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BiggerBoat posted:I've always felt sympathy for him and have never understood why the character (and the actor) catches so much poo poo. I wouldn't put it all on upbringing since Meadow came out of the same house as a far more capable person, even if she ended up embracing her mother's hypocrisy. AJ's a failson, and while there are worse things to be (like pretty much anything having to do with organized crime, as even Tony recognized on some level), it doesn't make him a particularly entertaining character. I do wonder if there was an ever an idea for him to be more like his dad, but some combination of Iler not growing up to have anything close to Gandolfini's presence (either in terms of charm or physicality) and Tony having the examples set by Jackie Jr and Christopher as flashing red lights telling him to keep his kid far away from that life moved the show away from that.
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Apr 9, 2020 07:05
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Beyond being interested in the movie just to see what David Chase comes up with as a movie in its own right, I think the character I'm most interested in learning more about is Livia. There's not much real humanity left in Livia by the time the show starts (or at least by the time she's furious about the retirement home), so it'll be interesting to see what a pre-degeneration Livia looks like. Tony's memories leave us with the impression that she was always a cruel woman, but I suspect she'll be a bit less one note than just that.
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Apr 21, 2020 20:02
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Dawgstar posted:Maybe she'll wave her hankie for the first time. If it was a series run by Vince Gilligan we'd absolutely see the origin of the hankie.
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Apr 22, 2020 01:04
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Pope Corky the IX posted:See, that's why "In Camelot" is such an important episode. It's the first time you really see what Johnny put Livia through. He knew she was pregnant and in the hospital and there was a chance that not only could she lose the baby but also die herself, and he still decided to spend the night with Fran. Then he makes up a ridiculous bullshit story at her bedside after the miscarriage and basically forces sixteen year old Tony to lie for him. Not that it explains everything about why Livia was the way she was, but it certainly goes a long way. And you can see in the therapy session that Tony hates that he's remembering this, because he was comfortable with the image of his father he had built up in his head as well as blaming everything on his mother. And at the end, he's all "She made my father give my dog away" when every bit of evidence from Janice, Fran, his own memory, etc proves that's simply not true. Tony's refusal to accept the reality that he had a lovely dad (or at least that his dad was a lovely husband), despite it staring him in the face, really is a lot more frustrating on a rewatch. He was on a precipice of an enormous crossroads but couldn't quite take himself over the edge. I think he does know the truth deep down, but he's really good at compartmentalizing so he doesn't have to face it anyway. To be fair to him, his mom seems to have decided Johnny Boy was a saint after he died, so it's not like she was presenting a counterview. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 16:43
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It was hinted pretty strongly that AJ and that rich girl were hooking up, wasn't it? They dated for a while anyway. As for his father's love, if nothing else, going forward he has the memory of Tony saving him from drowning. I don't know if that'll be much comfort after seeing his father murdered in front of him though.
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Apr 23, 2020 02:50
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JethroMcB posted:Looked up the cast list for this episode (Couldn't remember it was Sarah Shahi as Sonya) - the cyclist was Banbadjan from The Good Place! Yeah I was watching it recently and went huh, she looks kind of like Sarah Shahi...
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Apr 23, 2020 19:32
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CharlestheHammer posted:The entire point of the Adriana thing is he couldn’t give up the life no matter what Even in S6 he was ranting about how he had stories he could tell. He was probably never going to get to that point on his own, but if he actually got arrested and his options were going to prison for years vs going somewhere else with his family and trying to cash in on the story, option number 2 sounds pretty tempting. Yeah, we know he doesn't want to be a normal guy, but it beats being torn away from your family, especially once you realize your other Family doesn't actually give a poo poo about you anymore (and we know not being able to have kids with Adriana was something that bothered him, so the fact that he had a kid now was a meaningful change on its own, especially since he knew what it was like to grow up without a father). The reward he got for his loyalty was Tony and Paulie making GBS threads on him all the time, and he wasn't too stupid to notice. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Apr 25, 2020 |
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Apr 25, 2020 21:33
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I definitely don't think Carmine was deliberately positioning himself for the spot anymore, but I could see him relapsing and accepting the position, reluctantly or otherwise. People fall off the wagon on this show all the time, so I don't find it hard to believe he'd give up on embracing happiness to follow in his father's footsteps. I think some kind of council like Tony suggested in Season 5 probably makes the most sense for that family going forward though.
