64. Maybe You Should Be a Vegan
“I didn’t marry a cartoon.”
One of the most devastating moments in all of pop culture is the murder of Adriana La Cerva. But her death is nothing compared to the moment where she realizes that she’s going to die — realizes that she’s been betrayed and that every one of these men she trusted thought of her as an accessory, not a person with subjectivity but a thing they could keep or sacrifice as needed to preserve the lives they wanted for themselves. Her death hinges on multiple betrayals: Silvio pulls the trigger. Tony makes the call that coerces her into Sil’s car. Christopher sells her out to Tony. Their loyalty to each other, to their work, supersedes any affection they might feel for her; she is, in the end, always an outsider in this community, despite never really knowing a world beyond it.
Like so many of the show’s most brutal scenes, Adriana’s murder feels inevitable — especially because it’s set into motion so quickly — but wholly preventable at the same time. The fact that multiple people betrayed her means that each of them faced an opportunity to change their mind, to choose to save her. Along the way, there are several little trick moments where you can almost let yourself believe she’s going to be okay, even though you know she isn’t; moments where you can almost let yourself trust the men she trusts, even though you know you shouldn’t.
Right up to the end, Adriana’s fatal flaw is that she assumes everyone’s intentions are as good — or at least as morally neutral — as hers, that everyone is as motivated as she is by the desire for connection and closeness. But that drive is always unreciprocated. Adriana could enter witness protection alone, but she knows that doing so would lead to Christopher being killed, and she would never do that to him. In contrast, he will never, even in the throes of insurmountable misery and dissatisfaction with his current circumstances, give up his idea of a normal future in order to survive alongside her, even though he knows that his failure to make that sacrifice will lead to her death.
The swift, remorseless disposal of Adriana is one of Tony’s many acts of fast-casual cruelty in the name of long-term self-preservation. Throughout the episode, he continuously punishes Christopher to keep him in line — to keep him from becoming another Tony Blundetto. He confesses his panic attack to Tony B., which seems like it might be a gesture of remorse and intimacy but proves to be little more than a selfish effort to purge his guilt when he ends the call with a blunt “Now we’re even.” He breaks things off with Valentina, which is the right thing to do for his marriage but wildly hurtful in both timing and approach — and it’s not out of the question that he’s using Carmela as an excuse to do what he wanted to do for himself anyway.
That these brutalities are motivated by Tony’s desire to protect the crew and to restore his marriage isn’t accidental, but it also isn’t simple. The Family and the family exist in a symbiotic relationship to one another (where else would the money for the spec house lot come from, how else would Carmela have learned to negotiate for it?) but only up to a point. The Sopranos’ final, formal reunion hinges on the fact that it happens before Carm has any idea that anything has happened to Adriana. But even though she doesn’t know that her husband has exceeded her expectations for his amorality and violence in this specific way, she still knows who he is, and she still fails the test she presents to Tony early in the episode: to know your mistakes and take conscious steps not to relive them.