82. Fraternities… Frat Boys…
“Could I bank the resulting good will?”
Killing JT Dolan isn’t Christopher Moltisanti’s point of no return. That, I think we can all agree, happened when he handed his fiancee over to be murdered in order to preserve the possibility of life he thought he wanted. Now that he has that life — marriage, fatherhood, a McMansion — he resents it and wants to move to California, where Adriana suggested they forge a new life, far away from the Family. Her murder shut the door on his most likely path out of this community. But JT’s murder bookends the journey that started when Adriana died; he was Christopher’s last remaining tie to the outside world. There hasn’t been a way out for Christopher for a long time, but now there’s really no way out — he has nothing and no one to start over with.
He’s also, as he notes during his drunken confrontation of JT, “totally fuckin’ ostrafied” within the Family. His relationship with Tony is more strained than ever, and while Tony’s sour attitude about Christopher’s sobriety certainly doesn’t help, the true schism between the pair is Christopher’s continued guilt and resentment about the murder of Adriana. I doubt they’d be able to move past that regardless of what they do, but the possibility is off the table entirely because Christopher can’t bring himself to discuss the experience in any explicit terms. Instead, he gestures vaguely at it over and over again, at one point describing it as “when the relationship got poisoned,” but only JT manages to piece it together — and that doesn’t end well for him.
And, while Christopher sulks his way through domestic stability, Paulie seethes with jealousy about it. In spite of their years upon years of petty conflicts, the thing that finally sends their relationship past the point of no return is that Christopher’s family life gets in the way of Paulie’s work life, which is the only thing that Paulie has. It’s not an accident that this relatively tame point of disagreement breaks their relationship after all the wild shit they’ve experienced together (I mean, think about how many people have died as a result of these clowns rubbing their few remaining brain cells together, and then think about the fact their combined ridiculousness is so chaotic you can’t even confidently declare a number.) And it’s not a coincidence that Paulie retaliates by damaging the exterior of the Moltisanti family home.
It’s easy to pick up on foreshadowing in a television series you’ve watched [redacted number] of times. Still, “Walk Like a Man” is weighted with the feeling that Christopher is reaching the end of his road even more rapidly than everyone around him, and I found myself wondering whether first-time live viewers were surprised by the turn the next episode takes, or if it felt as inevitable then as it does now. Though I might have been spoiled on it at some point, I wasn’t shocked by Christopher’s death the first time I binged The Sopranos; I was stunned by how it happened, but I knew it would happen before the end of “Kennedy and Heidi.” Compared to my subsequent rewatches, Christopher’s exponentially expanding doomed-ness feels more even obvious this time around as I limit myself to one episode a week.
Which, now that we’re in the home stretch, that approach means spending one evening each week immersing myself in morbid thoughts and existential dread. Although admittedly that’s hard to separate out from, uh… living in a failed police state in an unprecedented global pandemic. So maybe it’s not so much the Death Comes For Us All of the series feeling more pressing when you pace your consumption of it as it is the Death Comes For Us All of being alive right here and right now feeling more pressing in general.