The details of Jackie’s death fit the self-deceptive requirements of Mob life. Everyone in the Family knows exactly where he’s hiding, but they have to pretend they don’t, to allow Ralphie to save face while he’s wrestling with this decision a gleeful Tony has forced on him. Even most of the spouses and children understand what really happened, though they all dutifully back the drug dealer lie. Meadow allows herself a brief period of candor, telling Carmela—a veteran at inventing bogeymen to blame for Tony’s acts—“Look at who he grew up with. Look at who his father was. Look at everybody we know.” But the honesty doesn’t last—it can’t if Meadow wants to in any way be a part of this family—and soon she closes ranks, scolding Jackie’s sister Kelli for trying to speak the truth about what happened while a cousin is in the room.
Later, she gets upset at the reception when she sees how Junior and the others don’t really care about Jackie: drinking heavily, throwing bread at her uncle while she sings Britney Spears’s “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” then running out into traffic after telling Tony, “This is such bullshit!” She knows what really happened, knows that her father almost certainly was involved, but she can’t do anything about it other than exactly what Tony wished for her in that session with Melfi: try to get as far away from him as possible. But we know from the Kelli lecture that even if she runs away, like her Aunt Janice did, her exile won’t last. It can’t. She’s a Soprano.
So, even less avoidably, is AJ, who bears both his father’s name and “that putrid, rotten fucking Soprano gene,” as a tearful Tony describes it to Melfi after learning that his son also has panic attacks. In that earlier therapy session, he had laughed at the idea of AJ following in his footsteps the way he did with Johnny Boy—“AJ? In my business? Forget it. He’d never make it.”—but much of the episode involves him struggling to find the kid an alternate path. Both AJ and Jackie were named for their fathers, and both were spoiled rotten. Meadow blames Rosalie and Jackie Sr. for being too permissive, the same accusation Tony lays on Carmela about how AJ thinks the world owes him everything. Jackie tried to be exactly like his father, and it got him killed; Tony’s worked very hard to prevent AJ from doing the same, but the result so far is only better in that AJ is still alive. Military school seemed the last, best option for Tony to straighten the kid out,78 but the panic attacks scotch that plan, leaving Tony and Carmela once again fumbling for the best way to make him even slightly less of a clown. Tony spends much of the episode reveling in the power he holds over Ralphie by forcing him to make the call on Jackie, but he’s powerless as he asks Melfi how to save his own son.
The finale also deals with bits of uppercase-Family business: a cancer-free Junior preparing for trial, Tony freezing out Christopher for questioning his leadership over the Jackie situation, Tony favoring Ralphie in a financial dispute with Paulie79 because Ralphie’s the much bigger earner, and Johnny Sack trying to exploit this schism in Tony’s crew by buttering up the frustrated Paulie with tales of Carmine Lupertazzi asking about him. But most of those stories—plus the FBI sending agent Deborah Ciccerone80 undercover to befriend Adriana—are setting things up for the following season. “Army of One” is mostly interested in attempting to settle lowercase-family business—or at least acknowledging that, when you’re part of the putrid, rotten, fucking Soprano family, the only thing that ever gets permanently settled is how much you have to lie to yourself and others to keep on going.
* * *
1 As a result of Patsy’s adventures in swimming pool micturition in this episode, the Television Without Pity recapper would later dub him “Patsy Pees-A-Lot.”
2 As happens occasionally on The Sopranos, some of the surveillance of Adriana makes it feel as though it’s the show that’s getting off, not just the agent.
3 This episode has one of the funniest Sopranos meals yet: the Bada Bing office lunch anchored to Paulie’s extended soliloquy on bathroom cleanliness. He’s especially disgusted by men’s rooms, consistent horror shows compared to women’s restrooms, which he thinks are so clean that “you could eat maple walnut ice cream off the toilet.”
4 HBO, in fact, aired it on the same night as “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood,” the only time two Sopranos episodes premiered together.
