66. Knucklehead Smith
“It’s my hobby, Janice, why ya gotta belittle it?”
It’s not clear, at the beginning of “Members Only,” how much time has passed since “All Due Respect.” There’s enough of a gap that significant, time-consuming changes have taken shape: Janice has a baby — a fifteen month old, Tony mentions at one point, so I think we can safely assume at least a year and a half has passed. Junior’s health has declined precipitously, and genuinely, unlike his prior courtroom performances of dementia. Vito has lost a dramatic amount of weight. AJ is taking college classes and growing out his hair. Bobby has gotten into trains; Tony and Carmela have gotten into sushi.
Beyond all those indicators that time has passed, on a macro level, everything feels pretty much the same for much of the episode. Nothing has come of Adriana’s murder. Nothing has really changed with the FBI (we get a “the mob and the feds shooting the shit outside Satriale’s” moment; you love to see it.) Other than a conflict with Hesh, war with New York has effectively been held at bay. Which means that something has come of Tony Blundetto’s murder, but the whole point of that act was to maintain normalcy, to make sure that very little came of his return; it also means that nothing much has come of Johnny Sack’s arrest, at least not in terms of his professional life.
And, on a more granular level, things still remain largely unchanged. The characters have aged, but the way they relate to each other remains intact. The spec house is at a standstill, and Tony keeps buying Carmela’s affections to make up for it. We don’t even get one therapy scene into the season before Melfi loses her patience with Tony and feeds answers to him, knowing he’ll never put in the effort to find them himself. Though Junior’s health has shifted, Tony’s level of patience with him hasn’t. Christopher keeps making the same jokes. Artie and Charmaine have reunited. Aside from some notable births and deaths and some formal rites of passage, things are as much where we left them at the end of season five as they are where we left them at the end of season three.
But the sensation that everything could easily be different — that things are the way they are due to choice, but also due to coincidence — permeates the whole episode. There’s a strong Sliding Doors vibe here. The Sopranos, now thriving, were just seconds away from becoming the struggling Sacramonis. While Carmela knows this in an abstract sense, I don’t think she fully grasps how close they came. She’s also taken aback by the fact that Angie, whose life recently represented an alternate timeline Carm ran from out of fear, is doing fine. As she digs herself deeper into her marriage, she has to force herself to be oblivious to her own moral concessions — a tendency echoed in Tony’s inability to process Gene Pontecorvo’s acknowledgement that there’s a world outside the Family and he’d like to be a part of it.
So, as mundane as the first two-thirds of the episode might seem on paper, it’s all shot through with the feeling that something has to give, that none of this stasis is sustainable. The discovery that the New York-New Jersey detente is not as stable as it appears doesn’t relieve that tension, nor does the reveal that the FBI is still actively recruiting informants; these are well-worn patterns.
But in the last few minutes, everything ramps up — it’s reminiscent of “Long Term Parking”’s disarmingly swift path from Adriana confessing to Silvio murdering her, punctuated with disorienting lulls — and it’s all unexpected. Gene’s downfall is inevitable, but that seems like a setup for a full-season arc, not a single episode story. It seems unlikely that Tony will make it through the season without getting shot — but that feels like a penultimate episode event that will happen at the hands of Phil, not a last five minutes of the premiere event at the hands of Junior. (Although Junior’s past attempts on Tony’s life come up during therapy.) Both events are sudden, and both are accelerated by coincidences. It’s not that nothing ever changes — it’s that change is both far less and far more within our control than we’d like to believe.