"The Sopranos," week three. I'll be on San Francisco's
KNBR 680 AM today at noon Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific, to talk about last night's episode, so if anyone wonders how basso profundo my voice sounds, now's your chance to listen live (their website has a link to that). In the meantime, here's the opener to my latest day-after review:
Let’s talk about Silvio on the toilet for a minute.
Look, I know you’re dying to talk about what the monks represent, or Carmela’s therapy session, or Little Carmine’s triumphant return, but I think we need to start with Silvio on the toilet.
Okay, so Tony didn’t make his traditional season-opening waddle to the end of the driveway for his copy of The Star-Ledger. It hurt, but I moved on and was rewarded with the sight of acting boss Silvio conducting business from a hospital men’s room stall while thumbing through a copy of this here newspaper. If I didn’t know that HBO refuses to accept product placement money for the show, I would assume my bosses slipped them a small fortune for that primo advertisement.
The toilet scene was also important because it was funny. While the season’s first two episodes had plenty to offer - religious imagery, award-worthy monologues, prolonged hangings - the laughs had mostly been absent from a show that often plays less as a drama than a black comedy about America’s moral decay.
To read the rest,
click here, then come back to comment. Two things I didn't have room to mention: 1)It was really the all-scumbags, all-the-time hour, wasn't it? I'm glad the show does this from time to time to remind the audience that these "lovable" mobsters are really awful people. 2)So what the hell do the monks represent? Maybe the idea that this isn't the exact Catholic Purgatory, but some kind of omnibus spiritual way station to the afterlife. Had Tony/Finnerty stayed there another episode, maybe he'd have run into some Muslims next.
"The Sopranos," week three. I'll be on San Francisco's KNBR 680 AM today at noon Eastern, 9 a.m. Pacific, to talk about last night's episode, so if anyone wonders how basso profundo my voice sounds, now's your chance to listen live (their website has a link to that). In the meantime, here's the opener to my latest day-after review:
But if Satan (in the guise of Tony B., I guess) is trying to trick Tony into entering the gates of Hell, why give him that glimpse of his mother to tip him off?
ReplyDeleteI've watched the two Costa Mesa episodes at least four times each, and I'm still trying to wrap my mind around exactly what those scenes meant. The more I think about the monks, the more I think that wherever Tony was, it was a lot more complicated than the familiar Good/Evil or Heaven/Hell paradigm.
Or maybe he wasn't anywhere, and a combination of Tony's inner turmoil and his vague awareness of what was happening to him created this fantasy life. When the monks told him that "someone has to take accountability," that could be Tony realizing that he has to do the same with the bad things he's done in his life.
These day-after reviews have been pretty long by daily newspaper standards (over 1,000 words), but I never feel like I have enough space to get into every detail and theory I want to explore. I could triple that word count and still not fully examine what they've been doing the last three weeks, which is a sign Chase and company are really on their game so far.
While I don't think Chase's intention with this two-parter was to chase away the blood-and-guts fans, I wouldn't be at all shocked if he intended it to be a positive side effect. The whole "when's somebody gonna get whacked?" crowd has always been the bane of his existence, and I think he'd rather be an art house success with a higher average audience IQ than to have this mainstream hit where half the fans expect "Scarface: The Series."
ReplyDeleteOf course Sil was lying when he told his wife that there was talk of him "stepping up" after Jackie died. One of the recurring themes this season seems to be delusions of grandure, represented most prominently by Vito's belief that he could be running things even though he was Tony's third choice (after Gigi and Ralph) to run the Aprile crew.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, JRE, and in an early draft of the review, there was a parenthetical pointing out that everyone on this show lies to make themselves look better. Got cut for space.
ReplyDeleteAnd is Sil a "captain" even now, technically? It's my impression that, as the consigliere, he doesn't have a crew, and I can't remember him ever having had one.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like I've read a lot in the last month or so about the so-called blood-and-guts fan contingent, but I seriously don't think I know any of them (and we don't see many of them on TWoP either). Are there really people who watch this show as an action series only? Is this really a thing? I've talked to people who were starting to get fed up with the limbo sequences, sure, but they were all concerned with narrative pace and nobody said they thought a whacking would solve the problem.
I'm not disputing that it's a real trend; I just wasn't aware of it until it started getting so much play in the TV press.
Oh, how I wish these people were made up. A sample from an e-mail I received just this morning: "Analogies & deep thought aren't meant for this program. Bring back the whacking. Tony is a simple person not caught in a complex show where he appears "out of place"."
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, as I was walking into the office, one of our security guards -- a burly ex-Newark cop who's basically the law-enforcement version of Paulie Walnuts -- chases me down and says, "Al, Al, Al! That Sopranos episode with the dreams -- that was the worst on ever, am I right?"
And you're right: Sil has never been a captain (Paulie runs what's left over from Tony's original crew), but consiglieri ranks higher on the food chain than captain. I'm not sure if this means that Sil makes more money than Paulie, since the captains kick up directly to Tony (maybe Tony in turn sends a percentage to Sil), but it's the more prestigious job and the reason Sil was acting boss during the coma.
ReplyDeleteRight on. I just couldn't remember Sil being anything other than a consigliere, although he couldn't have been that, at least in the series' initial episodes.
ReplyDeleteTo go back to the monks for a second -- to me the monks were a generic religious symbol cast via an ethnic inspiration/manifestation/extension of his Asian doctor who kept checking his eyes...
ReplyDeleteGranted, it doesn't hurt that the monks tend to be regarded as more "enlightened" and less corrupt than perhaps their Judeo-Christian counterparts, which make them appealing to Tony... only to find that they're putting the screws to him/Finnerty too.
When I first heard Gandolfini's voice (as opposed to Tony's) as he approached the conference sign-in desk, I thought we were in for a "Last Temptation of Tony Soprano" -- his meditation on what he might have been had he not followed his father into the family business.
He changes his name to get military contracts to avoid the Soprano connection (tho, of course, a Fed background check would breeze thru that like the proverbial hot knife thru butter) and I was almost hoping that it was Charmane on the phone as Mrs. Finnerty... tho it was not to be.