. Bobby loved his daughter more than any of other characters loved their child(ren). And of the entire ‘crew’, he was undoubtedly the only one who actually felt any guilt. My heart broke in two when he hugged his daughter. I doubt whether Tony or Carmela ever felt – or gave – that much love for their children. They just didn’t have it in them. Sigh. 😢
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Such a great episode..
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LK, i think what you say about this episode and the characters in general is spot on. My only point of contention would be that episode you mentioned, ‘The Second Coming.’ I always find the scene where Tony pulls AJ out of the pool to be very emotional. Interestingly, this may be a subtle thread connecting the two episodes. At one point during ‘Soprano Home Movies’ Tony, Carm, Bobby and Janice are sitting near the lake discussing a new story about a kid drowning in a pool and receiving irreversible brain damage.
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th38 – Yes, Tony holding AJ and calling him ‘My baby’ was very touching and emotional! But how often did that happen? What I was attempting to convey was that Bobby’s love for not only his little girl, but also for his other two children was much deeper than Tony’s love for his kids. As far as the child who drowned goes, we know from Tony’s history that he ‘feels’ for kids, but ‘feels’ even more for animals!
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‘This Magic Moment’ also calls to mind the era when Johnny shot Livia’s beehive, and the nostalgia of watching the home movies of Tony and Janice in their innocent youth.
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This is one of my favorite episodes of the series, if not my overall favorite. There are a couple of things to consider here:
– Remember that Tony sucker-punched Perry. So, clearly, he doesn’t really have any qualms about what’s fair – he just doesn’t like being on the losing end.
– I think this episode clearly illustrates that Bobby knows and understands way more than he lets on – and, in fact, probably doesn’t even really want to be a gangster. It certainly sounds like his dad tried to shelter him at least, and probably tried to keep him out of this lifestyle at the most. Bobby spends his early seasons as pretty much an errand boy to Junior, along with being the butt of jokes. Even still, everyone recognized him as a nice guy – and his family name likely carried some weight as well. But was it that Bobby is a nice guy, or that he took steps to keep the mob at arm’s length? He was the only member of the crew without a goomar, hadn’t killed anyone, and really didn’t seem to have the drama everyone else did. He was certainly proficient with firearms, and can handle himself in a fight – and he can be imposing when he wants to. He even found a way to monetize shooting an aspiring rapper. I think it’s clear that he felt like his best option in life was to be a gangster – if he could stay out of harm’s way. On the boat with Tony, their conversation reveals Bobby is very aware of the risks in this life. We’ve never really heard him talk like this.
– When Janice tells the story about the gun and the beehive, Tony gets upset, because the story paints his family as dysfunctional. While Tony certainly prefers to rewrite history whenever he can, I get the feeling that his gripe is less about the story being embarrassing, and more about Carmela having never heard it. I think Tony didn’t want Carmela to have another reminder that Tony hides absolutely everything from her. After all, the story’s being told in front of his sister (who was there), his wife, and his brother-in-law (who he’s obviously considering to promote to his #2). No one in that group would judge.
– Back to the boat: Out on the water, Tony and Bobby talk about how wiseguys usually end up – in jail, or killed. Bobby can talk about it freely at this point, because he’s on a boat, separated from the water. The water represents death (it’s where one goes to sleep with the fishes, after all). Bobby can talk about mobsters’ meeting their end, because he’s insulated himself, and isn’t really in danger – he’s never even killed anyone, after all. Tony changes all that by giving Bobby his first hit job; on the way back to the house from the meeting, Tony gleefully waves at the water-skiier – someone who can carelessly glide across the water, because they have nothing to worry about. Bobby doesn’t go back out on the water after the meeting; remember that Tony sat on the dock, stewing, staring at the water. Tony eyes the boat as he thinks; Janice is correct to wonder. After Bobby carries out the hit, he returns to the house, and clutches his daughter, looking out over the water – now he’s in it.
– It’s funny that Tony hangs up on Christopher mid-birthday wish, but then – why did Tony pick up in the first place? I think it was a little reminder that Tony can handle business, but can’t handle family/emotion. He was likely looking for a distraction from Christopher that let him forget about losing to Bobby or getting older. Nope.
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Jon – Well done! You did a great job summarizing this episode (probably my third favorite in this series). I have always felt sorry for Bobby; he’s been mocked, teased (“You fat f*k!”), humiliated, forced to spend years taking care of Corrado, and humiliated into doing the one thing he had avoided for many decades (kill the kid in Canada). But the bitter irony of all is that he sold his soul by agreeing to marry Janice, one of the most evil, manipulative, and narcissistic people in anyone’s world (in return for extra money in his pocket). At least his daughter loves him. But I don’t think anyone loves Tony.
