Good episode and a great season. Most everything that I’d point out has already been said, and we’ll have 18-24 months to predict next “seasons” shows.
I heard an interview with one of the actors who said they weren’t scheduled to start shooting next season until April 2005. That’s a long frickin’ time.
AJ might still end up in a college, but instead of hitting books, he might be running them.
To no one in particular:
AJ as Tony’s successor? Are you NUTS??? Could you imagine Paulie (ok, Paulie’s son) as taking any sort of “order” from AJ seriously??
“Event planner” does not equal “mafioso.”
Seems like they certainly went out of their way with the story line to point us in that direction. Only problem I see with AJ taking over the Crazy Horse would be his age. Wouldn’t he have to be 21 (although that’s easy enough to “fix”)?
Yeah, so even though the show is about the mob, and is constantly filled with power struggles and tensions within the mob, AJ would never be brought into the family because Walnuts wouldn’t take orders from him.
What would obviously be more interesting would be to see AJ event-planning a bake sale in New Jersey.
Clearly, he doesn’t look like he’s ready to be running things, and he won’t be running things next year, but bringing him in as a possible successor is interesting because he doesn’t look like he’s ready.
Certainly AJ isn’t going to be giving orders to Paulie when he’s 18 years old. Given AJ’s situation though, it has to at least be a possibility that he’s going into the family business. Paulie wasn’t all that happy with what Christohper was given either… but Tony made it clear that in the end, family are the only people he can really trust.
Who knows what the situation will be 30 years from now, when Tony is ready to retire. Maybe AJ would be a good boss. Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’ll move to Milwaukee and manage the Brewers. Who knows? The point is that we don’t have enough information right now to rule anything out…except a good college.
How can he be ready to run things as a coddled 17 year old? Christopher is in his 30s and he’s just being made and is still low man on the totem pole. AJ would first have to overcome his parents’ innate opposition to him entering the family business, then he’d have to prove himself, make his bones, gain respect from people like Walnuts, et al. This will undoubtedly take years. That doesn’t mean this isn’t being foreshadowed because I think it definitely is. AJ has that utter lack of principle and selfish instinct that would make him a good mafioso. Seems to be a likely future plot line.
Are you disagreeing with me?
I believe that’s exactly what I said. . .
it looks like that’s what was foreshadowed
he’s not ready yet.
it would be an interesting plot line.
If someone doesn’t think this was being foreshadowed, can they tell me what they think the purpose was of showing him running an illegal activity, lying to his mom about it, strong-arming someone in the process, and making a bunch of cash from it?
Was it to show how good he would be at “event planning” at college?
Nope, I’m in total agreement with you. I don’t see how anyone can deny that AJ is headed for the family business and that “event planning” is a nice way for Carmella to rationalize her son’s illegal activities.
Ah, Carmella rationalizing again… all is right when the Sopranos now ;).
It should be interesting to see AJ beginning a mob career. Or to see if Tony prevents AJ from being involved in the family business. Obviously the mob replenishes itself though the family, and it’d be fun to see a career beginning. I imagine it may be like frat hazing ;).
Tony and Carmella must know that AJ’s interest in “event planning” is a foot in the door to a criminal lifestyle – They note that he “keeps watching that Studio 54 movie.” I haven’t seen the movie, but it must touch (at least obliquely) on the organizers’ connections to the Gambino crime family, which helped to keep the pharmaceuticals flowing freely.
Incidentally, wasn’t one of the principal investors in that enterprise a Jewish gangster who famously suffered from panic attacks?
Regarding the possibility of AJ joining his father’s business, I remember the episode when Meadow explained to AJ exactly what their father did for a living, and how surprised he was by this. I think that until then he really believed that his father was legitimately in the waste management business. (It was particularly amusing that she explained this by pulling up some website that described the organization of the New Jersey mob.)
2 points:
My step-mom was an event planner. You can make quite a good living at this, and mafia membership is not a requirement. 
The shotgun blast that Tony S took out his cousin with looked like buckshot to me. The majority of the blast hit him in the upper left chest, around the heart. A couple of shots also hit him in the face and head.
Sorry to hijack this thread a bit, but I’ve been wondering about something from the season before. There’s an episode (Season 4 I’m pretty sure) in which Tony tells Chris that some cop is the guy who killed Chris’s father. Chris then kills the man. It seemed like a kind of random event that never had an effect on the plot of the show again. Was there anything leading up to this, or resulting from this?
In my opinion, Tony offerred up the identy of the cop, knowing that Chris would kill him to avenge the death of his father. This resulted in an increased level of gratitude and loyalty that Chris had towards Tony (which was Tony’s ultimate intent, as he was grooming Chris for more responsibilities). At the time, I even wondered if Tony just made up the story about the guy.
If you step-mom is made, do you really think she’d tell you? 
I seem to remember that the cop was someone whom Tony wanted killed for some reason. Goading Christopher to do it was a lucky coincidence.
A line I forgot: When Chris was sitting in the Iroc talking to Silvio, badmouthing Tony’s reaction to Tony B., Sil reminds him of everything his cousin has done for him. “Do I have to get into specifics?”
But it’s true. I had just about forgotten that earlier this season, Chris shot up Tony’s car and walked into the Bing ready to shoot Tony because of the rumors that Ade had given him a blow job. When you consider that, plus the heroin plus any number of minor offenses he committed all the way back to Season 1, he’s got some serious balls to be talking about Tony being too lenient on someone else.
AJ joining the family? Tony’s handling of Chris and Tony B. definitely show that he’s willing to forgive a lot in his family members, so there might be some juice in that orange. I guess we’ll see in 2006…
We really don’t know if Tony was telling the truth about the cop killing Papa Moltisanti or not, and Chris is in the same boat. Maybe he really was the guy, maybe he was a cop who had some deliquent gambling debts to the family who finally became targetable on his retirement day. But like Chris said before he shot the guy after he proclaimed his innocence, “It doesn’t matter.” Tony wanted him dead. Chris was a good soldier and killed him. An important loyalty test was passed.
Sorry, no offense intended.
I’m holding my line on AJ and the family business. Ain’t gonna happen. Tony doesn’t want it for him, and, as Tony pointed out in this very episode, AJ is a spoiled rich kid who wants everything handed to him on a platter. Unlike Chris, he’s not up to the hard work of digging the graves of people he’s killed. As for killing someone, didn’t AJ faint when he put on a military school uniform?
He’s a wimp, a follower, with no initiative or guts. Even the party was organized by him and his friend, the one who actually had the balls to fight the crashers, while AJ just stood around and watched. And he’s also pretty stupid. Definitely not on a par with Tony’s “tested” IQ of 138. Sorry, I just don’t believe AJ is, or can become, mob material.
In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here (in 18 months when the next series starts, no one will remember this prediction, anyway, including me) and say that if AJ tries to get into the business, or does something that intrudes into mob territory, he will be clipped or seriously hurt.
Climbing out even further, if either of Tony’s kids is going into the business, I say it’s Meadow. She’s smart enough, ambitious enough, and could become the next head of the family if she wanted. The mob meets women’s lib! Wouldn’t that be a great spin-off series?
You heard it here first.