5 Jersey-guy character actor—known to friends and fans alike as “Joey Pants”—who followed in fellow Hoboken native Frank Sinatra’s footsteps by playing Angelo Maggio in a TV remake of From Here to Eternity before breaking through as the pimp who loots Tom Cruise’s house in Risky Business. Pantoliano’s time on The Sopranos came as he was having another career moment thanks to his work with the Wachowskis in Bound and The Matrix and with Christopher Nolan in Memento.
6 The episode has an especially good ear for the non-sentiments people express after a loss when they can’t figure out what else to say, like, “At least she didn’t suffer,” and “What are you gonna do?”
7 “Grown children often secretly wish for an aged parent to die,” Melfi assures him. “And it’s not necessary for the parent to be a witness for the prosecution.”
8 Cozzarelli: “I’ll use all my powers, all my skills.” Tony: “Don’t go crazy.”
9 Though not always—the writers didn’t settle on the idea until this season.
10 Rosalie, a few years removed from Jackie’s death, is now dating Ralphie, which only adds to the feeling of him being the Replacement Richie. He’s angling to run the Aprile crew, he’s dating Richie’s sister-in-law and giving advice to Jackie Jr. He’s a wholly new character in many ways, but in others, it feels like a writer’s assistant went through every script and did a find-and-replace from “Rich” to “Ralph.”
11 An old friend of James Gandolfini’s, Funaro was initially hired to play Ralphie. When Chase realized the actor and role weren’t a good fit, he was recast as Eugene, a member of what used to be the Aprile crew.
12 Making his first appearance at the reception to celebrate Chris and Eugene’s promotions: Carmine Lupertazzi, Tony’s counterpart in New York and Johnny Sack’s direct superior, played by yet another Goodfellas alum, Tony Lip.
13 One of the few actors to appear in both Analyze This and The Sopranos, Casella was previously best known for playing Vinnie Delpino, the best friend of Neil Patrick Harris’s child prodigy on Doogie Howser, M.D.
14 This is first time that the show ever simply cut to black, as if somebody had pressed “stop.” In every other case, the episode faded to black.
15 This plotline caused such a stir that the producers tried to repeat it again in season four, but Kramer objected to getting raped twice in the same TV show, so the script was rewritten to have her fight her attacker and escape before he could do the deed.
16 Chase told Entertainment Weekly in 2001, “If you’re raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, ‘Obviously, there’s going to be some moral accounting here’. That’s not the way the world works. It all comes down to why you’re watching. If all you want is to see big Tony Soprano take that guy’s head and bang it against the wall like a cantaloupe . . . The point is, Melfi, despite pain and suffering, made her moral, ethical choice, and we should applaud her for it. That’s the story.”
17 From an extra-textual perspective, this story helps justify the ongoing therapy, even after Livia’s death and the curing of the panic attacks in the two prior episodes, after which either party easily could have drifted away out of awkwardness or lessened urgency.
18 A bit of an afterthought here, but still noteworthy given the man’s rank, is New York underboss Johnny Sack buying a mansion a stone’s throw away from Tony’s own.
19 “I was supposed to be married at this point in my life,” Janice complains after the beating, barely aware of the irony that she remains single because she killed the last man to punch her in the mouth.
20 Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, a married team of screenwriters who worked with Chase on Northern Exposure, won the 2001 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding
Writing of a Drama Series for this episode. Bracco was nominated as lead actress that year, but lost to costar Edie Falco for a different episode from this season, “Second Opinion.” Green and Burgess went on to create the hit CBS police drama Blue Bloods.
21 Here, as in other Elliot–Melfi scenes, it’s striking how frequently he’s off-base in his analysis. While he means well and obviously cares about her, he’s much more one-note in pushing her to drop Tony than Melfi is in pressing Tony to confront his poor parenting and criminality. He also seems less sophisticated overall. She’s usually at least a half-step ahead of him, and sometimes (as in this session, where he offers that unsolicited story about a soda machine falling on a motel guest in Gainesville, Florida) he seems like he’s just talking to hear himself talk, versus deepening or expanding on Melfi’s contributions.
