Whacking Junior would be a reasonable thing to do. Who knows what secrets he might babble out in his state.
Maybe Chris gets that. You think AJ does?
That’s true, but I still got a little tense when the FBI guy brought up Adrianna.
Do you all think there is any significance to Alternate Tony repeatedly bringing up th fact that he is 46 years old? I was wondering if that was the age his father was when he died or something like that.
I’ve got socks smarter than AJ. Chris knows and understands the business. AJ, like most kids his age, thinks he knows everything.
Just speculated to a coworker: Junior, AJ, and Vito don’t make it to the next 8 episodes. Christopher, Paulie, and Silvio do. You heard it here first.
For a few brief minutes, I thought I saw Ralphie in the Costa Mesa bar, but I figured it was just someone who looked a lot like him. I also noticed a couple of times Tony massaging his stomach/chest region in discomfort, to go back to the real life/coma dream incorporation.
Excellent episode, all around. The power play is going to get really interesting.
I don’t need snitches getting whacked, trucks getting heisted, or intra-mob jockeying to like an episode of the Sopranos, but I was a bit disappointed in this episode. It seemed to be, as happens with a lot of shows, an episode written and directed to get someone an Emmy. In this case, it seemed to me that Chase wrote the episode to get Edie another Emmy. She did a fine job, don’t get me wrong, but, with so few episodes remaining, this one seemed like a complete waste.
The dip into Tony’s coma-ridden subconscious was minorly interesting, but was overlong and could’ve easily been cut down by 20 minutes. The actor playing AJ absolutely sucked the life out of the episode for me also.
There were some great moments, of course. I absolutely loved Vito’s comment in the hospital waiting room about the other guys’ suicide could’ve been caused by being gay and not having anyone to talk about it with. And the stage is set for some great jockeying amongst Tony’s captains. But, all in all, I was disappointed in the episode.
I was fast forwarding through the beginning of the show (I was interrupted during it) and I thought I saw a flash of the Buddhist monks in the hospital scene. Turns out it was the bald Asian doctor. I thought it was really cool the way they incorporated things from “real life” into the “dreaming” state of the coma.
I figure we haven’t seent the end of the dream. It just felt unresolved to me. My bet is that we get more from Kevin Finnerty next ep, and the parralells will continue to become clearer.
Robert Iler is doing an excellent job, IMHO. The flatness in his delivery sounds to me like the disaffected tone in so common in teenagers today.
thwartme
Thank you. I guess we’re in the minority, though. It does set up the family struggle, but it needed editing. The kid that plays AJ is a lousy actor and always has been. He could pull it off when playing what he was: an asshole teenager. But he has nearly zero talent otherwise, it would seem.
He’s fine as long as he plays that one note over and over, but if the role calls for any kind of, let’s call it “acting”, he’s atrocious. I found it painful to watch him swear to take out Junior, not because I felt bad for the character, but because his acting was so bad. I think one of major reasons that the character of AJ is not written into more storylines, or has an extensive one of his own, is that he’s a poor actor.
I agree. I’ve always found Tony’s dreams/hallucinations to be overly drawn out. The episode where he was working up to killing Tony B. was particularly tedious. The only one that was good was the talking fish from season one, and even that one was longer than it needed to be.
I loved this episode, I thought it was less fragmented then last weeks. Last week’s episode had the problem of catching us up to speed on the billion or so characters on this show. As well it had to deal with old plot lines and set up new ones. This episode is the beginning of the focus for the rest of this season. I thought Edie Falco was excellent. She came across as strong and vulverable.
This show is so rich. It’s amazing after 5 years it still so fresh.
Hah, it’s funny that you say that. I’ve always hated Tony’s dream sequences and hallucinations, but I didn’t mind this one.
2 pages and nobody mentioned the best line in the whole show?
“Van Helsing. Let’s Go.”
I laughed so hard I think I prolapsed my rectum.
- Peter Wiggen
I forget the exact line, but I loved Christopher’s opening line to the Feds in the pizza joint about the bug they picked up in “diarrhea-stan”. That, and “Van Helsing”, were the two best lines of the night.
Maybe he was a homo and didn’t know who to talk to about it…it happens.
who was the woman at the table and kissing Tony in the dream sequence? She looked an awful lot like Melfi.
MY SO responded to that with "it’s even funnier coming from Paulie “Dracula” Walnuts.
Was Chris driving Johnny “Sack” Sacramoni’s car when he pulled up Satriale’s?
For some reason that clicked into my head over lunch.
Jim
That was Sheila Kelley, who doesn’t look very much like Lorraine Bracco in my opinion. She has a much bigger nose.
But it seemed to me that her first appearance on screen came up oddly. As if she just sort of materialized in the crowd.