The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  There follows a prolonged corpse disposal sequence,39 after which Tony and Christopher wait until dark to remove the remains. Tony, dazed from the fight, covered in blood, partly blinded from Ralphie’s insect repellent attack, tells Christopher a laughably transparent lie about finding Ralphie dead like this—but Chris is so high on heroin, and so abashed about Tony seeing him like this, that he goes along without questioning it. The dismemberment sequence is, like the fight that led to it, graphic and stomach-churning, but also darkly comic, from Christopher being startled when the wig falls off Ralphie’s severed head40 to both of them realizing that the banging sound in the house is the bowling ball Tony removed from its bag so he could stow the head. Like Barry Haydu’s murder, the disappearing of Ralphie Cifaretto is another event that brings mentor and protégé closer together, because now they have a secret to share—If the guys in the Family didn’t understand Tony’s desire to kill Ralphie over the death of someone they called a whore, how will they respond to learning he did it over a horse?—but Tony’s uncontrollable temper and Christopher’s drug addiction make neither partner particularly sensible.

  After a trip upstate to bury the extremities at the farm of Mikey Palmice’s father—where Tony again proves he’s more capable than his underlings by driving the bulldozer they use to dig up the hard, cold ground—it’s time to clean up and catch some precious sleep at the Bing, where the question of ultimate motive is answered.

  Or not.

  In the closing moments, Tony checks his inflamed eyes in the Bing dressing room mirror, which is decorated with photos of dancers past and present. In the standard-definition version that aired on HBO in 2002, the pictures were too fuzzy to make out. You could imagine that Tracee’s picture was there, and that this was the show tipping its hand about that “beautiful, innocent creature” line, but you couldn’t prove you saw anything unless you verified it with someone on the Sopranos crew, which nobody did.

  The episodes are all high-definition now, though, and Tracee’s face is very clear—at the center of the frame, no less. (She’s a bit to the left of Tony’s reflected jaw.) His eyes even fall directly on the picture before he turns to exit into the blinding morning light.

  The enhanced focus is nice but inessential. The glimpse of the wall of photos was already enough to evoke Tracee, along with all the other incidental and purposeful pointers we encountered along the way, from the near-rhyme of horse and “whore” to the fact that Tony kills Ralphie as Ralphie killed Tracee.

  But for all the mirroring, it’s still possible that Tony kills Ralphie over Tracee without realizing why he’s doing it. We know from his pathology that he has a gift for repression. He has huge breakthroughs with Dr. Melfi, then has no memory (or claims to) the next time she mentions them. Maybe in the kitchen, his thoughts are entirely about the horse, and it’s only the following morning when he glances at the mirror that his other motivation nuzzles his conscious mind like a horse taking a sugar cube. Or maybe he’s bottled the memory up so tight that it can’t escape, even with Tracee smiling right at him.

  It doesn’t matter. What does is that Ralphie is dead and gone, that The Sopranos did it in a way that no one would have expected going into “Whoever Did This,” and that no one could forget when the episode was done.

  “THE STRONG, SILENT TYPE”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 10

  STORY BY DAVID CHASE, TELEPLAY BY TERENCE WINTER AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY ALAN TAYLOR

  Intervention

  “I’m like a visitor in my own town. Life went on without me.” —Furio

  There is one overt intervention in “The Strong, Silent Type,” along with a bunch of characters either being confronted about their dangerous behavior or trying to curb it themselves. But the overt one is a doozy.

  With the Tony–Melfi scenes, The Sopranos has always managed to thread the needle of pointing out the absurdity of a man in Tony’s profession spilling his guts to a shrink, while treating their conversations very seriously. Melfi is genuinely trying to help Tony, and Tony occasionally makes an effort to be helped. The subjects they discuss in that room are real and raw.

