THE SOPRANOS: “Kennedy and heidi”
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST

Spoiler alert: It's important to wear your seat belt

Christopher Moltisanti is dead. As if that wasn't shocking enough, he died a mere ten minutes into Sunday's episode of The Sopranos, ignominiously, in a car-crash. People have been speculating on Chris' demise for some time, especially with the show entering its own deaththroes, but the core characters, those who have been around since the very beginning, have seemed to possess a kind of immunity. Yes, Tony's mother Livia left us early on, but that was principally because of the death of the actress playing her. Chris' girlfriend Adriana was shockingly murdered two seasons ago, and her death continues to reverberate, but it had taken time for her to become a major player. And her death, when it came, was the climax of an episode. Big Pussy, the first major casualty, had most of an hour devoted to his demise; his was a most ceremonious offing.

Of late, the show has been getting more cavalier with its send-offs. Hesh and Uncle Junior have been effectively sidelined, but they are still technically alive. Even more remarkably, the episode about Chris' death turned out not to be about Chris' death but about everyone's reaction to it, especially Tony's. Because Tony killed him. This was not altogether unexpected, since Chris, once the favoured surrogate son, had come to represent all kinds of threat. But for it to happen like this? While chauffeuring Tony, Chris swerves and hits another car. Chris, the relapsed junkie, protests that he has too much dope in his system for him to risk being caught in the driver's seat. ("I'll lose my licence"). He's so badly hurt that he might die anyway. So Tony, whose superficial bruises give him a lumpy look for the rest of the episode, helps him along. You might call it a mercy-killing, but you'd have to be feeling very generous. Incidentally David Chase, the series' creator, co-wrote this episode; it was as if he too had to do this job himself. His hands-on presence may also account for the episode's insistent - maybe too insistent - symbolism.

Carmela's reaction is concern for Tony - she doesn't know, of course - and quasi-maternal grief for Chris; remember how, when he was close to death once before, she prayed that he would recover and get out of the Life? (Not that she's got out of it herself.) Paulie Walnuts, Chris' old foe and colleague, expresses unexpected sympathy, probably sincere, or as sincere as anyone in this milieu ever gets. ("You were his dad, I was his Dutch uncle" he says to Tony, who was Chris' uncle.) But the old indignant Paulie bounces back, when his mother - actually his aunt, but we don't have to go there - dies too. The two wakes are held on the same day, and the one for Mrs. Walnuts, or whatever her name was, loses out; hardly anyone shows up. (Tony and Carmela do pay a flying visit.) "What kind of testament is that," Paulie asks, "to her spirit and generosity?" And maybe we should count in the two young ladies in the car that got away; the one driving won't go back to help because "I'm on my learning permit after dark." Much the same position as Chris, really.

But it all centres on Tony, his vestigial guilt and his overriding relief. He tries to unload some of the latter response on Carmela, with little success. He actually confesses it to Dr. Melfi, twice. The first time he even confesses the murder. Then he wakes up. The Sopranos' dream-sequences fool you every time, especially in this episode, which has a dream-like feel throughout. The second, real, psychiatric session cunningly reprises much of the first, imaginary, one, with the most incriminating details left out. The combination of brutality and evasiveness in these scenes are James Gandolfini at his best.

Then, in a sequence strikingly reminiscent of his near-death experience when Junior shot him, Tony goes to Vegas: not, primarily, to play the numbers (though he does, and for a change wins) but to meet and bed an old girlfriend of his nephew's. Presumably the sexual rivalry he always felt with Chris has been sated. She turns him on to peyote, and he ends the episode having a Carlos Casteneda moment in the desert. "I get it," he shouts, though what he gets is unclear. Whatever it is, I doubt that it will last. We've met new Tonys before, and have stopped wanting to believe in them. One of the last things Chris got to say to Tony was "whatever happened to 'stop and smell the roses?'" Nothing much. It couldn't, as long as Tony remains Tony and his life the Life.

Maybe his real son has a chance. AJ remains part of the gang of student Sopranos, and this week participated in the beating and humiliation of a black boy who had the misfortune to be on his bike when it was hit by a rashly opened car door. (This has been an episode of road rage.) But he seemed less happy about it than he did about the torturing of another kid, and he seems to be worried by all kinds of things he's never thought about before, from the Middle East conflict to Wordsworth's words on the world being too much with us. He talks to his shrink about the hopelessness of it all. But then again, it could just be words. The show often shows us feelings, fine or foul, flaring up and being smothered by the process of life. Tony's and Carmela's marriage should have foundered a dozen times but it goes on. Tony's desert revelation was counterpointed by the side-effect of one of his business deals: a load of asbestos dumped into a river. Earlier he had hurled a Cleaver coffee-mug, a souvenir of Chris' movie, into the wilderness beyond his own home. And on both occasions, his beloved ducks feebly quacked.