The Juggler
Behind that bush over there. Posts: 47,561
this episode is on par with seasons 1-3's excellences...brilliantly done.
the aj thing hit home to me as i had a brother who tried to kill himself a few years back...my youngest brother really reminds me of aj too...
tony doing what he did to koko was great--"how bout a put a bullet through your head" to the other guy--awesome! i felt like i was watching an eagles game or something i was so excited---hell yeah tony!.....now we finally have an idea of how its going to end. i cannot wait for june 3rd. though i am really sad there are just 2 left because it seems like its getting better and better...
this episode is on par with seasons 1-3's excellences...brilliantly done.
the aj thing hit home to me as i had a brother who tried to kill himself a few years back...my youngest brother really reminds me of aj too...
tony doing what he did to koko was great--"how bout a put a bullet through your head" to the other guy--awesome! i felt like i was watching an eagles game or something i was so excited---hell yeah tony!.....now we finally have an idea of how its going to end. i cannot wait for june 3rd. though i am really sad there are just 2 left because it seems like its getting better and better...
I agree that the episode was on par with the early seasons.
Sorry to hear about your brother, Jeagler. Hope things are better with him now.
I felt about Tony how I have for the majority of the series ie I was pulling for him. What has been cool about the series is that it makes you sympathize with him, especially when he is going up against other gangsters. I really wanted him to kill that guy koko. I thought the guy was dead when he did the American History X treatment to him.
I don't know how everything can be wrapped up in two episodes either but I am glad that it is going strong.
Meadow looks so hot!! I thought she was hot from the first season but she is gorgeous now!!!
Editor's note: This article contains spoilers from Sunday night's episode of "The Sopranos."
By Heather Havrilesky
May 21, 2007 | The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-- W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
David Chase's epic drama series "The Sopranos" has never skirted the depravity of its characters. But after enduring the last few episodes of this last chapter, we discover that we've been let off the hook for years: There was murder, yes, but there was also baked ziti in the fridge, and there were bad jokes and smart remarks and naked girls and ungrateful kids and temperamental mistresses. Sometimes Tony murdered people casually, the way other people mow the front lawn. Other times he killed close friends and family members and it plagued him and made him sick. But he always escaped death and prison. He maintained his sanity, and shook off the shadows of the past. At the end of the day, his family was safe and well fed. Even after his brush with death at the start of this season, he emerged feeling that every day was a gift.
These days, every day may be more of a curse than a gift. The things Tony has struggled to hold together are starting to fall apart: His authority in the mob hierarchy is openly threatened by Phil Leotardo, and there's no way out. His marriage is suddenly crumbling, his friends look more like strangers, and his naive innocence about himself is gone, thanks to the realization that even Christopher saw him as "some asshole bully."
And then there's his son, AJ. Just as the first season of the HBO show found Tony struggling with his mother, now Tony wonders if he's just as merciless and self-pitying a parent as she was. AJ has never believed in anything, really, aside from Blanca and her son. Now that they're gone, everything looks like bullshit to him, from the meat industry to foreign policy. "Do you realize we're gonna bomb Iran?" he asks Meadow.
"You need to learn to shut stuff out," she tells him. "Are you crazy?" he asks. Is she? Is AJ just a whiny, spoiled little brat? Or is Meadow's peace with the world based on denial, a skill she inherited from her mother?
AJ is walking a thin line between prophetic and pathetic. In his English class, they're reading those terrible lines from Yeats, repeatedly endlessly, yet the words never lose their sting, least of all today. AJ is right to be haunted, of course, and it's almost refreshing to see him taking something seriously for once in his frivolous, unexamined life. But when Meadow tells him to set some goals for himself and move out of their parents' house, he says, "Look, I'm ill, Meadow. All right, I'm on medication. I need mom's cooking. It could mess with my blood chemistry."
Even AJ is ready to blame those "purtrid fucking genes." He reminds his parents what his grandmother Livia said in the hospital before she died: "It's all a big nothing." Has he inherited a curse of chemistry, or just a bad habit of feeling sorry for himself?
