13. That Woman is a Peculiar Duck
“Just last week, I told you I’m not a big Renee Zellweger fan.”
Of all the transgressions that could have come back to haunt Tony Soprano in the season one finale, I don’t think anyone expected the incineration of Vesuvio to be the one. But what else could it have been? The arson was terrible, but it emerged from good intentions — which makes it exactly the kind of thing that comes for us all. As this season has shown us over and over again, we live in a world in which purely bad acts are rarely penalized, purely good acts are rarely rewarded, and acts that fall in the middle of the two create all kinds of trouble, often after we believe we’ve moved past them. The universe’s failure to dole out punishment or absolution or praise in any consistent, reliable way is enough to drive anyone to therapy/substance use/conspicuous consumption/madness/criminal deviance/having a weird emotional affair with a priest/owning a Slipknot t-shirt.
The arson popping up again echoes the therapeutic process: you think you’ve moved past something, and then you realize you have not — and you’re deeply fucked as a result. It’s also a fitting punishment for Tony’s failure to do the work of genuine closure. He felt guilty about hurting Artie, but pushed it out of his mind as soon as he believed he’d gotten away with it. Even now, forced into accountability, he chooses what’s easy over what’s right, telling his friend, “I didn’t burn down your restaurant. I swear on my mother.” You can see him rationalizing the statement as he speaks it. It’s not technically a lie: Tony didn’t commit the act in question; Silvio did — on Tony’s orders. But he could have left it at the first sentence, and the fact that he tacks on the second is a perfect touchstone for where he is now and where he’ll go from here.
The resurgence of the fire is not just a window into Tony’s circuitous character development; it’s also an anchor for an episode full of parallels with the pilot. Water and/or bird references return with a vengeance. Carmela describes Livia as “a peculiar duck” — a great line and also quite possibly the most massive understatement in the American television canon. Later, Artie goes with “an odd bird in a sea of negativity.” Like Carm and Phil’s movie screening, Meadow’s anonymous couch make-out is interrupted by a loud noise from the backyard. (Also hilarious that Meadow and her date are “watching” a movie in which a woman’s face bursts open to reveal a monstrous, man-eating creature.) One of my favorite sequences of the season, Tony returning to Melfi’s office to make sure she left town, visually and narratively inverts the moment in which she realizes he no-showed for his second-ever session.
The episode moves from key location to key location, checking in on every living character we’ve met so far— and introducing almost no one we haven’t. It’s a whirlwind tour of the insular world the pilot introduced, and it measures how its occupants have and have not changed in the last four to five months. Rosalie Aprile returns to the action like a bat out of hell. Now colleagues, Adriana and Charmaine have developed an instant and unsurprising mutual respect. Agent Harris is humiliated to stand by as Tony listens to the tapes of his mother plotting his murder. (Tangentially, there’s almost nothing I would add to the series, but I would love just, like, two more scenes digging into Tony’s weird bond with Harris.) All this bouncing around reinforces that the show is, for all its expansive Mafia conflict, an intimate interpersonal dramedy at its core. In an hour full of deaths, threats, and arrests, the most compelling, tense scenes — the scenes that really drive the series forward — are simple two-handers that depict women seeing through men’s bullshit.
Both this episode’s therapy scenes make me want to crawl out of my skin, the first in a terrifying way, the second in a… slightly less bad (?) way. Melfi’s confidence around Tony has grown to the point where she’s comfortable losing her patience and just telling him exactly what the fuck is wrong with his mother — until he makes sure she knows she’s overstepped his boundaries. After the FBI tapes prove her right, Tony returns, humbled, and I like that she doesn’t regress back into her initial timidity in their second session. Though she’s justifiably on edge, she also doesn’t try to soften anything she says to him (“Like your feelings of worthlessness sparked by your mother’s plot to have you killed?” isn’t her best deadpan/bitchy question in the series, but it’s top five), nor does she pull back on her anger at the way he’s disrupted her life.
A similar righteous anger runs beneath Carmela’s confrontation of Fr. Phil. She describes all his worst tendencies to him in excruciating detail before explaining that she no longer wants to continue their weird relationship. It’s deeply satisfying, because 1) Phil sucks so hard, and 2) it feels like this is the big race for which all her prior assertive flexes were training runs. And it’s perfect that pseudo-infidelity is where she draws a line. Phil’s primary role in her life was as a non-Tony, and now that he’s engaged in the behavior that causes her the most pain as Tony’s wife, she has no use for him. Her choice to sever ties is both a scathing exposure of her tendency to treat relationships transactionally and an exciting assertion of her often-limited agency.
And, last but certainly not least, Livia doesn’t directly call Artie out on his bullshit, but she sees through it and twists it to her advantage. It could be her final conscious act, and it encapsulates her perfectly: fully demonic (is there any opportunity she won’t seize to try to get her son killed, anything she won’t do to realize the goal she’s been trying to carry out for months?) and fully pitiful (really, resorting to Artie, of all people?), all at the same time. Enlisting Artie into her cause isn’t quite a twist, and it doesn’t lead us to a full-blown cliffhanger — but it builds toward a thrilling, devastating, tightly contained ending to a thrilling, devastating, (mostly) tightly contained season. It ties up enough loose ends to create a satisfying conclusion, but still leaves the door open to infinite future possibilities.