The Sopranos - Family Values

Review By Dr. Scott

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Season Five, Episode Five (Episode 57 - IRREGULAR AROUND THE MAARGINS)

Review By Dr. Scott

Woo-hoo! Now this is why I watch THE SOPRANOS. After the last two episodes coming off as relatively toothless and, well, kind of boring, things were brought to a boil this evening as David Chase & Company put SOPRANOS fans on the edge of their seats with the most exciting episode of the show in...hell, a long time. This, undoubtedly, was my favorite episode since "Pine Barrens". Goddamn...what a show, huh?!

Things were looking crazy last week, when HBO ran their usual "And next week on THE SOPRANOS..." thing after episode 4. It looked like someone was gonna meet the business end of Tony’s revolver, and all signs pointed to Christopher. Me, I spent the week going back and forth about whether or not Chase would have the nerve. On the one hand, it would bring the "reality" of THE SOPRANOS crashing back down on the heads of all of its many fans; On the other hand, Chris is a major character, and Tony would be running a tough gauntlet for the remainder of the series if he were to off his own nephew. Anti-hero or not, how could we come along with Tony on that little adventure and still like him?

So, when the show started tonight, I was a little nervous. Within minutes of the episode beginning, I think I forgot all about the "Will he or won’t he?" issue and started paying attention to some other things that took center stage: Tony, in the hospital, seemingly getting a cancerous mole removed (Turned out, it was, and I guarantee that’s not the last we’ll see of that plot thread); Adrianna and her IBS, clearly being caused by the informing she’s been doing to the Feds; The attraction between the two aforementioned characters, and the "bed of misery" (As Dr. Melfi put it to Tony) that would erupt from such a union; Chris going out of town to North Carolina...maybe something’ll happen to him there?

The episode was brought into focus early on, with the main story dealing with the budding attraction between Aid and Tony. The question on everyone’s mind, of course, is, "Will they or won’t they?"– a clever spin on the question we’d all been asking since last week’s trailer. Tony visited Melfi to glean some advice on the situation, and she advised him to be the better man (the lesser man, of course, being himself, as well) and "try and be respectable" to Aid, who already respects him and, to hear her tell it, once "feared" him.

We also got to see Tony doing a little coke with Adrianna, something that I recall being a very rare occurrence on the show. We all know that Tony indulges, but the show has rarely brought it to our attention as blatantly as it did this evening. The two decide to go off and land some coke, only to get in a big-ass wreck on the way. Put into the hospital, Tony gets away without a scratch (though that scar forming on his forehead, where the doctor removed his mole, is looking larger with every passing moment), while Aid ends up in a neck brace. This does not bode well.

Christopher finds out about the wreck upon returning to town from two shifty eyed guys who seem to think that Tony and Aid may have been up to more than a moonlight drive. He confronts Aid, who tells him that nothing happened; Next up is Tony, who asks him "What kind of an animal would I be?" He poses the same question to Carmela later on, but then, I’m getting ahead of myself. Notice how quickly Paulie jumped at the chance to have Christopher killed, revealing his true colors concerning their "truce" from a few episodes back.

Tony B. shows up at Chez Soprano to tell him that Christopher has lost his shit, and we see that he has. He beats the hell out of Adrianna, goes straight for the vodka in the freezer, and comes calling for Tony at the Bing, pausing just long enough to fill his Suburban with bullets. We see how the situation got this far this fast with a hilarious montage that gave us a twist on the old game of "Telephone", with everyone in The Family calling one another to tell the tale of Tony and Aid and who had what body part where at the moment of their wreck.

Tony and Associates take the drunken, screaming Christopher out to a deserted road, and I thought for sure that was the last we were gonna see of him. At the last moment, Tony B. stepped in, saying, "Let’s try it my way". His way, of course, meaning no violence. The Two Tony’s took Christopher to the hospital, dragged the doctor that had worked on Aid out into the parking lot, and made him admit that, no, she couldn’t have been blowing him at the time of accident. The way that Tony B. got the doctor to recall this was priceless, as was his line about, "Any bullet wounds or broken kneecaps?"

Tony, slightly vindicated, returned home to Carmela, and it looked– as the episode ended– that a truce had been formed: Her, Tony, Adrianna, Christopher, and other members of their immediate family out to dinner at Artie Bucco’s. And the audience breathed a sigh of relief.

Again, this show keeps surprising us. It bobbed, it weaved, and–yes– it kind of sucked the last two weeks, but it returned with one helluva sucker punch. With the fate of Chris still up in the air (not to mention Tony– I mean, cancer? Fuck.), and with the unsteady truce between Tony and Carmela established, we can only wait to see where Chase and Company will take us next.

Word,

Dr. Scott

If you have comments about this review send them directly to Dr. Scott at until_dark@yahoo.com

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