84. At the Precipice of an Enormous Crossroads
“I look over and your Uncle Junior’s got laser beams shooting out of his eyes.”
There’s a stretch of “The Second Coming” that echoes, both thematically and tonally, the segments of “College” through “Boca” where season one starts to click — the moments when the series hits its stride and zeroes in on what it’s really about. We go from Melfi’s therapy session (a meditation on the theory that a sociopath can’t be redeemed) to Tony curb-stomping Coco in defense of his daughter’s honor (a confirmation of the fact that a sociopath can’t). It’s a slick reminder of the patriarchal protection racket that both keeps these families intact and allows Tony to stay in therapy this long, even though Melfi would never admit, even now, to wanting to have it at her disposal.
After that, we jump to AJ’s family therapy session, which amounts to a greatest hits compilation of what Carmela describes earlier as “the Soprano curse”: oh poor you, blaming your mother while letting your blatant demon of a father off the hook, various resurrections of Livia Soprano’s nihilism, all of it culminating in Tony casually brushing a literal fucking human tooth off the cuff of his pants while his son rakes Carmela over the coals for losing her temper at AJ’s confirmation several years prior.
These callbacks are as infuriating as they are satisfying; like the premieres of earlier seasons, they remind us that a lot has changed, but nothing really has. The whole episode approaches these characters from that angle: Carmela verbalizes thoughts she’s repressed before, but she’s just identifying the principles that have structured this marriage and this family the entire time we’ve witnessed them; there’s no way that her saying it will make a real difference. Tony’s immediate reaction to AJ is still anger — even when he’s had time to cool off, his default assumption is that “it could be that he’s a fuckin’ idiot; historically, that’s been the case.”
And Meadow settles into the adulthood she’d flirted with but seemed to avoid for so long. She’s headed for law school so that she can defend mobsters, and about to be engaged to a fellow mob kid who found himself in the same position. Which is to say: she’s exactly where she started and exactly where neither of her parents wanted her to end up. The scene in which she deals that double blow to Carmela is one of the darkest in the whole series, devastating on a level I didn’t fully grasp on past watches. Meadow is annoying, but she comes the closest to making it out, and she seems tough enough to weather her parents resenting her for it — but ultimately, she’s as vulnerable to entropy as they are.
Even though it’s a colossal fucking bummer on the whole, the end of this episode is a far more hopeful conclusion than where we actually end up. The same goes for the ends of the two preceding episodes: the improvised family dinner (shades of earlier seasons), Tony declaring “I get it”, and Tony and AJ finding a tenuous bond are all moments that suggest that Tony still has the potential to become good, to connect with others. But all those windows of possibility end up swiftly getting shut by what follows — and the next two episodes are an exercise in relentless decline.