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Apr 26, 2020 22:49
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Bip Roberts posted:Obviously we aren't there yet but what is the lay of the land for the NY family post Made in America. My guess is Little Carmine steps up, either on his own or as part of a council running things. Once he's involved in greenlighting whatever happened in the last episode (maybe twice), I think he's in too deep to go back to living the good life stress free. I have to imagine even the other families would be telling them to get it together after all the chaos.
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Apr 27, 2020 04:15
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Honestly if David Chase really wanted us to walk away with a feeling that people in general can't change, I don't buy it. My takeaway is that you can only compartmentalize things so much, and if you want to change for the better, you have to actually live the change full time, not try to find ways to make it conveniently fit with the parts of your pre-existing lifestyle you want to keep. That's hard for everyone, but harder still for people in the Mafia who don't necessarily have the option of just casually walking away from the life. The therapist Carmela saw gave the best advice of anyone in the series when he told her to walk away from the lifestyle built on blood money she had, even if he knew there's no chance she was going to take it. I guess Little Carmine's the counterexample, but 1) as I've said before, it's not clear to me that he'll stick with the good life, and 2) if he does, it's not really clear how seriously he was taking the whole thing down in Miami to start with. Edit: I guess the thesis is more that people don't change rather than that people can't change, and tbf that's mostly true. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 16:31
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If Phil wanted nothing but violence from the start, I don't think he would have accepted Carmine's offer to meet with Tony in the first place. We know he was ultimately willing to offend Carmine since he does back out at the last minute, but I don't think that was a deliberate ploy--I think Phil's genuinely indecisive at that moment. On some level I think he knows he's behaving irrationally, but he really wants to make Tony eat poo poo, so he does that, in my opinion without a clear goal initially for where that might lead.
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Apr 29, 2020 16:30
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Paper Lion posted:Meadow knew exactly what would happen when she told Tony about this. You can maybe give her the benefit of the doubt with the whole thing about Finn, but this is clearly history repeating itself and it's more direct confirmation than anything that she accepts Tony's power and lifestyle and is willing to condone it for power and material advantages at this point in the show. I think she clearly wanted some kind of confrontation/retribution to happen (with plausible deniability on her part so she could still pretend to herself and her parents that she's not involved--there's no way her broader denial about the family isn't willful), but I think she'd still be surprised at how far it went.
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Apr 29, 2020 23:11
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BiggerBoat posted:I think Phil did that "Sitting up in my Castle Tower" bullshit power move on purpose. I can't see it any other way and am surprised people here think he set up a meeting with 2 people he not only doesn't respect but outright LOATHES, especially in light of "No More" and Tony's act of VERY extreme aggression against a made guy in his crew. He hates Tony and considers Carmine not only a rival but also a complete moron. Going out of his way to piss on another important guy in his own organization at the same time he's rushing to war with another (admittedly weaker) organization would be really stupid. We know Phil was making reckless decisions, but I think the subsequent episodes show that he was cracking a bit under the pressure and succumbing to paranoia too, so I don't think this was all some master strategy on his part. I think that 'I'm not going to eat poo poo from anyone' stubborness just leads him down the road to making the kinds of impulsive decisions that we see from Tony all the time, where he knows he should (or shouldn't) do something but says gently caress it and does what he wants to do anyway, but not necessarily in a planned out way. Paper Lion posted:Her boyfriend gets forced to go talk to her dad and his buds at the strip club, he's wracked with guilt and anxiety about it, Vito "disappears". She's not A.J, she can put this poo poo together Phenotype posted:I was typing up something like this, but then I realized it's been what, a month or so since Vito was murdered a few weeks after they interrogated her and Finn about him. She should really know better at this point. To be fair, if she does blame her dad for murdering Vito, it would be one of the few crimes he's actually innocent of committing. I think Meadow's obviously a hypocrite who knows some poo poo's going on that she isn't comfortable owning up to, but I don't think she's straight up plotting out some dude's murder or near-murder because he made a creepy comment to her. That seems way beyond anything she'd be comfortable with, even if she should be smart enough to know that these are real risks. I don't think even Carmella would be comfortable with that level of blatant complicity. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 00:14
