Let the Killing Season Begin
THE SOPRANOS: “THE BLUE COMET”
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST
Spoiler alert: Turf war claims its first big victims
With its penultimate episode, The Sopranos has turned into a gangster drama. Or rather, it's become like other gangster dramas. Just as The Godfather closed with Michael Corleone disposing, in montage, of all his enemies, so in this one the body count has gone way up, as the bosses of New York and New Jersey have finally turned on one another.
One of the accusations that Tony Soprano's mother and uncle flung at him (behind his back) in the very first episode was that he was "thumbing his nose at New York." It's been a long road, but that struggle has finally come to a head. Only, this being The Sopranos, things are not going so smoothly, at least not on the Jersey side. They start out all right, with Silvio paying a social call on Burt Gervasi, the snitch who'd been trying to persuade him to cross over to Phil Leotardo's bunch in New York, and efficiently garrotting him. (Burt commenced the episode by picking up the newspaper in his driveway. Always a dangerous thing to do. Ask Tony.) So, no qualms about Silvio's loyalty.
Phil knows it, because he promptly places Sil on his hit list, along with Tony himself and, to his subordinates' surprise, Bobby Bacala, the apparently harmless former driver. Tony gets wind of this, via FBI Agent Harris, and lays counter-plans, calling guys from Italy to execute his New York rivals. But maybe he laid on too many intermediaries, or maybe you can't trust outside help, because the guys who go gunning for Phil end up shooting an innocent lookalike and the man's daughter.
Cunning Phil has gone to ground. He despises the Sopranos for not being a real Family at all, just "a jumped-up crew" and his delegates certainly seem more efficient than Tony's. Sunday's episode ended with Bobby dead and Silvio in a coma. Bobby, in a prolonged but effective sequence, gets shot while shopping for one of his favourite model trains. Silvio is bushwhacked in his car, just outside the Bada Bing. There's a memorable shot of half-naked girls and their customers fleeing as he bites the dust.
Lest we feel too sorry for Sil, the sight of him crawling on the ground couldn't help but raise memories of Adriana in a similar position as he disposed of her a few seasons ago: by common consent, the most shocking whacking ever on The Sopranos.
Remember how good Steve Van Zandt was in that scene, making clumsily nice with Adriana up to the moment of drawing his gun? Have we seen the beginning and end of Van Zandt the actor? He was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying that he'd never acted before The Sopranos and might well never do so again. At the very least, he might work in commercials. Or, he could just go back to music.
Last seen running for his life was Silvio's car-mate Patsy Parisi. We can probably assume that he was a loyalist, not a rat. But when he gets his breath back, Patsy - as the Soprano empire crumbles around him - may feel a modicum of satisfaction for the death of his twin brother. Previously, he had to slake any thirst for vengeance by urinating in Tony's pool.
This week saw Tony covering that pool. Perhaps it's a seasonal thing, perhaps it's to discourage A.J. from a second suicide attempt. By episode's end, Tony was out of the house, having sent wife and kids off separately and ensconcing himself in a safe house with a few anonymities and Paulie.
Paulie wasn't on Phil's list; maybe his loyalty is compromised; maybe (and more likely) Phil, rightly, didn't think him important enough. Paulie has had his stab at changing sides, and it worked out bitterly for him. And though Tony, a few weeks ago, thought seriously of killing him, it seemed to be more for his loose mouth than for any suspicions.
Anyway, Tony has had this week to face a far more wounding rejection. Dr. Jennifer Melfi has abandoned him. At a dinner party full of psychiatrists, Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the shrink's shrink, repeated his admonitions about therapy for sociopaths serving only to enable them, and even let fall the identity of her patient. This seems appallingly unprofessional, and I had a hard time believing it. But it cues what is presumably Tony's last consultation. The Duchess of Melfi, as I like to think of her, tells him that, after seven years, she can do nothing more for him. Tony reacts with furious self-pity. Every word he says - about his troubled son, his career-challenged daughter - fits in with what Melfi has read about sociopaths' hypocrisy and sentimentality.
Tony's love for his family may count for little against his other activities, but it seems real. And isn't Melfi just angry with herself for having, as she now sees it, been taken in for so long, and for having made no difference? (In the latter case, she's wrong. The differences were for the better. The worse would have happened anyway.) She tries to be clinical and impersonal in dismissing him, but what comes out is the opposite. The scene plays like a marital breakup, as bitter and petty as the one Tony and Carmela had. Only, they got together again - Tony and Melfi are unlikely to do so.
But there is, come to think of it, no guarantee that Tony and Carmela will set eyes on one another again, at least not alive. Would The Sopranos dare do that to us? I doubt it.
But I wouldn't take bets on it.