54. Herman J. Something

“At least Judas didn’t go into any Apostle Protection Program.”

In my family, we don’t name kids after people who are still alive. But because I come from two giant clans of white ethnic Catholic nightmares, I’ve ended up with multiple relatives who share my first name anyway. People try to mitigate the confusion with the first-plus-middle combo (which means I’ve become so immune to hearing “Kellie Marie” that my best friend’s mom came up with extra middle names to yell when I’m causing trouble), but they frequently slip up and go first-only. So every time I’m back in my hometown, there’s a turning point where I go from answering to my name every time I hear it to not reacting to it at all. 

It’s disorienting to hear your name over and over again but only sometimes have it actually belong to you. It’s like the thing where you read or write a word so many times in a row that you start to question its spelling — but more surreal, because it’s folded into your sense of self. The same-name thing is only bewildering when we’re together in a larger context though; it’s fine when I’m just talking to another Kelly/ie one-on-one, or the only Kelly/ie present. 

I love the way that the actual introduction of Tony Blundetto leverages that weirdness for dramatic effect, although, to be fair, I was never going to not love the introduction of a character played by Steve Buscemi. Having two Tonys (well, two Tonys who actually go by Tony) running around is a good bit — frankly, a better riff on Italian-American stereotypes than anything in “Christopher” — but it also forces us to focus on how these two men overlap and diverge. The fact that we experience the phenomenon from within the perspective of both Tonys makes it more than just a character development Venn diagram. We feel how disorienting it is for each of them to have a second Tony around again — a disorientation that amplifies the awkwardness of all the time they’ve spent apart, but largely dissipates when it’s just the two of them together. 

This weirdness is most intense during Tony B.’s surprise welcome-home party, which is such a quiet flex I’d never really absorbed how impressive it is on previous viewings. Without leaning on flashbacks or dialogue callbacks, Tony B.’s reintroduction makes us feel how unfamiliar these characters are to him, how much they’ve changed since he last saw them — even though we’re all too familiar with them, even though we’ve watched many of those changes unfold. It helps that Tony and Carmela’s separation and Bobby and Janice’s marriage are still fresh enough to feel as not-right to us as they do to Tony B. But it’s mostly in the acting: Buscemi’s nervous effort to locate himself within this community without losing himself, James Gandolfini’s childlike desire to impress, the GOAT Edie Falco’s impeccably cagey reading of “you’re still full of shit.” 

That not-quite-familiarity works to create the immediate moment, but it also sets up where this storyline goes from here. It would be overly simplistic to say that the Tonys are each other’s inverses; it’s more accurate to say that the introduction of Tony Blundetto inverts the previous pattern of Tony Soprano foils established by Livia, Richie, and Ralphie. Those three made effective antagonists then because they were so horrible that they threatened Tony’s potential for goodness at every turn. Tony Blundetto is an effective antagonist now because he’s trying so hard to realize his own potential for goodness, and Tony Soprano is now a fully-realized bad influence in his own right. 

This episode is full of paired, inverse entities that are not quite as opposite as they first appear to be or would like to believe they are: Adriana and Carmela, the mob and the FBI, the New Jersey and New York crews, even Johnny Sack and Little Carmine (though the intelligence gap there is indisputable.) But where past seasons suggested that every pair of opposing forces needs one another — if only in a sick, maladaptive way — season five marks a turning point where they can no longer coexist, and it mines from that sea change all the drama and horror it possibly can.