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Remember when (LOL) Janice compliments Tony and says “you’ve really changed since last year” (when he got shot)? Carmela agrees, while Bobby stares off into space (and says nothing). When Tony asks her how he has changed, no one says anything. I guess his ego doesn’t get massaged in that scene. 😑
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Continuity error: Between the shots of the fight and the next morning, Tony wore 3 different bloody T-shirts.
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When Tony and Bobby are on the road, Janice tells Carmela that her ‘former boyfriend’ (Richie) hit her. Carmela – for some reason – becomes very hostile and tells Janice that she has ‘verbal diarrhea’. She then says that Tony NEVER raised a hand to her (a semi – lie – Tony hit the wall by Carmela’s head), and adds that he NEVER hit AJ. She corrects herself before saying, “He hit AJ once and felt terrible – for WEEKS!” (Yet another lie – he’s smacked AJ in the head multiple times.) Carmela then berates Bobby for taking advantage of Tony, and adds, “He (Tony) is NOT a vindictive man!” (A real big-time lie this time.)
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So, in the end – who is more dysfunctional/dishonest/delusional? Hmm … 🤯
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They love giving their reminders of disgusting gritty realism to take the sheen off organized crime. They even include the detail that the guy stays squatting and never actually sits down. Even people desperate to relieve themselves know you don’t make contact with a jail toilet seat.
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Pingback: The Soprano Onceover: #16. “Soprano Home Movies” (S6E13) | janiojala
Hi Ron,
I’m reading your articles many years later, along with rewatching the show and greatly appreciate your analysis.
I never really saw Bobby “popping his cherry” as a massive loss of innocence.
This is the same Bobby we saw cold pitch someone he just met on shooting them in “the fleshy part of the thigh”. That was just for some rapper’s street cred and a few thousand dollars but Bobby came up with the idea immediately and sold it hard.
I know movies and video games have taught us everything short of a headshot is a mere flesh wound but, as seen in the episode, when gun play is involved all bets are off.
To me on my first watching, and to this day, between being assigned a mob hit isn’t all that much worse than coming up with a scheme to get paid to shoot someone.
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👍
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sorry for the useless comment but I feel the need to note some synchronicity here. I read this post today at my home in Montreal, and not 2 hours ago I saw a guy driving around in a Jeep with a decal on it that says ‘EDUCATED DRUG DEALER’.
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😂
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One thing nobody mentioned… when the drummer grips and tears Bobby’s shirt, the very first time I saw this I thought back to Bobby talking about “these days… the fibers and shit.” Dude got a nice handful of DNA and fabric fibers, maybe even a chunk of his shirt! I found out on talking Sopranos that the shirt rip was a happy accident. Anyway, the messiness of that crime is gonna plague and worry Bobby forever after. Sucks cause it turns out it wouldn’t matter! Aw.
Weird that he dropped the gun at the scene. I know Michael did that in GF but wasn’t there anti-fingerprint tape on the handle? Bobby just drops a weapon w. prints on it? Also, I think Montreal is Europe-esque in that they have a shitload of security cameras everywhere. You can’t just blow someone away and walk away without appearing on camera. A bit of TV fantasyland in a realistic show?
I imagine this has been addressed in earlier seasons but I really think Bobby was written as a different character in S2 and 3. More like a baby man, not dumb per se but not socialized since he’s had the same weirdo friend/family group his whole life. That’s a different guy than the one that confidently approached the rappers in the hospital. I get it that they are trying to say that that was just how Tony saw him, like laughing at him in his hungting get-up, and it’s kind of clever but I do think the writers fudged it a bit. Of course all the characters were a bit one-dimensional at first.
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I think also Schirripa kept proving thru the seasons that he was up to the task of playing an ever expanding role, so Chase and the writers ran with it.
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Yeah he really brought something to the table, and it was cool to see that he was the nice guy but he could lean on somebody for a vote or whatever (Wild Turkey, neat!) and that he started expressing his boundaries the more status he got. I think this far in the season they aren’t using any of the core members as punch lines any more. Even Paulie… “You ever get checked for tourettes? Heh-heh.” It’s like they have their quirks but they’re real people in the same universe as us. Of course Little Carmine is always good for a laugh!!
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I blew through the series so fast this time around, basically about a month. I wish I had been following this blog all along. Madone, will I just start at the beginning again when I hit the end? Maybe wait a year, maybe just play it again like a good record. The best ones, maybe you can… a seventy-hour record?
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By far, Aida Turturro’s best episode. Those 5 seconds when she is staring out over the lake wondering if Bobby is coming home (at 41:50)… gives me shivers every time.
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