You really have to hand it to Chase and the other writers: Each of these last episodes seems to pack more of a punch than the last. This last chapter started with a sigh that's built to a scream: Tony goes from reminiscing about the ducks at the lake, to suffocating Christopher, to pulling his son out of the pool, tied to a cement block. Every step of the way, whether he's dealing with Phil Leotardo or Carmela or AJ, Tony's not sure whether to fight or retreat. "What's wrong with you?!" he bellows at AJ by the edge of the pool, then softens and strokes the boy's hair. "All right... Are you all right? Come on, baby. Are you all right, baby? Are you all right?"
"He was always so happy. He was our happy little boy!" Carmela says, crying, and her agony makes Tony and Meadow crumble. "What did I do wrong?" Tony later asks, and we can name a few things, but is he right to blame himself?
But as always, just when we're tempted to feel for them, they turn on us: When Tony confesses that the whole thing has him depressed, Carmela turns brutal and won't hear another word. "He didn't get it from my family, that's all I'm going to say." What could be more heartless, after your son attempts suicide, than to blame it on your husband and his relentless self-pity -- or is it just in his genes? Even Carmela can't decide which it is -- she'd like to blame Tony for both.
Of course the fight ends with Carmela hurling the brand new watch Tony gave her at his face. "You are my life," is what Tony had inscribed on the watch, and still Carmela accepted it with a casual kiss on the cheek, hinting that she knew it was just a gesture of guilt. We've seen coldness between them before, but this is different. They have no patience with each other. Their world is falling to pieces, and they still can't help but eat each other alive. But that makes sense, since their marriage, like the watch, is a fragile lie.
The absurdity of therapy is also on display here, along with the best joke of the season, when Dr. Melfi and Tony discuss AJ's attempted suicide:
Melfi: It could've been a cry for help.
Tony: Aren't you listening? He did cry for help. He's lucky I came home and heard him.
Later, Melfi's therapist, Elliott, tells her of a study he read about how talk therapy actually enables sociopaths instead of treating them. Chase is showing his hand now more than ever.
But even as we can hate Tony for his weaknesses and his bad decisions, even as we lament his apparent lack of deep remorse over Christopher's death, he's still a complicated human being that plays on our sympathies, either when he strokes AJ's hair and cries or when he brings him a pizza the hospital. It's remarkable, really -- a character who feels this real, but who embodies so many conflicting impulses. But then, the best authors make us feel for characters who carry with them the best and the worst of human behavior.
And, of course, larger questions loom over these terrible scenes: Is depression a whiner's malady, a genetic legacy or a part of the human condition? Is Tony a sociopath enabled by anyone who'll listen to his whining, or is he an ugly reflection of our culture: lazy, self-indulgent, confused and morally adrift?
We can fold our arms and say, smugly, that Tony is finally going to pay for all of the evil he's wrought on the world, for all of the human beings he's thoughtlessly killed, for the asbestos floating up into the air, but the terrible truth is that we recognize ourselves in him, at least in some small way. We can hope that Tony pays for it all, but still cringe as we see his world slip out of his control. When Coco makes menacing remarks about Meadow, when Tony goes down and kicks the guy's head in himself, when Tony appeals to Phil "on a human level" and Phil laughs in his face and rejects his acts of contrition? Suddenly Tony doesn't seem to have any other choice but to fulfill his tragic destiny.
And what is Sil reading? "How to Clean Practically Anything." We have to wonder what Sil will be forced to clean up once that blood-dimmed tide rolls in.
can someone tell me the significance of meadow dating patsy parisi jr (or whatever his name is)....or if there is any?
i've been watching the show from the first season, but with it being so close to the end, i'm wondering why they are throwing this storyline in. parisi and tony are cool aren't they? is there bad blood between them? is he an informant?
am i just reading too much into this?
and yes, great episode last nite, cannot wait to see the next episode!
can someone tell me the significance of meadow dating patsy parisi jr (or whatever his name is)....or if there is any?
i've been watching the show from the first season, but with it being so close to the end, i'm wondering why they are throwing this storyline in. parisi and tony are cool aren't they? is there bad blood between them? is he an informant?
am i just reading too much into this?
and yes, great episode last nite, cannot wait to see the next episode!
