I got a major vibe that the gambling losses story was a cover for the real reason he needed the cash from Hesh, we just haven’t been told the real reason yet. I can’t believe Tony can’t come up with a few hundred k of his own if he needed to.
I liked the character development of Paulie, although it’s a little late in the game. Loved how he packed 3 or 4 pairs of nearly identical pristine white slip-ons.
The mental ward stuff was definitely weird- at first I thought the Asian kid was a ward or orderly or something. Got very confusing when his mom came to visit. Also, the scene with the inmates singing in the group room didn’t ring true- a couple seasons ago we were treated to Corrado serenading everyone at Vesuvio’s and he had a beautiful voice, but last night he was gamely singing along with the group. I can’t believe Uncle Jun would have gone along with that- I expected him to stand up and tell them off and break into a beautiful solo or something.
Now that you mention it, Johnny Sack had a pair of white slip-ons at the hospital in “Stage 5.” They weren’t as pristine as Paulie’s but Ginny cleaned them as best she could. Any relation?
Well, they brought up his gambling losses in another episode, too, in a completely different context. If he can’t come up with a few hundred K, that’s the story.
Well, I think that was sort of the point – he’s medicated into oblivion, and he’s willfully doing it.
This episode might have been the closing of the book on Junior.
In terms of Phil, he basically decided at the end of last week’s episode that he was getting back into the game and taking over. His “no more” statement was about not taking shit anymore rather than being tired. He was just waiting for an opportunity to take out Doc.
It’s clear that a war with New York (or, really, Phil Leotardo) is coming, and I think the point of the last 3 episodes is to further isolate Tony – neither Bobby nor Christopher not Paulie is really 100% loyal or really all that up for a leadership role. There’s also a clear sense that the sharks are circling – Tony is being harrassed legally more than usual. I can see him sitting in jail on some minor charge, waiting on bail, impotent while all sorts of bad things happen on the outside.
When Junior walked out of shot and the Asian kid sat down with my mom, my friend commented, “Oh goodie, another subplot.” Chase is certainly taking a leisurely route to the end.
I think that the point of showing Junior in the mental ward was that he was happy being the “boss” inside. The reason that he didn’t take up his buddies’ dentist offer was that he didn’t want to leave. He was running businesses against the rules of the ward, just like when he was a mobster running businesses against the rules of society. He had his own protege, just like he had Tony in the past.
I think that parallel to Junior was Paulie. He was also living out his glory days, through memories. Eventually, Tony figured this out and felt some sympathy for him.
Predicted last week that the body was going to be nobody. This isn’t a TV evening soap; there was no reason for it to be Adrianna or anyone else in the show. The Sopranos doesn’t do things like that. Totally different style of writing than one would see on Desperate Housewives or Lost, where a body would have tied back to something. Here, it is just a plot device to get Paulie and Tony out together.
No way was Paulie going to be killed this episode, only because they foreshadowed Big Pussy far too much, then kept showing all the weapons on the boat. Another thing that David Chase doesn’t do. That said, it was nice to see Tony’s growing paranoia and Paulie’s fear. cochrane, one thing we know about Tony is that he lets nothing go. If Paulie had admitted to telling, Tony would have blown a gasket, and kept it blown for a long time. You could tell just from the way Tony kept asking. Paulie was right not to admit to it.
Blonde bimbo may have been FBI, but it probably won’t matter as we won’t see her again.
Knew Doc was a goner, starting with dinner. When they focused on him getting into his car, it was a sure thing. One right in the eye - yuck!
He completely capitulated to the fact that he was no longer the boss of anything. He is a crazy pants-peeing old man who got beat up by the next generation. . .his protege. . .from his own home town, no less.
He didn’t even want to run a card game anymore. He was powerless against a frumpy college professor who tattled on him.
The next 6 episodes might (and probably will) prove me wrong, but I think we just saw Junior’s swan song.
This one seemed like an old school Sopranos to me. Maybe I just like road trip episodes, because The Ride was probably my favorite from the first half of the season. There were a lot of nice, tense moments and they continue to drive home the ‘we’re geting old and nothing is changing’ themes.
I agree with you. I was referring to the first 45 minutes of the episode. The point of last 15 minutes was obvious: as powerful as you are, there’s always someone more powerful to squash you. In Junior’s case, it was the staff giving him medications. In Tony’s case, it may be the Feds or New York, or both.