  Sometimes, though, the show can’t help but have fun with the intersection of Family and family therapy, as we see in the black comic masterpiece that is the intervention Adriana and the wiseguys stage to address Christopher’s heroin addiction. The people in that living room are not emotionally equipped to perform what recovering addict Dominic (Elias Koteas41) describes as “a care-frontation.” Paulie attacks Christopher as weak and out of control. Silvio—in the best bit of intentionally stiff delivery of Steve Van Zandt’s acting career—recalls finding Chris high in the Bing bathroom. (“Your hair was in the toilet water. Disgusting.”) Even Tony, who has experience in a variation on this theme, gets angry and distracted the moment he learns that Christopher smothered Adriana’s little dog Cosette. Within moments, we’ve gone from insults, to dirty little secrets (the Russian) threatening to come to light, to Paulie, Sil, and Benny Fazio beating and kicking Chrissie into an emergency room visit.

  Amazingly, this is one of the hour’s more successful interventions, because at least Chris agrees to stay in rehab until he’s better, albeit under threat of death from Patsy Parisi. Everyone else, whether talking to others or turning inward for counsel, is on the verge of succumbing to temptation.

  The episode’s title recalls Tony’s original Gary Cooper lament with Dr. Melfi, which comes up again here even as his wife falls ever harder for a man who resembles Cooper far more than Tony does.

  Melfi was absent from “Whoever Did This,” so we get a belated opportunity here to see Tony grieving for Pie-O-My—moments after scolding Furio for crying over the death of his father, no less—and as full of self-pity as we’ve seen. It’s a jarring enough display of emotion—what would seem performative if we hadn’t seen how deeply Tony cared for the horse—that it prompts Melfi to do something she usually avoids: she confronts Tony directly, not only about how he’s more depressed over losing animals than he’s ever been over losing human loved ones, but about how his “sad clown” laments clash with everything Carmela told her during the joint sessions in season three, and everything Melfi herself has witnessed to date. Often, Melfi lets Tony’s blatant lies and self-justifications sit there, because spotlighting them would threaten the intimacy and trust of their relationship. Here, though, Tony is so obviously lying—to both himself and his doctor—that Melfi can’t help herself. When he bemoans the state of the world, invoking both 9/11 and the LA riots (“I feel like the Reverend Rodney King Jr.: Why can’t we all just get along?”), she points out, “You’ve caused much suffering yourself, haven’t you?”

  Ultimately, Tony gives in to his own foreign strong, silent type, when visits to Uncle Junior’s house lead him to see Svetlana for the kind of woman he goes for (give or take the blonde hair and artificial leg): assertive, independent, and, yes, beautiful. (She dismisses this compliment, especially compared to her cousin, but the way she’s lit in that moment, it’s like we’re seeing her for the first time along with Tony.) Where Carmela is still trying to stop herself from giving into temptation with Furio, Tony roars right through this red light, only to experience an unwanted change of direction when the sex is done: Svetlana was using him, and has no interest in continuing things.

  It’s clear from Tony’s expression that being rejected by a woman is a novelty for him, and an unwelcome one at that, and the episode’s closing moments contrast Tony and Furio: the man Carmela has slowly grown to hate, even though she’s married to him, and the man Carmela has fallen in love with, even though she won’t let herself be with him. Tony is reheating leftovers that Carmela made, in a house she decorated; Furio is cooking his own meal, in a house he bought and then fixed up with his own two hands. Furio is who Tony fancies himself as, or at least wishes he could be;42 is it any wonder that Carmela has come to feel so deeply for him, even though they’ve never kissed?


  Both Furio and Carmela spend much of the episode trying to self-intervene to head off an affair that would likely destroy either themselves or Tony. Furio tries waiting in the car, and doesn’t give Carmela the present he bought her in Naples, while Carmela keeps bringing AJ on her Furio visits, knowing that AJ’s presence will keep her from doing or saying more than she should.

