“The Sopranos” — The Blue Comet
Oh God, the horror!
The Sopranos has a history of letting the big action from a season happen on the next to last episode. Because of this I wholly expected some craziness to go down last night, and what do you know, it totally did. The full, gory details after the break…
We didn’t have to wait long to see where things were heading. The would they/won’t they over a seemingly unavoidable mob-war was settled a few minutes into the episode when Silvio strangled Burt Gervasi for playing both sides, and when Phil said to his guys, “Let me tell you a couple three things.”
What I found interesting about having the wheels set in motion so early was that it kind of deflated a season’s worth of tension that had built since Tony and Bobby sat on that boat in Maine.
The season has had a relentless aura of foreboding menace and finality (as it rightly should) as we watch and try to dissect character’s words and actions into meaning that might shed some light on where we’re being led. Like any good piece of suspense we say we want to know what’s going to happen, but really we don’t — learning the destination means the end has come and what fun is that?
Once the New York mob was targeting Tony, Silvio and Bobby and the New Jersey mob was targeting Phil and whoever else, we (or at least I) suddenly don’t have to worry about the destination — because this is it. But I wasn’t at the edge of my seat anymore. The suspense was gone.
It’s to the editor’s great credit that I found myself back there by the time the episode came to a close. More on that in a moment, but first Melfi:
I love Peter Bogdanovich as that weasel Elliot. He’s so manipulative. During the dinner party, the way he ambushed Melfi over the study that therapy made sociopaths better criminals was brilliantly Machiavellian in its execution, capped off with a cherry when he simply told her to “Chill out.”
This, of course, leads to the big scene where Melfi drops Tony as a patient. I need to rewatch this as at the time it played very stilted to me, though that could very well be the intention. The fact that Tony saw this as being more or less directly related to his stealing a recipe for steak from one of her magazines made the whole thing equally as funny as it was devastating.
Now to the violence. Once it started it was relentless. They were the type of sequences that would have got your blood pumping had you known what was going to happen or not. As Bobby stood there at the hobby shop looking at that train (The Blue Comet) and reminiscing about about how things used to be, we know what’s going to happen. We can feel it.
And that’s when the cuts start happening. The Sopranos has never had a particularly brisk (or punchy) editing style, but as we go from Bobby, to the security mirror, to the close-ups of the model trains and back to Bobby I was just praying that they get it over with all ready. When the moment finally came, Bobby went down in a hail of bullets we haven’t seen before. As the real and plastic people looked on in horror Bobby collapsed on the train set as a bloody mess.
Without missing a beat we’re taken to Silvio and the cuts of him putting the keys in the car are as nerve shattering as any. Of course he’s going to blow up. When he doesn’t it only makes the ensuing gun battle all the more vivid. Though Sil taking a few in the back is nothing compared to the random motorcyclist falling off his bike and immediately getting run over by a semi as all of these bullets went flying.
As we go into the last episode Tony’s crew has been shattered, the only people left are idiots like Pauly and some hired goons. His family is a disaster as they seek refuge anywhere but their own house for fear someone gets accidentally clipped. We close the episode with Tony alone, as he rightfully should be. In a darkened room in a nondescript New Jersey house Tony lies on a mattress holding that assault rifle Bobby got him for his birthday waiting for death to walk through that door.
They say you don’t hear it coming.
We’ll find out next week.
