11. Suits? Pleurisy? More than once?

“He’s like the Jonas Salk of backs.”

Season one of The Sopranos bounces back quickly from its lowest point; “Nobody Knows Anything” is as well-paced and intricately constructed as “A Hit is a Hit” is not. While it’s not a beloved standalone on the level of “College” or “Pine Barrens,” I think it’s one of the episodes that best showcases what exactly makes the series so much better than nearly everything else. I’ve talked here before about how the show balances short arcs and long arcs, but I’d argue that’s not its most unique narrative strength. Other shows have excelled at that; if anything, The Leftovers and the middle seasons of The Good Wife truly perfected the form. But The Sopranos pairs its delicate balancing of multiple, simultaneous stories with a freakish gift for rejecting our expectations for what those stories will add up to and making us enjoy it.

“Nobody Knows Anything” is an apt description for the experience of watching the episode itself. We think we’re going to start making major progress toward a satisfying finale, either to a season or a series — and to some extent, we do. But early on, the hour introduces an entirely new, world-shattering question: Is Big Pussy wearing a wire? The episode builds to a self-contained climax and denouement, an acceptable resolution — a major tonal shift after so many consecutive weeks of deferred satisfaction. But that resolution lets enough ambiguity creep in that we won’t be totally bewildered when it proves unresolved next week and bleeds into a long-game storyline in season two.

In a lesser show, the A-plot of this episode would be saved for later so it could function as the spine of its season two premiere — but this is very much the first of three parts of a finale arc, and a continuation of what we’ve already seen. The possibility of Pussy being wired is a gut-punch but not, strictly speaking, a twist. As Makazian points out to Tony, there’s plenty of evidence if you’re willing to look for it. It would be more accurate to say it’s a sleight-of-hand, a distraction from the threat that lingers at the edges of everything like a particularly horrible ghost: Livia Soprano, my favorite fictional villain of all time.

I wouldn’t say that Livia is the most evil Sopranos character. But, in Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall’s The Sopranos Sessions, David Chase says that Nancy Marchand made his wife swear that “this entity that I’m portraying” wasn’t based on a living person who could hunt her down, and that seems like a more than reasonable amount of caution. (For the record, Chase swears Livia is only loosely based on his mother. At the same time, roughly 80% of his DVD commentary for the pilot lists similarities between the two of them. The other 20% tells us which cast members have been to therapy. ) She is, beyond question, the show’s most effective antagonist. Tony will be menaced by others, but they drive him insane as a side effect of pursuing some other, self-serving purpose, some goal that’s only tangentially related to him. For Livia, destroying her son is the whole game — but she hides it beneath layers of manipulation and obfuscation and feigned incapacitation. Yes, it helps that the object of her machinations is deeply in denial about who she is. But mostly, she succeeds because she is really, really fucking good at this.

And we know that she’s good because she manipulates the viewer as well as she manipulates every character in her orbit. While we get to see more sides of Livia than any single character does and can piece her motivations together, that doesn’t mean we have any sense of her core personhood. We never see any part of her that isn’t calculated for a particular audience in order to advance a particular purpose. During this rewatch, I’ve been so struck by how much of Livia’s image is a construction — even the most inconsequential parts. Like, it’s clear that she exaggerates her distress about Green Grove, but the discovery that she has water-aerobics friends there bewilders me much as it does Tony.

The only character who doesn’t fall for her bullshit, at least this week, is Carmela. The ricotta-based confrontation between the two of them has been one of my favorites of this rewatch. I think a big part of that is that I keep fixating on the way Carm tries to asserts her authority and carve out little arenas of control. At this point, she only applies these skills to other women — her efforts to control men read as subconscious — and it’s particularly exciting when she exercises them with Livia. Livia would never, ever sell herself short by choosing not to manipulate men, but she’s also clearly never had to spar with someone who shares her intellect and her skills in negotiating the mob-wife role. It’s fun to watch the two of them battle it out, and it’s satisfying to see Carm waver but ultimately hold on to the upper hand.

Of course, it’s a classic case of winning a battle but losing a war. Livia might not be able to wield an iron fist over Carm’s leftovers, but we’re finally starting to grasp the intensity of her control over everything else — and what, exactly, she wants to do with that control. But no one within her universe shares our full picture of her machinations, and most of the tension of the episode comes not from the fact that we know something they don’t, but from the fact that we can see them foreclosing on so many opportunities to ever know what we know.

As in the episode itself, Livia is relegated to the periphery of other characters’ imaginations: a source of frustration, but not a disruptive force on the level of an informing Family member. And the episode only works because the distraction is compelling enough to actually be distracting, as Tony is heartbroken by Pussy’s betrayal. There’s a massive affective gulf between the enthusiasm and passion with which he’s jumped into plotting other murders and the moroseness with which he approaches the possibility of having to have Pussy killed. His devastation is evidence that he might not be totally sociopathic; he loves his friend.

But does he empathize with him? Makazian suggests that Pussy flipped to protect his family, explaining that law enforcement seek out men who they know will choose their families over their work. Would Tony do the same in that position? At this point in the series, you can’t really decide. His characterization has been so complex and ambiguous that you could convincingly make either case — and much of that ambiguity comes from the way he both is and is not like Livia, a person who has no family loyalty at all.