  It’s not an affair in the traditional sense, and sensible Rosalie tries to dismiss it as fantasy. But Carmela insists, “It is real. We communicate. He looks at me like I’m beautiful. He thinks I’m interesting when I talk. Just those few minutes when we see each other, I live for those. I feel like my life is slipping through my fingers, and I will never be happy.”43

  Succumbing to temptation nearly gets Christopher killed; Tony even says he’s only letting him live because of their family connection. Tony can’t stop himself from sleeping with Svetlana, just like he couldn’t stop himself from killing Ralphie, which now has the entire crew suspicious and resentful of him (even as he tries to blame Johnny Sack, over the HUD scam). Tony’s impulses tend to backfire and create new problems.

  At least Christopher’s locked away from his demons until his rehab stint ends. The others have to keep intervening for themselves, and that’s not easy for any of them.

  Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? He came over from Naples, and a lot of trouble followed with him.

  “CALLING ALL CARS”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 11

  STORY BY DAVID CHASE AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS AND DAVID FLEBOTTE AND TERENCE WINTER, TELEPLAY BY DAVID CHASE AND DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Versales

  “I’m sorry. I don’t wanna do this anymore.” —Tony

  “Calling All Cars” isn’t the shortest Sopranos episode ever, but it’s close,44 and it feels shorter—or, rather, thinner—than almost any other installment to date. It features some significant developments in the relationships between Janice and Bobby, the New Jersey and New York Families, and especially Tony and Dr. Melfi, but it’s an episode almost designed to frustrate.

  Dreams bookend the story, both involving Tony being haunted by ghosts: Ralphie and Gloria riding in the car with him in the first one (and the caterpillar on Ralphie’s head transforming into a butterfly, even as Gloria transforms into Svetlana), then Ralphie leading Tony (now recast as an immigrant laborer like his own grandfather, with a poor command of English) to the home of a mysterious woman cloaked in shadow, whose aloof manner conjures up thoughts of the young Livia.

  What do they mean? Well, Melfi figures out the first one, but she initially doesn’t want to spell it out for Tony. “Can’t you just tell me what the fuckin’ thing means?” he grouses.45 “I mean, you obviously know.” We’ve seen Tony have dreams in times of stress; here, he is again under great duress due to the feud with New York over the HUD scam, but the dreams provide no insight into that. Instead, they seem to be meditations on people he’s lost (or, in the case of Ralphie, rid himself of), and of transformation, amplifying his recent feelings about Gloria’s suicide, Ralphie’s murder, and Svetlana giving him the I’m Just Not That Into You treatment. (As Tony’s kids might one day say, she’s ghosting him.) His personal life is slipping away from him, too, not that he’s aware of it. The dreams feel like a warning, even as the Miami hotel room he wakes up in at the end seems more nightmarish (down to the ominous red lighting of the bathroom) than the swampy home he visits in the second dream.

  Tony’s not the only Soprano sibling battling ghosts, as Janice steps up her efforts to land Bacala by any means necessary—which first requires her to make him move past his grief over Karen. It’s a rare Janice subplot where she’s not being wildly unreasonable: leaving her own desires out of it for a moment, Bobby’s wallowing and inability to let go are hurting him professionally, and young Bobby and Sophia personally. Still, you can’t divorce her deeds from her true motive, and the extremes to which she takes it—cyber-stalking Bobby’s son to make him scared of ghosts, and all but shoving Karen’s final ziti down Bobby’s throat—make it clear that altruism for the Baccalieri family has little to do with it.

  That’s a fairly low-stakes subplot, though, and the Carmela–Furio tension is on hold, which means the episode’s most pressing plot is the growing argument over the HUD scam and Johnny’s belief that New York deserves a cut. But even that conflict is primarily played for laughs, as the two Families focus their attentions on the appraiser whose work is central to the scam, Vic. (“‘Vic the Appraiser,’ they call him,” Johnny explains to Carmine, in the most incisive parody of crime story nicknames ever written.) This leads to poor Vic being manhandled by guys from both sides of the Hudson, plus a new record for the number of times “appraise” and its variations are uttered in the same hour of a movie, TV show, or one-act play (“So go back inside, get your appraising shit, and start appraising!” Vito threatens him at one point). Even Tony’s bank-shot solution to the feud is treated as a joke, since it involves going to Miami to speak with Carmine’s son Little Carmine (Ray Abruzzo), a ridiculous, shallow figure who speaks in an overly formal manner while constantly dropping malapropisms and mispronunciations (“Versailles” comes out of his mouth as “Ver-SALES”).