In this episode, you have 3 old school mobsters living out the limited time left in their lives in different ways: Junior (as the “boss” in the mental ward), Paulie (through memories) and Phil (by making a power play he never tried before).
I really liked this episode. I agree that this is pretty much the end for Uncle Jun. He’s old, his time is up, and all he has left is his equally senile old coot buddies who want to break him out before they head back to Sarasota. There’s really nothing to do except sit back and wait for time to whack him for them.
It was interesting to play it against Paulie’s story. Paulie is also old, and his income stream is drying up, and what are his options when that happens? Could he be one of those old senile retired coots in Sarasota? Probably not, because he’s not very good at keeping his mouth shut. Tony has said more than once that most of the time wiseguys end up dead or in jail, and as Tony knows from the Ginny Sack joke incident, if Paulie ends up in jail there’s no telling what he’ll do. He hadn’t been in jail for more than a few days before he started stirring up trouble. He may be old school, but they can’t count on him if he sees a chance to save his own ass.
I didn’t think they needed to cut in the scenes of Big Pussy getting whacked to get the point across. We know what going out on a boat means in this world, just like Bobby B. had to know what it meant to go down a little country backroad in “Soprano Home Movies”. (I did like it when he showed up in Paulie’s dream, though.) Paulie certainly knew what it meant. I can’t decide if Tony actually planned to kill him, or if he just wanted to scare him, letting him know what could happen if he doesn’t come through when he’s put to the test.
Do they really need to give Tony a gambling problem with six episodes left? A little bit of a diablo ex machina, to coin a phrase. There are plenty of ways to get Tony into deep financial shit without giving him a whole new issue. I hope they go somewhere interesting with it.
It might be glanced upon in the next epidode never to be heard about again, we’ve had that happen before.
If there’s one consistent thing about this show (other then Sil’s hair) it’s that the previews are almost always misleading to the point of being irrelevent.
We know, because we go on message boards and analyze the shit out of the episodes, the Big Pussy whacking. That’s not to say that every viewer has an air-tight memory of episodes from 4-5 years ago. At least they didn’t try to explain the whole reasoning - just a little memory jog for those who may have forgotten.
IMNSHO, Tony had absolutely no intention of whacking Paulie on the boat trip. He was trying to reconnect with Paulie.
Almost forgot - poor Jackie Aprile. I’d be pissed if I were him…and I wasn’t dead, of course. Getting blamed for a murder he didn’t commit - at least nail him for something he did!
According to a survey (mentioned here), the average “Sopranos” viewer watches fewer than half the episodes. Maybe the writers reminded us of Big Pussy in order to bring the occasional watchers up to speed. It amazes me that people would watch just a bit of “The Sopranos,” since it seems like an all-or-nothing show to me.
The money shortage due to gambling didn’t bother me. Didn’t Tony buy a race horse once? I think we’ve seen him betting on sports a few times.
Makes you wonder about his financial situation though. He’s got a kid in college, big house, big spender wife – who paid for her spec house? He could be cash poor. And he said something about envelopes being short too.
Maybe I’m way off base here, but it almost seems like Tony is forcing himself into a position where he will have to make a decision that he couldn’t otherwise make - that of going into witness protection.
Life in the mob is all about relationships. You can’t exactly sue someone for breach of contract, so it is all about close, personal relationships. Tony seems to be going to great lengths to harm those relationships - hanging up in Christopher’s face, goading Bobby into a fight, pushing Paulie on the joke about Johnnie Sack’s wife. These are people he has to be close to in order to make his business, and life for that matter, operate, but he is pushing them away with both hands. I wonder if he will do something to Sil next week.
He has had to exert his authority before, and that is to be expected. But he is now just being a prick for no reason. He may be a prick, but he’s not a stupid prick. He has to know this. By damaging all these relationships, he may be subconsciously forcing himself to go into witness protection when those relationships collapse. Either that, or he is looking for some kind of “suicide by mob”.
I think he’s feeling very trapped by his life. I wish I’d counted how many times characters have said “who’d have thought we’d still be doing this?” in different contexts this season.
Ah, but the Big Pussy whacking was so memorable! And Vincent Pastore has practically made a career for himself out of that. I’m sure even the casual fan knows about him as “the wise guy who got whacked on the boat”, even if they never saw the episode. It’s like Seinfeld’s “master of your domain”. Even so, I agree the reference helped in explaining Paulie’s nervousness in going for a boat ride with Tony, since Paulie participated in the Big Pussy hit.