83. All the Sympathies and the Teas
“They did a beautiful job on him.”
As we discussed last week, Christopher Moltisanti’s death isn’t a surprise. But it does defy expectations: it’s shocking that it occurs so early in the episode, how anticlimactic it is, and how directly responsible Tony is for it. All the setup points to Tony, in some way, choosing to sacrifice Christopher to gain leverage over the New York crew — but what unfolds is, somehow, infinitely more ghoulish: he picks Christopher off in order to save himself (and, to both a lesser and greater extent, Christopher) from facing consequences for a relatively minor mistake. He’s not any better than the titular Kennedy and Heidi, who fail to go back and check on the car they accidentally ran off the road for the exact same reason.
A long, long time ago, I wrote about how the series negotiates the car as a symbol of freedom, and I’ve been waiting to revisit the increasingly grim tone that motif takes on until this episode. There are plenty of examples of the insidiousness of the free-but-not-that-free space of the automobile before this — including but not limited to Tony and Adriana’s accident (and the crew harassing the hospital employee afterward) and Tony actually getting road head from a random Bing girl while Carm is away in Paris — but this moment is the culmination of the dark side of the the rules don’t apply — but only up to a point ethos of the car. They’re still bound by limitations; the more they test those limitations, the more likely they are to face consequences that bleed into their normal lives.
Though no one suspects what he did to Christopher, Tony feels a compulsive need to justify his choice to them anyway, repeatedly mentioning the baby’s carseat and the fact that, if she’d been in the car, she would have been killed on impact. Leveraging hypotheticals to justify bad behavior isn’t new for Tony (the absurd “What if I died?” “But you didn’t.” “But what if I did?” therapy scene from the first season comes to mind), but this is an especially morbid iteration of it, and its grimmness is amplified by the fact that it’s often in the context of conversations that expose the total lack of empathy that enabled Tony to kill his own mentee and nephew in the first place.
In a continuation of last episode’s abysmal attempts to cheer AJ up, Tony tries to connect with Carmela’s grief about Christopher by projecting his own feelings of relief onto her. He flounders when she admits the normal human response of being relieved, on some level, that Tony wasn’t the one who died — so, in an effort to position himself as also capable of normal human emotions, he defaults to the hypothetical child death, and she runs off to grieve alone.
“In retrospect, maybe not the best approach,” Melfi points out drily when he recounts the moment in therapy — actual therapy, not the uncanny valley of dream therapy, where he confesses to killing Christopher, and Tony Blundetto, and Pussy. The gulf between the horrific but honest dream session and the cagey, defensive real one lays bare how unwilling Tony is to examine himself truthfully, still, and how unlikely it is that he’ll ever find redemption. Whatever he “gets” by the episode’s end — high on peyote, in the middle of the desert with Christopher’s ex-mistress; a fucked up echo of Carm’s Paris epiphany — he’s never going to act upon it.