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BiggerBoat posted:I'm willing to look at it that way but still don't see it. I'm saying he agreed to talk it out after Coco got his teeth knocked out when the seriousness of the situation became clear (he wanted to lord over Tony and force him into a subordinate negotiating position, not start a war), and then backed out of that agreement when he decided to seize the opportunity to get revenge on Tony for his brother. If he'd wanted to go to war from the start, he could have just done that and taken the first shot without warning Tony by backing out of a planned meeting. And yeah, Phil doesn't respect Carmine (he did ultimately back out of the meeting), but Carmine was still clearly a part of the family, and one who was in leadership contention not so long ago (and seemed to be in a solid position to succeed Johnny Sack after Phil's heart attack if he'd wanted to), so he's not just some irrelevant idiot, as the way the war played out proved. I've been trying not to get too far ahead of the story, but the way Phil divorces himself even from his loyal crew tells me he lost the plot at some point and was just lashing out irrationally rather than coolly pulling strings. Edit: Didn't see this until after I posted. Jerusalem posted:I think there's a strong chance that Phil agreed to the meeting because he initially thought,"Now that he's done this to Coco, I can not only get what I wanted from him but maybe more too because he knows he hosed up" but the closer they got to the meeting the more he got pissed off that he was agreeing to a negotiation AFTER claiming his position was set in stone, even though Tony was actually coming to capitulate entirely, so he decided gently caress it, no negotiation. There was probably also a significant amount of pleasure in getting to force Tony to come all the way out to see him and then sending him away as a power-play, as noted. I agree about Phil seeming scared of Tony. When he's shouting from inside his house after canceling the meeting, he doesn't seem like someone who's cool and in charge, he seems like a little kid. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 02:25
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Pissed Ape Sexist posted:I want a straight-to-Netflix Sopranos spinoff sequel for wine moms where it's Janice going on a road trip to find Harpo... and herself Imagine if they actually did do a spinoff like that and someone tried to say something about Tony that would confirm one way or another what happened at the end of the series and Janice just said she doesn't want to talk about her brother to cut it off.
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May 1, 2020 16:41
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I don't know if Tony hits all the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy or not, but in a colloquial sense he's definitely a sociopath. Yeah, he seems to love and care about people, but he didn't seem to be filled with regret when he ordered Adriana's murder, or when he killed his former protege. I think it's one thing to be able to rationalize their murders as necessary evils, but he never seemed broken up about it at all. He did seem uncomfortable with having killed Pussy, so maybe it's a sign of his degeneration over the course of the series that he gets so comfortable with killing people who were genuinely important to him (if he'd gone through with killing Paulie, for instance, I don't think he would have felt particularly bad about it). I do think he was capable of feeling remorse, but he had an ability to turn it off that "normal" people don't have, and leaving that switch in the off position seemed to become his default over time. I was pretty resistant to the idea that he was a sociopath for a while too, and like I said, I don't technically know if he fits all the criteria or not. I think as an audience we fell into the same trap that Melfi did though, where we buy his into his occasional crocodile tears and overlook what a monster he is deep down. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 18:10 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 18:05
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Basebf555 posted:Bobby is really a super interesting character and just throwing him in the good pile or the bad pile is definitely underselling him. I love how, even though he never kills anyone for the majority of his life in the mob, you never get the sense that he feels above anyone else because of it. He knows that his lifestyle and his ability to provide a good life for his kids is directly tied to the violence and death perpetrated by his associates, and he owns it. That's why he doesn't really hesitate when Tony gives finally gives him the order to kill, because he always saw that as an essential part of the business that he just never had to participate in up to that point. And yet, when it's over he clearly has conflicted feelings about it, and he owns them to. He hugs his daughter and in that moment comes to terms with the the fact that yes, I'm willing to do these things to provide for these people I love. So he has remorse, but with no excuses. Yeah, I think a big difference is that he's not sadistic and doesn't actually enjoy loving people over. He'll do it, so we shouldn't be under any impression that he's a good guy, but like you said, this is just a job to him. It's hard to imagine him killing a waiter over a tip, for example. I think the most ruthless character in the whole series might be Silvio. Other than crumbling under the pressure of being Boss when Tony's in a coma, and I guess his loyalty to Tony, is there really any hint of humanity in the guy? I don't think he gets off on cruelty the way Ralphie or Richie might, but the guy's loving cold.