22 This is a recurring thing on The Sopranos: verbal cruelty, followed up by a half-hearted protestation of “I was just kidding—can’t you take a joke?” These insults are tiny, nonphysical versions of the beatdowns and gunshots—little eruptions of socially taboo impulses that people feel entitled to express until the person on the receiving end realizes they’re being publicly dominated and decides to push back, as Chris does after Artie repeatedly insults him and makes inappropriate remarks about Adriana.
23 Character actor who first found fame as the exuberant Boon in National Lampoon’s Animal House and was the star of the Bill Forsyth–directed cult classic Local Hero.
24 Seriously, imagine any other show devoting its entire season premiere to the FBI planting a bug perfectly designed to take down Tony Soprano, only for his selfish daughter to simply take the thing away with her four episodes later, without it having recorded anything of value.
25 An ex-convict who discovered a love (and talent) for acting while behind bars, Dutton was a star on Broadway (The Piano Lesson), television (the ’90s Fox sitcom Roc), and movies (Rudy), and had a history with HBO, appearing on Oz and in the TV-movie For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story, and directing David Simon’s The Corner, the miniseries that brought the future Wire cocreator to the pay cable channel.
26 Fountains of Wayne was a real place—a family owned store on Route 46 that sold lawn ornaments, outdoor furniture, and quirky Christmas decorations until closing in 2009. Owned and operated by the Winters family (no relation to Sopranos writer-producer Terence Winter), it inspired the name of the rock band, and was best known for its elaborate, lovingly curated holiday displays.
27 This was only Kiley’s second screen credit, after a Law & Order episode from earlier that year. After a handful of other jobs, she left acting altogether and is now a yoga instructor.
28 See this page.
29 Where they might major in communications studies and perhaps write a paper on The Sopranos.
30 A phenomenal performance by an actress who came out of nowhere, without any prior introduction, playing a character who might have ended up in a ditch like Tracee, were she not upper-middle class, with caring parents, university-quality mental health care, and family friends who own a cottage in Vermont. Graynor has acted regularly as an adult, most recently as a lead on Showtime’s drama about ’70s stand-up comedians, I’m Dying Up Here.
31 The trio of dancers that open the episode are arranged on-screen from least-augmented to most, an evolutionary chart of a gender gradually progressing toward a Bada Bing ideal of beauty.
32 Krakower’s last name is very similar to the last name of Sigfried Kracauer, the German sociologist, social critic, and film theorist who developed systems to analyze photography, motion pictures, circuses, dance, advertising, architecture, and tourism, and wrote about how modern technology seemed to be attacking or supplanting the normal mechanisms of human memory, to our detriment. Kracauer also wrote From Caligari to Hitler, a seminal text for film students—a book that treated post-World War I German cinema as a cultural premonition that foretold the rise of Nazism, and analyzed it the way Melfi and Tony might pick apart one of his dreams.
33 Subtle, piercingly intelligent character actor who appeared in The King of Marvin Gardens, Dog Day Afternoon, Car Wash, and Prizzi’s Honor. Died March 23, 2001, at age seventy-seven, while waiting for a city bus in Queens, just two weeks before this episode aired.
34 As in the scene on the golf course where Tony and Furio confront Dr. Kennedy, this is a very public display of violence for the boss of New Jersey. But Tony can’t resist when his temper acts up.
35 Junior, to Tony’s annoyance, reveres the doctor mainly because he shares a name with his favorite president. Reminded by Tony that JFK’s tenure struck the first serious blows against the Mafia as a national force, Junior says, “That was the brother”—Robert F. Kennedy, John’s attorney general.
36 Film, television, and voice-over actor, perhaps best known for playing the swinger Glen in Raising Arizona, Neil’s dentist father on Freaks and Geeks, and supervisor Patrick O’Boyle on The King of Queens.
37 Furio, finding an excuse to smack Dr. Kennedy upside the head: “You got a bee on you hat!”
38 Striking and versatile New York actress of Italian American descent; costar of True Love, Cadillac Man, Jungle Fever, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and What Dreams May Come. Fans who wondered why her career never seemed to deliver on its early promise got an answer in 2017, when she said that accused serial rapist and sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein, cofounder of Miramax Films and the Weinstein Company, broke into her house and raped her in the 1990s and continued to sexually harass her for years after that, driving her away from show business. Sciorra’s star quality is undeniable here: from the minute we first see her in Melfi’s waiting room, working a potential sale on the phone and then joking that she’s here because she’s “a serial killer . . . I murdered seven relationships,” she’s got both Tony and the audience wrapped around her finger.
