81. Like a Pebble in a Lake
“It’s a very unflattering portrait of Italian-Americans.”
When The Americans was still airing new episodes, every Wednesday my mom would say, “It’s time to watch my favorite show, Oh No, Martha!” By this logic, I think the secret title of The Sopranos is Oh No, AJ. Though he’s a font of excellent one-liners, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I like AJ — whereas Martha is an angel who deserves only good things — but I appreciate him more this time around than I have on past watches. He’s not really a person, and certainly not an adult, but how was he ever going to learn how to be either of those things?
He’s had no good examples, and no explicit instruction to make up for that deficit. His father is torn between the desire to recreate him in his own image and the desire to push him down a divergent path; his mother is torn between the desire for him to grow up and the desire for him to remain a child forever. His sister is out on her own, seeming to have made sense of these conflicting parental forces, but in these later seasons, it becomes clear that she’s been hiding a fundamental sense of being unmoored behind good-on-paper achievements all this time.
Where Meadow makes a conscious effort to extricate herself from her context only to end up wandering back to where she started — a bummer in its own right — AJ does things he thinks he’s supposed to be doing based on the rules of the community he grew up in, and never gets anywhere with them. No matter how you feel about how much of a doofus he is, that’s depressing, and I think something we’ve all been able to relate to at some point. When AJ’s relationship with Bianca finally dissolves in this episode, it’s because he’s going through the motions of being an adult man without being capable of genuine human connection — and while he bears some responsibility for not trying to be better than the way he was raised, his behavior in that relationship is, from start to finish, a pretty damning indictment of his family of origin.
Although AJ is kind of a sidenote in “Chasing It,” which is mostly about Tony trying to capitalize on doubling down on his control issues while the women in his life are trying to capitalize on corralling them. I’m still not sold on the critique that Tony’s late-series gambling addiction is out of left field — it would have been good to gesture toward it at some point in the seasons 4-6 stretch, but it’s heavily foreshadowed earlier. It’s also of a piece with his larger tendencies toward risk-taking and poor impulse control, and this episode convincingly connects Tony’s gambling to his temper. The longer his losing streak lasts, the more prone he is to furious outbursts.
It also contextualizes those rage issues and the related money issues within his relationships with women, in ways both small and large. Moments like him blowing a windfall with an ill-advised bet on a horse named Meadow Gold and not registering that skipping therapy is a problem even though he pays for his no-shows are part of the ecosystem of delusional bullshit that shapes his brutal fight with Carmela about her refusal to let him gamble the earnings from her spec house sale. (As a side note, it’s intriguing that Ginny has now fully replaced Angie as the mob wife Carm most fears becoming, even as she and Marie are both trying to persuade Tony to fund their quests for better living through real estate.) If Tony’s gambling pays off, he can use the money to convince himself he controls both fate and other people; if he can convince himself he controls both fate and other people, he can stave off his increasingly overwhelming fear of death.