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May 6, 2020 19:38
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BiggerBoat posted:RE: Tony's failure to engage with therapy. Short answer: he CAN'T. How is he supposed to get to the root of his issues by glossing over the violence, the murder, etc? To say nothing of extortion and theft. Therapy doesn't really work if you can't be honest and that's completely incompatible with his line of work and the things he has to do It's funny because that's what he told her from the start. He didn't trick Melfi, Melfi tricked herself.
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May 6, 2020 19:40
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Jack2142 posted:I think this is what I was trying to get at, Phil is terrified at how easily (to him) Tony has handled everything. I feel this is almost like when Tony was bitterly commenting on his sister Barbara's father in law "The Happy loving Wanderer". Phil doesn't necessarily see Tony's internal misery, he just sees this lucky "young" upstart who seems to never loving lose and walked the easy way to power and prestige without earning it like he did. Even if he did see Tony's internal misery, he'd look at Tony the way Tony looks at AJ or Christopher when they deal with their issues, except with even less recognition or sympathy. 'What the gently caress do you have to be miserable about? I'm the one who did 20 years in the can and buried my brother.'
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May 6, 2020 21:17
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Torquemada posted:I think there’s a real danger that there’s not actually that many shows that can stand up to the kind of analysis Jerusalem provides. That said, maybe something a bit simpler might be a nice change of pace for him? At the risk of asking him to sign his life away, I wouldn’t object to Breaking Bad, The Shield, or Deadwood. Rewatching parts of this show during the shutdown definitely made me revise it upward in my top shows. I'm pretty sure I'd put it above Breaking Bad now, which really relies a lot on plot momentum and suspense (which to be fair makes it super exciting the first time through), but isn't as layered.
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May 6, 2020 22:07
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Jerusalem posted:A big part of my objection to the idea is that... it's just too easy an explanation. It's such a sweeping generalization that not only allows Elliot and eventually Melfi (and yes, the audience) to feel superior to him, but it reduces an incredibly complex character to "he bad". Part of the appeal of Tony Soprano, outside of the amazing performance of course, is that he's a very flawed but very human person. There isn't a single easy label to slap onto him and consider the problem solved (or unsolvable, in this case). I think that's true for early season Tony, but I think by late season 6B that potential for change has only moved him deeper into something that at least looks a lot like sociopathy. If he chose that instead of defaulting into it by nature, to me that makes him even less sympathetic. Either way, he seemed to have a real opportunity to show growth after his coma, but very quickly degenerated to his lowest point in the series instead. I don't think fans are hypocritical for turning on the character as he becomes more and more of a monster--I pretty much think the way he killed Christopher (and was gleeful about having done so) was meant to make us feel that way, even if David Chase also condemns the fans for wanting Tony to meet a grisly fate. I think the way we applaud the therapist Carmela saw for telling her some hard truths and refusing her blood money while thinking Melfi may have been too harsh about ending treatment with Tony is kind of interesting. Yes, of course she did owe him more professional courtesy after years of treatment (particularly with his son's recent troubles), so I don't think the actual way she went about firing him as a patient was the best possible way to do it, but the decision was clearly long overdue. And again, whether or not the study fully captures him as a human being, the way it describes criminals using therapy to become better criminals is something we had demonstrated to us multiple times over the course of the series. Melfi genuinely did seem to be enabling his criminal behavior, and was never going to make the kind of progress with him that could even hope to make up for that fact.