I don't see the significance of meadow and parisi. I agree with you, it seems strange to throw that in now. Isn't one of the kids AJ was hanging out with Patsy's son? Remember Tony was pissed when patsy was saying how good his son was doing in college. Is this the same kid?
I think Tony had Patsy's brother killed in an earlier season because he was talking to the FBI. I might be wrong about that.
I don't see the significance of meadow and parisi. I agree with you, it seems strange to throw that in now. Isn't one of the kids AJ was hanging out with Patsy's son? Remember Tony was pissed when patsy was saying how good his son was doing in college. Is this the same kid?
I think Tony had Patsy's brother killed in an earlier season because he was talking to the FBI. I might be wrong about that.
Ohhh...you're right! And Patsy almost shot Tony through the window of his house, but backed off. I don't think that storyline was ever 'resolved' either, and Patsy just sucked it up. Maybe there's more to this. But in only 2 more episodes? I dunno...
They did mention this kid earlier in the episode when Tony was talking to Patsy. Something about a troubled past, but he cleaned himself up. I need to watch this classic episode again.
24 years old, mid-life crisis
nowadays hits you when you're young
Ohhh...you're right! And Patsy almost shot Tony through the window of his house, but backed off. I don't think that storyline was ever 'resolved' either, and Patsy just sucked it up. Maybe there's more to this. But in only 2 more episodes? I dunno...
They did mention this kid earlier in the episode when Tony was talking to Patsy. Something about a troubled past, but he cleaned himself up. I need to watch this classic episode again.
Yeah my wife last night's episode but she doesn't think she will watch it tonight. I don't know if I can wait until she watches it to watch it again!
The preview for the episode on June 3 is nuts. I think I am going to go nuts with the Sopranos no more. Truly one of the greats of our time.
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The Juggler
Behind that bush over there. Posts: 47,561
yea in the preview sill says something like "he's been playing on both sides of the fence for a while now."----is he talking about paulie? or maybe pat parisi?...that could be something to make meadow dating his daughter a bigger storyline perhaps....hmm
There are only two episodes left. Why would anyone who watches the show religiously want to read a spoiler now. Once again, I like this thread, and I kindly ask if you're going to post spoilers than just start a new thread. Thanks.
Once in a while you can get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.
There are only two episodes left. Why would anyone who watches the show religiously want to read a spoiler now. Once again, I like this thread, and I kindly ask if you're going to post spoilers than just start a new thread. Thanks.
I've seen every episode and still read it, might not be true will have to see...don't read it if you don't want to that is why I put spoiler at the top
I've seen every episode and still read it, might not be true will have to see...don't read it if you don't want to that is why I put spoiler at the top
Still an asshole move. We watch the show for 8 years and some douche puts a huge spoiler before the last 2 epsiodes.
Comments
the aj thing hit home to me as i had a brother who tried to kill himself a few years back...my youngest brother really reminds me of aj too...
tony doing what he did to koko was great--"how bout a put a bullet through your head" to the other guy--awesome! i felt like i was watching an eagles game or something i was so excited---hell yeah tony!.....now we finally have an idea of how its going to end. i cannot wait for june 3rd. though i am really sad there are just 2 left because it seems like its getting better and better...
I agree that the episode was on par with the early seasons.
Sorry to hear about your brother, Jeagler. Hope things are better with him now.
I felt about Tony how I have for the majority of the series ie I was pulling for him. What has been cool about the series is that it makes you sympathize with him, especially when he is going up against other gangsters. I really wanted him to kill that guy koko. I thought the guy was dead when he did the American History X treatment to him.
I don't know how everything can be wrapped up in two episodes either but I am glad that it is going strong.
Meadow looks so hot!! I thought she was hot from the first season but she is gorgeous now!!!
I would love to have her and Carmella together.
Something we can agree on!
meadow is fucking goregous
I love her.
Tony flails helplessly as things fall apart.
Editor's note: This article contains spoilers from Sunday night's episode of "The Sopranos."
