This 'Pork Chop from New Jersey' Goes Down Smooth

THE SOPRANOS: “Soprano home movies”
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST

The final season begins with cottage country mayhem

It's so good to have it back. The exhilaration kicks in all over again with the title sequence, which was always the most enticing in TV history and grows richer at each viewing. (And listening, I'd swear they've turned up the volume on the soundtrack song.) Tony Soprano's drive home through the landscape of his life is now as rich with memories for us as for him. And maybe we're better off than he is; the drive sometimes seems like the most fun Tony ever has.

The Sopranos, however energized by violence and humour, has always been an elegiac show. It began, after all, with a panic attack and Tony's admission to his shrink that the great days of being a mob boss were in the past. Last night's episode, the first in the concluding batch of nine, worked in a fist fight and a murder, but was still low-key. It showed us Tony at his most vulnerable and at his most vindictive.

It might have been subtitled The Blooding of Bobby Baccala. Bobby (Steven R. Schirripa) has always seemed the most likeable, even innocent, of the Jersey hoods. Tony's sister Janice once told her own shrink that Bobby "wasn't like the others," and then went ahead and married the poor widowed guy. We learned last night that Bobby had yet to "pop his cherry" in the sense that he'd never killed anyone; even when hunting, he only used a bow and arrow, to give the deer a fair chance. A great proponent of fair play and going by the book, Bobby; he even objected to Tony, Carmela and Janice inventing their own rules for Monopoly on the grounds that "Parker Brothers put a lot of thought into it."

They were playing the game at Bobby and Janice's lakeside place up near the Canadian border. This gives Tony plenty of opportunity for his favourite pastime of gazing desperately or contemplatively into stretches of water. It's his 47th birthday, shadowed by his having been brought up on a gun-possession charge that threatens to morph into something more substantial.

We notice that though Bobby's frame was definitely not made for shorts and singlet, and Janice (Aida Turturro) is ampler than ever, Tony seems to have lost weight and Carmela is trim as she always was; James Gandolfini and Edie Falco have weathered the seasons and the acting honours in excellent condition. Janice, irritating as ever, brings up more discordant childhood memories than Tony cares to hear ("makes us sound like a dysfunctional family"). He lobs insults at her, literally across the board; Bobby, in a mood of chivalrous disgust, leaps to her defence ("the Sopranos -- you go too far"); there's a fight from which Tony emerges bloodied. He takes a peculiarly nasty revenge, one that combines business with pleasure.

He and Bobby meet up with a couple of drug dealers from Montreal: prescription-drug dealers, that is, offering to unload expired osteoporosis pills at a huge discount. (Canadian content note: This may be the first time The Sopranos has acknowledged Canada's existence. We learn that Bobby's own granddaddy had entered the U.S. from here--illegally, since he had a past as a political agitator. Bobby, of course, would now like to erect a wall to keep latter-day undesirables out. And his in-laws say Amen.)

The deal can be sweetened if Tony will knock off the worrisome brother-in-law of one of his new partners. He deputes Bobby to do the deed; and not, he says, with a bow and arrow. Bobby complies, shooting the guy, who looks as much surprised as appalled, while he's doing his laundry. Bobby then returns, as these men always do, to the loving bosom of his family (he and Janice have a darling two-year-old daughter). Whether something has died inside him, we can't tell, and may never be able to. But the conflict that underpins the show, between Tony's better and worse natures, has found another mirror in another of his subordinates -- who will probably get the promotion that Tony, disillusioned with nephew Christopher, has promised him. He's proved himself.

The episode was crammed with comic detail: the resigned swagger in Tony's eye when the cops come to arrest him; Meadow's shrill legal protests over her father's humiliation, and the silence (embarrassment? Schadenfreude?) of the respectable doctor neighbours; Tony's unexpected prowess at old movie-star impersonations, especially of W.C. Fields; Janice and Carmela doing karaoke, with Carmela having to look over her shoulder at the words on the screen. Plus a couple of prize false trails: we see Tony lying in bed, his face twisted in what we take to be a nightmare about a drowned child and find that he's actually been receiving a birthday blow job from Carmela; a "welcome home" sign at a party turns out not to be for Tony out on bail but for the peculiarly loathsome New York boss Phil Leotardo, back from a heart attack. We find, incidentally, that the New Yorkers refer to Tony as "pork chop from New Jersey." Yes, it was a quiet episode, but fires have been lit.