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May 7, 2020 14:16
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Ishamael posted:I remember David Chase making a lot of these same complaints, he was so mad that people wanted Tony's blood after so long, as though he hadn't spent 7 years slowly and methodically convincing everyone that Tony was irredeemable and evil, and that the parts of him you loved and cheered for were dead or dying. I think it's fair to say that the guy who wrote that ending liked to have things both ways. 
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May 7, 2020 14:45
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I agree that Mad Men is the closest thing to an heir this show had, which makes sense given how heavily involved Matthew Weiner was in The Sopranos. Boardwalk Empire is obviously somewhere in that conversation too, but it's not in the same ballpark of quality aside from some occasional high moments, and imo gets dragged down by Buscemi (who I like!) not being remotely in Gandolfini's league in that type of role.
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May 7, 2020 22:03
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Big Dick Cheney posted:I would like Jerusalem to write about whatever they want to next Yeah for sure.
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May 7, 2020 22:16
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Jerusalem posted:You know... I've never actually watched Mad Men before... FWIW, despite feeling like Tony earned whatever label we might want to put on him (by nature or choice), I was always in the wanting him to be okay at the end camp, so sticking him with a label isn't about wanting to right the scales of justice or anything to me. There was another show that did seem to go out of its way to punish its protagonist at the end where it felt super on the nose Boardwalk Empire, where it felt like maybe a response against Chase not explicitly doing that (don't know how to hint what the show is without spoiling it for everyone, so mouse over at your own risk), and I loving hated it. There's probably an argument to be made that sympathizing with murderers isn't ideal (Breaking Bad's fans and creators had a lot of back and forth about that, where some fans seemed to identify too strongly with Walt in pretty toxic ways), but I do at least think the whole turning off that sympathy like a switch at the end of a show's run and needing to always see long delayed justice applied is way too black and white (and convenient) to feel true. BiggerBoat posted:Boardwalk Empire was one of those things where I feel like I'm supposed to like it more than I do. Bobby Cannavale was phenomenal, but yeah otherwise I just don't think it lived up to the expectations anyone had for it given that it was inevitably going to be compared to The Sopranos given who made it and for what network. BiggerBoat posted:From the sound of it, I guess I should maybe finally watch The Shield and Mad Men, yes? Mad Men for sure. The Shield relies a bit more on suspense than I really like these days, and might feel a bit dated otherwise since it was basically the first big premium basic cable show (and I think watching dirty cops do awful things is a lot more uncomfortable for many of us now than it was at the time), but I do have to say it builds toward an ending like no other show I've ever seen. BiggerBoat posted:Getting back to The Blue Comet for minute, one thing that stood out to me in this episode was how flashy and dramatically directed Bobby's death was; what with the train crash, the build up fast cuts and the close ups on the little men and poo poo. The show didn't do much of that and usually when someone got clipped or shot it was rather abrupt and to the point. Trying to think of another killing that had that sort of directorial flare to it and coming up empty. I think that was partially twisting the knife to make us feel bad. We were meant to sympathize with Bobby as the closest thing to a decent guy on the crew, and putting him in what's basically a toy store (where the owner specifically thinks his kid will enjoy it with him, even if that's not true) leans hard on that relative innocence. Prolonging the scene just gives us more time to feel bad about his fate.
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May 8, 2020 02:11
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Ishamael posted:I think that Chase conflated people wanting there to be a definitive, satisfying end to his story with people thinking "he must be punished". I think he was adding the moralizing aspect, I don't remember people wanting Tony to necessarily lose or die, just to have a strong ending. I know for me I was the most interested in the ending because it felt like that would be the final note in the song, the step that would tie everything together. I think that's a fair point about Chase possibly railing against strawmen with that argument. Maybe critics were more vocal about wanting some kind of justice, but I think a whole bunch of viewers were just enjoying the show and wanted Tony to win. It's hard to say though since normal people were less Extremely Online back then. I agree with what you said about people wanting some sort of closure too though. Obviously Pine Barrens is a big example of that, and of Chase telling them to gently caress off.