By Heather Havrilesky
May 21, 2007 | The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-- W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
David Chase's epic drama series "The Sopranos" has never skirted the depravity of its characters. But after enduring the last few episodes of this last chapter, we discover that we've been let off the hook for years: There was murder, yes, but there was also baked ziti in the fridge, and there were bad jokes and smart remarks and naked girls and ungrateful kids and temperamental mistresses. Sometimes Tony murdered people casually, the way other people mow the front lawn. Other times he killed close friends and family members and it plagued him and made him sick. But he always escaped death and prison. He maintained his sanity, and shook off the shadows of the past. At the end of the day, his family was safe and well fed. Even after his brush with death at the start of this season, he emerged feeling that every day was a gift.
These days, every day may be more of a curse than a gift. The things Tony has struggled to hold together are starting to fall apart: His authority in the mob hierarchy is openly threatened by Phil Leotardo, and there's no way out. His marriage is suddenly crumbling, his friends look more like strangers, and his naive innocence about himself is gone, thanks to the realization that even Christopher saw him as "some asshole bully."
And then there's his son, AJ. Just as the first season of the HBO show found Tony struggling with his mother, now Tony wonders if he's just as merciless and self-pitying a parent as she was. AJ has never believed in anything, really, aside from Blanca and her son. Now that they're gone, everything looks like bullshit to him, from the meat industry to foreign policy. "Do you realize we're gonna bomb Iran?" he asks Meadow.
"You need to learn to shut stuff out," she tells him. "Are you crazy?" he asks. Is she? Is AJ just a whiny, spoiled little brat? Or is Meadow's peace with the world based on denial, a skill she inherited from her mother?
AJ is walking a thin line between prophetic and pathetic. In his English class, they're reading those terrible lines from Yeats, repeatedly endlessly, yet the words never lose their sting, least of all today. AJ is right to be haunted, of course, and it's almost refreshing to see him taking something seriously for once in his frivolous, unexamined life. But when Meadow tells him to set some goals for himself and move out of their parents' house, he says, "Look, I'm ill, Meadow. All right, I'm on medication. I need mom's cooking. It could mess with my blood chemistry."
Even AJ is ready to blame those "purtrid fucking genes." He reminds his parents what his grandmother Livia said in the hospital before she died: "It's all a big nothing." Has he inherited a curse of chemistry, or just a bad habit of feeling sorry for himself?
You really have to hand it to Chase and the other writers: Each of these last episodes seems to pack more of a punch than the last. This last chapter started with a sigh that's built to a scream: Tony goes from reminiscing about the ducks at the lake, to suffocating Christopher, to pulling his son out of the pool, tied to a cement block. Every step of the way, whether he's dealing with Phil Leotardo or Carmela or AJ, Tony's not sure whether to fight or retreat. "What's wrong with you?!" he bellows at AJ by the edge of the pool, then softens and strokes the boy's hair. "All right... Are you all right? Come on, baby. Are you all right, baby? Are you all right?"
"He was always so happy. He was our happy little boy!" Carmela says, crying, and her agony makes Tony and Meadow crumble. "What did I do wrong?" Tony later asks, and we can name a few things, but is he right to blame himself?
But as always, just when we're tempted to feel for them, they turn on us: When Tony confesses that the whole thing has him depressed, Carmela turns brutal and won't hear another word. "He didn't get it from my family, that's all I'm going to say." What could be more heartless, after your son attempts suicide, than to blame it on your husband and his relentless self-pity -- or is it just in his genes? Even Carmela can't decide which it is -- she'd like to blame Tony for both.
Of course the fight ends with Carmela hurling the brand new watch Tony gave her at his face. "You are my life," is what Tony had inscribed on the watch, and still Carmela accepted it with a casual kiss on the cheek, hinting that she knew it was just a gesture of guilt. We've seen coldness between them before, but this is different. They have no patience with each other. Their world is falling to pieces, and they still can't help but eat each other alive. But that makes sense, since their marriage, like the watch, is a fragile lie.
The absurdity of therapy is also on display here, along with the best joke of the season, when Dr. Melfi and Tony discuss AJ's attempted suicide:
Melfi: It could've been a cry for help.
Tony: Aren't you listening? He did cry for help. He's lucky I came home and heard him.
Later, Melfi's therapist, Elliott, tells her of a study he read about how talk therapy actually enables sociopaths instead of treating them. Chase is showing his hand now more than ever.