  Tony’s out of his element for much of the trip—the very un-Sopranos Beach Boys classic “Surfin’ USA” plays over the final shot of him looking puzzled on the hotel balcony—which no doubt contributes to the second, stranger dream. But he no longer has Dr. Melfi to help him translate it, because he’d abruptly quit therapy a few scenes earlier, recognizing what the good doctor somehow can’t: these sessions have provided no real value for either of them since she found the root cause of the panic attacks.

  When she suggests they could go deeper on the sources of his pain and truth, he scoffs, “Pain and truth? Come on. I’m a fat fuckin’ crook from New Jersey.” It’s a striking and direct scene in an episode that otherwise approaches things from unusual angles, and it’s a stark contrast to the state of things between Tony and Carmela. There, he’s ignored signs of trouble, acting like he always has on the assumption that he always can, while she’s pining for Furio but unwilling to make things physical. Tony, though, sees the doctor–patient relationship with crystal clarity. He doesn’t want to be judged by Melfi, doesn’t want to contemplate his own inner pain more than he already does, and can’t get into much detail about things that are tearing at him, like Ralphie and Tracee. And so he simply gets up to go, leaving a dumbstruck Melfi to leave the eponymous message (a staple of police dramas) for Elliot.

  In their first session of the hour, Melfi tries to warn Tony about the danger signs in his own marriage, suggesting that his living wife behind the wheel of the car in his first dream is far more important than the dead mistress and associate riding in the passenger seats: “Whatever’s gone on with the other two,” she suggests, “you want to square it with Carmela.” He’s lost the ability to hear her, though, which explains why he walks out on therapy, but this means he has no one to help guide him through that strange second dream.

  Who is on the steps? Livia? Gloria? Carmela? Vic the Appraiser in a really flattering dress? Tony has to puzzle that one out on his own, and so do we.

  “ELOISE”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 12

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY JAMES HAYMAN

  Meeting’s Over

  “You’re standing too close.” —Furio

  Even by the standards of a series that made an art of the anticlimax, “Eloise”—and season four in general—seems to relish how frequently it subverts expectations. Several of the season’s arcs spend the hour on the verge of collision, only to pull back at the last possible moment.

  This is most obvious with the abrupt ending of Furio and Carmela’s flirtation. They come the closest they’ve ever gotten to an actual date when she offers to go to Color Tile with him: “I would love to go with you there,” says Furio, his voice aching for something more than just home dec
or. As Furio continues to endure Tony badmouthing and cheating on Carmela, the possibility of boss and bodyguard coming to blows, or worse, feels unbearably close—as close as a drunken Tony to a helicopter rotor, as Furio contemplates shoving him into it. It’s late, no one else is looking, and Tony was publicly drunk at both the casino and the airport; one nudge would rid Furio of this man and perhaps allow him to be with the woman he loves.

  Instead, Furio realizes he’s the one who’s been standing too close: to Carmela, to this country where he doesn’t fit in, to this boss whose appetites and weaknesses mark him as unworthy of loyalty and respect. So he runs. No note, no call (unless you count an answering machine message he leaves at the Bing at 4:30 A.M., when he can feel confident no one would answer), nothing; he just lists the house in Nutley and flees the country without warning, leaving a stunned, devastated Carmela in his wake, wondering how foolish she was to stand so close to a man that could abandon her instantly, before anything had even happened.

  Carmela’s exasperation is perhaps meant to mirror what Chase, Winter, and company expected the audience to feel when the Furio arc ended in this way, though her method of channeling her frustration—causing an indignant scene at a dinner with Meadow’s roommates and new boyfriend, aspiring dental student Finn DeTrolio (Will Janowitz),46 over the question of whether there’s gay subtext in Billy Budd—isn’t likely how most Sopranos fans were dealing with it.