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May 8, 2020 18:05
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Vichan posted:I still enjoyed Boardwalk Empire's third season immensely (Bobby Cannavale is amazing) but I agree that it did feel very aimless overall. I can't help wondering what the show would have been like if someone like Cannavale had been the lead instead of Buscemi. Very, very different energy. But yeah, Season 5 is pretty much inexplicable to me other than 'okay, people don't love this absurdly expensive show, so I guess we'll just rush to the end.' I think it probably dipped below mediocre at some point there especially since it's one of my least favorite finales ever.
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May 10, 2020 19:31
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We're all getting ahead of the reviews, but I really think the best argument for Tony being alive is that we never saw him die and many of us wanted him to survive. Of course we didn't see Adriana die either, but still know she's dead from context, so I don't buy it. I really resisted the conclusion that he died for a while, because it didn't feel necessary to me for him to have died (and young me sympathized more with murderous protagonists than today me does), but even David Chase has referred to it as a death scene. I think there's enough room to take it how you want to take it (and to the extent that authorial intent matters, obviously Chase's reluctance to talk about things for a while was meant to give viewers the option to do that, even if he blabbed too much in the years since then), but the signs all point in one direction for me. If someone takes it the other way though, that's fine too--like I said, I wanted to see it that way for a long time too.
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May 11, 2020 19:09
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I think what I feel most strongly about is that David Chase should have either said nothing or just explained it. Trying to have it both ways where he gives interviews and doles out hints here and there before clarifying that actually he wasn't saying what he said (or what the reporter implied he said), and the answer is irrelevant anyway, is pretty annoying. Tbf he's owned up to the ending being frustrating for a lot of people, so maybe he's working out his own reactions to people not liking it, idk. I'm not trying to tell him how to live his life obviously--he can say whatever he wants to say. I just think it cheapens the whole thing to play games with it.
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May 11, 2020 21:35
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crispix posted:Some people just wanted to see Tony's head lying on a plate of onion rings and AJ screaming and covered in brains, imo. David Chase definitely talked a lot about how that's what he thought people wanted, which may specifically be why he didn't do it, but I think most people wanted Tony to live. What about any fandom suggests that people don't like protagonists who are awful people? Look at the way people have romanticized Scarface. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 00:22 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 00:18
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Oz hasn't held up very well imo, and always had a misery porn element to it that was pretty uncomfortable, but it was legitimately trailblazing in a pre-Sopranos world and had an insane cast.