But even as we can hate Tony for his weaknesses and his bad decisions, even as we lament his apparent lack of deep remorse over Christopher's death, he's still a complicated human being that plays on our sympathies, either when he strokes AJ's hair and cries or when he brings him a pizza the hospital. It's remarkable, really -- a character who feels this real, but who embodies so many conflicting impulses. But then, the best authors make us feel for characters who carry with them the best and the worst of human behavior.
And, of course, larger questions loom over these terrible scenes: Is depression a whiner's malady, a genetic legacy or a part of the human condition? Is Tony a sociopath enabled by anyone who'll listen to his whining, or is he an ugly reflection of our culture: lazy, self-indulgent, confused and morally adrift?
We can fold our arms and say, smugly, that Tony is finally going to pay for all of the evil he's wrought on the world, for all of the human beings he's thoughtlessly killed, for the asbestos floating up into the air, but the terrible truth is that we recognize ourselves in him, at least in some small way. We can hope that Tony pays for it all, but still cringe as we see his world slip out of his control. When Coco makes menacing remarks about Meadow, when Tony goes down and kicks the guy's head in himself, when Tony appeals to Phil "on a human level" and Phil laughs in his face and rejects his acts of contrition? Suddenly Tony doesn't seem to have any other choice but to fulfill his tragic destiny.
And what is Sil reading? "How to Clean Practically Anything." We have to wonder what Sil will be forced to clean up once that blood-dimmed tide rolls in.
http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2007/05/21/sopranos/index.html
teeth flying out by the root.... and staying in his pants
wtf??
and meadow is HOT... but she looked different last night... in a good way
did she get work done? new haircut? eyebrows? find her ideal weight (and by this I mean put on a couple of LBs ... she was way skinny last year no?)
i can't get to youtube
but are you talking about cologino? he's dead
cuffed pants......all sorts of crazy things can get caught in there especially if your curbing someone.....:p
she is gorgeous.....i think she has finally grown into an adult and is at her ideal weight.....:)
i've been watching the show from the first season, but with it being so close to the end, i'm wondering why they are throwing this storyline in. parisi and tony are cool aren't they? is there bad blood between them? is he an informant?
am i just reading too much into this?
and yes, great episode last nite, cannot wait to see the next episode!
Excellent point I totally agree.
I just watched that scene when Tony curbs the guy. Fucking amazing you can feel the anger in Tony. I wish he would have put a bullet in both of them.
I don't see the significance of meadow and parisi. I agree with you, it seems strange to throw that in now. Isn't one of the kids AJ was hanging out with Patsy's son? Remember Tony was pissed when patsy was saying how good his son was doing in college. Is this the same kid?
I think Tony had Patsy's brother killed in an earlier season because he was talking to the FBI. I might be wrong about that.
Ohhh...you're right! And Patsy almost shot Tony through the window of his house, but backed off. I don't think that storyline was ever 'resolved' either, and Patsy just sucked it up. Maybe there's more to this. But in only 2 more episodes? I dunno...
They did mention this kid earlier in the episode when Tony was talking to Patsy. Something about a troubled past, but he cleaned himself up. I need to watch this classic episode again.
nowadays hits you when you're young
Yeah my wife last night's episode but she doesn't think she will watch it tonight. I don't know if I can wait until she watches it to watch it again!
I hoped T would shine some light on what exactly 'he got'. His talk with Delfi didn't make much sense..
And Silvio reading that book "How to clean almost anything" brilliant!
I see a full scale war coming between NY and New Jersey.. Haven't seen Ginny in a while, is she in the madhouse too?
I agree - I was wondering if that was going to go anywhere...2 or 3 times they showed her doing that.
She'll be bald by the series finale!
Twirling and pulling out her hair wasn't she?
I also wonder if that shooting Bobby messed up on will come back and haunt him.
howard: "can we expect major violence in the next 2 weeks?"
steven: "yes"
hehehehe.....:)
maybe a spoiler from an unconfirmed source
deleted for all the little girls that don't want people to discuss possible outcomes of future sopranos episodes in the sopranos thread
no shit.....not cool green......
Still an asshole move. We watch the show for 8 years and some douche puts a huge spoiler before the last 2 epsiodes.