39 Janice, who usually responds to misfortune by shifting her persona, is now hanging with born-again Christians like Aaron, whom she met in her prayer group.
40 If this were a Martin Scorsese gangster film, Ralphie would be a Joe Pesci character.
41 Tony describes this book as having been recommended to him by Melfi, but she never actually told him to read it. In “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” Melfi chastises him for not taking therapy seriously enough, and says that if all he wants out of the experience is to become a better gangster, he could just read The Art of War, an ancient Chinese text that’s been embraced by CEOs as well as military tacticians. Although other fictional characters have cited it, including corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, its repeated citation by Tony and his fellow gangsters made it a popular phenomenon. According to a May 13, 2001, article in the Baltimore Sun, publishers that put out translated editions of the public domain text saw ten times the usual sales figures that year and had to order emergency reprints to satisfy demand: “No question, the spurt is entirely because of The Sopranos,” Sara Leopold, publicity director for Oxford University Press in New York at the time, told the Sun.
42 When he finally gets Ralphie to apologize for disrespecting the Bing, he pauses long enough for his new captain to add, “. . . and the girl,” though Ralphie quickly blames the latter on excessive cocaine use.
43 It is also secondarily—through Jackie-Meadow and Tony-Gloria—about people diving into the deep end of a new sexual relationship without getting to know the other person first.
44 The Crazy Horse is not officially The Stone Pony, the Asbury Park, New Jersey club where Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band honed their craft, but the name is bound to make Springsteen fans think of it, especially when a character played by Little Steven Van Zandt holds forth on what a pain in the ass live performers can be. It’s also the name of a club once owned by Vincent Pastore in New Rochelle, New York, and the name of the band Neil Young regularly plays with.
45 In the scene at the pork store, Tony dances around the idea that he won’t allow a gangster to date his daughter, but he never explic
itly says it to Jackie. It might not have made a difference with this thick, entitled kid, but Tony’s often more direct in issuing a warning than he is here. Maybe there’s a part of him recalling that he was once a gangster who dated a nice girl in Meadow’s mother, and if he’s condemning Jackie on this basis, he’s somehow condemning himself.
46 Carmela has no idea of the depths of Ralphie’s depravity. Talking to Rosalie Aprile, she calls him “a real find” and urges her to “hang onto him.”
47 As if to make the parallel official, the episode cuts directly from Jackie playing junior godfather to the Soprano family meeting at Verbum Dei to discuss AJ’s vandalism.
48 Look closely in the pool scene and you’ll spot a young Lady Gaga, then a fifteen-year-old actress billed as Stefani Germanotta.
49 Edie Falco’s delivery of “So it’s not exactly ‘zero’ tolerance” is a master class in how to put sarcastic air quotes around a word without lifting any fingers.
50 There’s a moment of possible moral compromise in this episode for Melfi as well: Tony overpays because he’s in a good mood, then refuses to let his therapist return the overage, telling her “give it to charity.” Moments later, Jason calls to check in with her (“I hate my patients . . . all of them,” she admits) and request extra money to buy two textbooks. The scene ends with Melfi staring at the cash in her hand.
51 Tony has his own version of this: Jackie’s repeated assurances that he’s taking his studies seriously when he’s doing no such thing. The scene where Jackie bamboozles Tony is another great example of James Gandolfini’s ability to convey subtle gradations of self-consciousness just by doing certain things with his face and voice. His demeanor here communicates that Tony’s not actually dumb enough to fall for something like this; it’s more a case of him wanting and needing to believe it, because he doesn’t want to make Meadow unhappy by killing the relationship, and because he’s got so many other things going on in his life right now that he doesn’t have the bandwidth for one more major drama. He’s disabused of his optimism soon enough.
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