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May 12, 2020 01:40
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Ginette Reno posted:There's a lot of clues that Tony did die. The boat conversation with Bobby makes a lot of sense when you consider how the show ends. Tony's comment in the final scene about the onion rings being "the best in the city", which is a callback to the scene in the Godfather where Michael murdered Solozzo and the corrupt cop. The likely murderer going to the bathroom and then coming back to kill Tony is also a Godfather reference. I'm sure there's a mountain of other clues I'm not remembering off the top of my head and I'm sure Jersualem will cover those in time. David Chase's position is that it doesn't matter and we're all crazy for worrying so much about it, yeah (though he's not just putting down the audience when he says that, because he also says it falls on him if people didn't feel satisfied with the ending as it was shown). The ending we got led to far more discussion and (I think I can honestly say) anxiety, because people are really, really uncomfortable with ambiguity, but we'd all be happier if we accepted it for what it is and made our peace with whatever interpretation we give it. That isn't to say it can't be examined and our perspective can't change, but the show's just as over if he survived as if he's dead, so it's all kind of a philosophical point. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 03:43 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 03:40
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While I agree that Carmine was sincere about pursuing his happiness and not getting tied up in trying to run things in New York anymore, I still think that meeting was a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G29DXfcdhBg moment for him, and maybe that's why he seemed out of it and reluctant about the whole thing. I don't know how he can go to that meeting and casually retire back to living the good life. Even if he's happy letting Butchie or someone else take over, there's a track record proving he's not some harmless guy they can just ignore since he directly influenced a meeting that led to a boss's death.Paper Lion posted:i think the saddest part of the junior scene is when he asks "i was involved with that?" because it implies when heard This Thing Of Ours he remembered what it meant, and had memories of...some aspects of it, but couldn't place himself or anyone else. It really was all in there, and that little uptick in his voice reads to me as though hes hopeful in that split second that he can remember SOMETHING, anything. a drowning man reaching for the life preserver, only for the waves to cruelly pull him under just before he can grab it. his tone sinks down and he becomes flat again in his "that's nice" response, and you can see on Tony's face that he's registering all of this. When junior flattens out, that's when he gives up and can't look. It's not that he doesn't remember that crushes him, it's that he can't even get close to it again. I felt the same way the first time I watched it. I kept hoping something would register with Junior and there would be a level of catharsis there, but nope, he's gone. It's all a big nothing. I think it's really one of the bleakest scenes in television. I wonder if Tony walks away wishing he'd visited sooner, so he could have had some kind of confrontation with the man who shot him (even if Junior clearly wasn't himself in that moment either), instead of going to see that. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 17:50 on May 12, 2020 |
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May 12, 2020 16:46
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BiggerBoat posted:Also, labeling Tony a "sociopath" is too simplistic IMO - too broad - and I maintain that the primary "failure" of his treatment isn't entirely what Melfi read but rather the complete incompatibility between what therapy is designed to treat and the inherent dishonestly required from someone in Tony's line of work. We see him dancing around poo poo all the time and making up stories for what happened to people that he was directly responsible for murdering (Chris, Pussy, Ralph, Ritchie). How can a person get into any sort of healing mechanism this way? The central theme of the article Melfi was reading was that the sociopath "uses" therapy to make himself a better liar and such but I don't see it that way entirely. If anything, Tony's treatment overall made him a LESS effective mob boss, since the two things simply can't conflate and all the things you learn in therapy fly directly in the face of the things that make you capable of running a criminal enterprise (empathy, sensitivity, forgiveness, introspection, honesty). I think the way he steadfastly refused to acknowledge his dad's faults, even outside of the context of his criminal life, is another big piece of his refusal to engage with therapy. The fact is that Tony had no interest in changing who he was, or in examining the lovely role models he looked up to as he was becoming the man he was in the series. He wanted to do the minimum amount possible to get things like panic attacks under control while still having the ability to do whatever else he wanted to whoever else got in his way. Whether or not he was a sociopath by nature, the takeway is exactly the same, because the end result was that he was using therapy to be a more effective criminal, as the paper suggested.
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May 13, 2020 00:00
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Phenotype posted:I never really understood why Butchie was so quick to flip on Phil, though, I thought he'd have a lot more animosity towards Tony after the scene in the diner where Tony curbstomps Coco. Tony shoved the gun right in Butchie's face, really reveling in making Butchie feel helpless, daring Butchie to try to stop him while he beat his friend half to death. I mean, sure, money is everything with these people, but Butchie (and Phil) in particular seem like the kind of people who are going to let their emotions lead after being made to feel small and having their bubble of invulnerability pierced like that. And it didn't seem like the New York crew was doing that badly if they were taking business off of New Jersey while Tony's crew was in hiding. To me, Phil sounded kind of threatening when he was talking about having a meeting with Butchie after things settled down. He was blaming Butchie for things going to poo poo, and even if that wasn't totally unearned since Butchie was the one pushing for confrontation before Phil went overboard, between that and Phil going AWOL and leaving any blowback to fall on him and the other guys (and immediately rejecting any hint of negotiation), I think he decided he was better off without him. Presumably there was pressure from guys on the ground and the other Families too, but we never got that kind of detail about New York. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 00:14 on May 13, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 00:12
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I do think condensing that much of a character shift in one scene like that was a lot. The show just wasn't super interested in that sort of detail.
