That was my impression. Great to see Buscemi back for a last blast, plus he’s also directing at least one episode coming up so there that to look forward to as well. I was hoping for Pussy to make an appearance. Heh…I enjoyed the Bill Curtis “cameo” too.
Looks like AJ can’t take a dump in Essex County without it getting back to Christopher. Heh. Poor kid.
Looking forward to seeing Vito’s arc through the season. Looks like he’s got the same sort of vague sense of doom hanging over him that Tony B. did last season.
Paulie pissing off Tony into consciousness == best thing this season so far.
Technically that led to his recovery. Albeit via annoyance.
AJ forgets about his vendetta on uncle June, since Tony is awake.
Vito is an ass, yes, he’s still a fat-ass. He’s less of a fat-ass now, but his fixation on his weight loss is getting annoying. So is his lame-ass attempt at taking over.
My WAG is that Tony has a regular character whacked next week.
I disagree. If the primary therapy is couples therapy and they each have a few individual sessions with the couples therapist, then yeah. But at no point in my career as a therapist was it ever OK to be the individual therapist for two people in a pre-existing relationship.
I could almost give it a pass since we don’t know if Melfi would have treated Carm on an ongoing basis, but when she said, “Tony told me that things have been better between the 2 of you”, I thought she was way out of line. Confidentiality is still applicable if the person is in a coma!
Interesting point. I didn’t particularly like Bobby as a nitpicky little bastard this week, but I have to think that at least some of that is engineered by Janice. Of course, I also have to remember that he is a mob guy, so the chances of him being a sweet and unassuming mob guy are pretty slim.
Even better, IMO, was his telling the story to other guys. “So I was sitting there holding his hand and the numbers start going crazy…”
I watched most of the series over again in the last few months, as they had an episode every night on HBO2. (Cut into my productivity deep, it did.)
One of the things that really jumped out on this viewing is how entitled Christopher feels compared to what he actually deserves. It started when he and his buddy busted up that poker game, through drug rehab (“If it had been anybody else, he would have gotten his intervention right in the back of the head”), through taking shots at the boss over rumors of an affair, to his girlfriend squealing to the feds. (That last one isn’t his fault, but I’m sure a lot of guys would be clipped just in case.)
Christopher should be kissing Tony’s ass first thing every morning for letting him continue to live…and yet, he talks about how much Tony owes him for coming to him about Ade, even a year and a half after the fact and after he’s already been made a Captain. One of my predictions for the season was that he’d finally push it too far, and it looks like they’re setting that up.
Tony’s illness has also given everybody renewed ambition. Chris is the obvious successor, so anyone who wants to claw his way to the top is going to have to go over him.
I love Silvio. “Can’t breathe! Can’t breathe! Can’t breathe!” (I really want his wardrobe, which is somewhere between rich Guido and touring production of Guys and Dolls.) I have to think that Bobby asking him about his dispute while he’s being wheeled into an ambulance will make him realize once and for all that he wants no part of being boss.
Vito may back off with Tony awake, but I still don’t think he should be buying any green bananas.
Very good episode. I loved all the power play between the minions. I hope they can keep that going a little while Tony recovers. Excellent portrayal of Silvio’s inability to lead. I didn’t htink they had to go all the way to sending him off in an ambulance, though.
Also, did AJ’s first T-Shirt of the episode say “Most Likely To Succeed” on it? (wink wink)
After I noticed it, the only glimpse I got was “Most Likely To (blank)”.
If Vito had any brains, given the way he swings, he would stay far, far away from the limelight. For these men who pick and choose which parts of Catholicism they will adhere to, homosexuality is one of the big mob no-nos.
I, too, got the Goodfella’s reference. Very nice.
Supposedly the score was to be $1,000,000+, but Paulie said he only cleared $750,000. Neither Paulie nor Vito wanted to kick up.
I got a kick out of Meadow mentioning how Vito’s ‘harmless’. I’m sure Jackie Jr. thought so, too.
Whenever Artie comes on screen, I get hungry. It’s a Pavlovian response.
Got a kick out of Bobby hounding Silvio even into the ambulance.
At the beginning when Vito and Paulie met in the cars, I thought Vito was pulling a gun when he was actually passing Paulie a piece of paper. Thought they were getting the gunplay going very quickly!
When Tony spoke, I thought he said “I’m different.” but my wife says he said "I’m dead, right?’ Any help?
My wife and I have gotten addicted to Closed Captions on any prerecorded shows. The “live” ones are pathetic and misleading. But it’s rare we’ll not have them on in order to avoid mishearing things. There’s all sorts of stuff that one would miss otherwise. There are even things that are just plain not in the dialogue! (I guess the captioners work from a script as opposed to the actual soundtrack.)
Vito was just dying for a taste of Finn when he thought that he was going to take over and there was nothing that could be done about it. You could just see the disappointment on his face when Tony made it. My bet is that Vito is the one who gets whacked this season which will up the tension even more with Philly because his wife is Philly’s cousin. Philly might have to go too.
Also, did anyone else get that Carm knew damn well that Paulie and Vito only gave her the money because Tony came back to live? It looked like she glared at them when they were back in the elevator.
It’s a good thing that Tony came back alive because I am done with dream sequences for another season.
Ditto. When we first saw the dream last night, I was thinking, “please, not anymore”. I had a sense it was ending with the “pearly gates” scene, though.
Yeah, I might have noticed something about Carmella being wary.
It’s really, really funny how quickly the mobster’s loyalties dissipated when the boss went down. Even Chris. The only one who got more loyal was AJ.
It will be interesting to find out what Tony can figure out when he comes around. Chris was being very stupid, though.
(Stupid aside: I just IMBD’ed Doogie Howser to see if that guy “Benny” was the guy who played Vinnie on Doogie. It was. I just learned that Doogie was created by Stephen Bochco and David Kelley).
When Paulie and Vito gave her the money, they made it sound like they were doing her a favor or giving her a gift. But it’s money she was fully entitled to (on Tony’s behalf, as he’s head of the family).
I saw it more along the lines that Carmella hadn’t given much thought to the money, but was grateful Vito and Paulie showed up with the nice ‘gifts’ that had been promised to her and that their relationship was all family-like.
It wasn’t until she saw them on the elevator as they made their stink faces, clearly upset at letting go the money, that she began to glare, more of a realization that they ‘aren’t’ family and would just as soon see Tony dead than anyone else (especially if it left them each their $100k).
Yes and a reputed yes (it’s a war movie whose name eludes me at the moment). Same with the Big Band leader (might have been Tommy Dorsey, but again, might be faulty memory) releasing him from the contract (as Michael explains at the wedding in The Godfather).
I like Carm asking Tony “I wonder how you do it” when she realized that Vito and Paulie weren’t going to give her the money and then got scared of Tony waking up and got their asses in line. Even a Tony that can hardly speak gets respect.