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May 13, 2020 20:11
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JethroMcB posted:It's very impressive how almost all of the characters' final scenes definitely carry a weight to them - but if we didn't know this was the series finale, it could be very easy to read them as just laying down hooks for the next season's storylines. Tony's preparing to face an indictment; Meadow's pivoted to law and found love with a guy who is going to bring Patsy Parisi into an uncomfortably close orbit for Tony; AJ's over his funk - for now - and roped into Little Carmine's business; Paulie has finally earned the position he always (thought) he wanted; Melfi cut Tony loose, but this isn't the first time they've been on the outs, so who's to say it's the last? It all feels like it's going to continue. (In reading about the finale, I saw that the scripts that the majority of the cast and crew received were cut short, ending with the scene of Tony raking leaves and taking a moment to just look up and reflect, before he went to see Junior or met the family for dinner. I wonder if the backlash would've been as vocal if it really had just ended there - going out on a scene with absolutely no sense of menace, but also completely lacking the kind of "real" resolution that people were seemingly expecting.) Hard disagree about Melfi, I don't think there's any coming back from that one. Maybe if she hadn't been humiliated in front of her peers she could find a way to believe their therapy actually is meaningful despite the study, say if Tony has another emergency after a panic attack or something, but even that seems like a stretch since she came to the almost certainly correct conclusion that talk therapy wasn't the solution for him. It probably wasn't ever helping much in the first place--she uses the fact that Tony's medication hadn't had time to kick in to suggest the therapy was helping, but placebo effect seems likelier to me (though as I wrote this it occurred to me that talk therapy could be useful largely because it also has a placebo effect, and a quick Google search suggests that isn't completely implausible). The funny thing about AJ is that if he'd had even the smallest amount of success at the new job, I think viewers would have been happier with that than almost anything else he was involved in over the course of the show. It's kind of awesome how this is such a great show that it got to rub our faces in a bunch of scenes with unpleasant characters (Livia, Janice and AJ have to be some of the most hated tv characters ever) and still be loved by tons and tons of people.
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May 15, 2020 03:17
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I'm sure someone's posted this before, but Tony wasn't exactly Boss of the year when it came to how he treated Carlo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjSad5BDU8M&t=210s Seriously, saying "gently caress that honor and loyalty poo poo" when you're the guy at the top relying on the loyalty of everyone else is pretty stupid. The guy at the top of a pyramid scheme going out of his way to tell everyone they're a bunch of suckers seems like a bad strategy to me.
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May 16, 2020 00:18
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lurker2006 posted:So is Tony getting whacked in the finale still the consensus here? Seems kind of out of sorts with NY seemingly wanting to ease tensions/heat and go back to making easy money. Patsy seems to be a popular theory, but I like the idea that it was Little Carmine getting rid of the other volatile guy who created the mess he had to step back in to clean up, and throwing some red meat to any Phil loyalists out there who were unhappy with the way that whole thing went down. Really though, I think the fact that we don't even know for sure that it happened at all makes it really hard to pin it on someone. Yeah, the show is practically screaming at us that it happened, but that's more in visual cues than in plotting, so I just don't think we saw enough to come to firm conclusions. For all we know someone like Matt Bevilaqua could have decided to make his bones taking out a boss. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 07:57 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 07:52
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 11:16 |
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So Jerusalem's not the only one who said this, but I don't agree that the tension in the scene is just because it's the end. The way it cuts back and forth to Meadow definitely heightens tension even aside from everything else, especially since we can all probably relate to her frustration with parking. Cutting back and forth to that is a deliberate attempt to make the viewer anxious imo. I do think you can fairly say that Tony himself isn't particularly tense in the scene though, which may be what people mean. Great writeup though--I read them for every episode, so thanks for all the quality posting!
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May 17, 2020 17:37
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