I rank the 86 episodes of The Sopranos. #45 is Join the Club, the second episode of Season 6.
The first coma-episode.
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INFLUENCES
- The way Paulie shouts “HEY!” at those reporters on the Soprano-house’s driveway, lives rent-free in my head as the kids say.
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“Chase is pushing his chips to the center of the table and telling the audience they had better go all in — murder and therapy, flatulence jokes and metaphysics — if they intend to stay at the table for this final season.”
–Alan Sepinwall, The Star-Ledger
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I didn’t realize that the name Kevin Finnerty was a pun on “infinity” until Ron @ Sopranos Autopsy pointed it out to me. And this is after nine times viewing the show.
If anybody reads a Sopranos-blog and feels stupid for not noticing as many nuances and such things, as those writers apparently notice… don’t be hard on yourself. It’s not a competition after all.
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John Patterson, who worked as a director for 13 episodes of The Sopranos (including ALL five first season-finales) died in the time between Seasons 5 & 6.
Matthew Weiner was a guest on the 64th episode of Talking Sopranos and said that to David Chase, the death of Patterson (Chase’s friend he’d known since grad-school) was a spiritual experience. Weiner said that David is an existential person. The coma-dream, hospital-scenario and Tony getting shot by Junior, were all planned, but the plan was also for all that to take as long as it needed to take. Just as long as it needed. Two episodes for the coma-sequence and one episode for recovery, happened to be all that was needed.
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I’m slightly underselling the situation when I tell you, I’ve been excited for this moment. Getting to write a blog-entry about the infamous divisive and open-ended coma-episodes?!!! I sat on one ass-cheek the whole way ovuh!
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Tony Soprano Kevin Finnerty wakes up in a bed inside a hotel room.
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It is really interesting to me how so many of the early transitions between coma-land and real life happen via Tony seeing/visualizing a Helicopter — the sight becoming overbearing. It is particularly interesting to me because I wrote a book called Helicopters in 2018, publishing in the spring of ’19. Helicopters was the last part of a trilogy (called Oulunsalo Fiction), the first part of which is Ice Road, an admittedly very Sopranos-inspired book — not without its’ explicit homages to the show, however.
For the purpose that helicopters the actual, flying, machines, have in a novel of mine called Helicopters… well for that purpose I couldn’t be more giddy at the exact specific way they chose to use helicopters here. It’s really similar to the idea I had when naming the book that. And these Sopranos-episodes weren’t even on my mind when I decided the title.
But it does feel like a little bit of a karmaic connection.
And this is precisely the writeup to talk about shit like that!
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Tony’s here because he got shot by Junior at the end of Members Only (S6E1) and is now in a coma.
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“My whole life’s in that case”, Tony/Kevin says. He gets depressed seeing he’s got the wrong case. A case he doesn’t recognize to be himself. He really believes it’s wrong, dementia or not. It’s something that’s deep within him, that belief. He probably doesn’t know how much he meant those words.
No matter where he goes, he has to know that suitcase is there. When it comes time to give up the suitcase to the hands of somebody else, the thought is scary. Because this is something entirely conjured up by Tony’s consciousness, it can REALLY show HOW scary the thought is.
These coma-episodes are such great new story-territory, something I think hits-and-tits fans will always unreasonably hate. And I can accept that. It’s part of the fan-dialogue. There will always be people who don’t get (or, in equally large part, care to get) these episodes.
It took me some time to vibe with this episode and Mayham (S6E3), but at least the later episode is hilarious as all shit with Paulie, Vito and Christopher’s antics.
Here on Join the Club there’s just no escape. When you’re not in this dense and foreboding coma-fantasy you’re in a dense cloud of suffering. Draining, emotional outbursts. On Join the Club there is no escape.
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Kevin is here because his whole life was in that case.
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Kevin comes to a bartender to unload his troubles. He still can’t wrap his head around it, how this all could’ve happened. How such a royal, almost fate-will’d specific coincidence happened to befall him and everything is now ruined beyond escape.
He tries to pay for his drink with his own card in the bar.
“It’s dead.” Says the bartender to Kevin, with the most fateful tone he’s mustered up so far in this conversation. We are not being all that subtle about what’s going on. Tony is very, very close to dying. Desperation is settling into his family. Death, depression, decay, sheer fright at the thought of crossing over…
“The Big Nothing” looms heavy over Tony’s coma-dream. An eerie thing to think about and put into perspective about this, is how there’s no familiar faces here this time. No Gloria, no Mikey Palmice, Vin Makazian, Tony Blundetto, or even people alive like Artie Bucco…
…or Tony Soprano’s actual family. Those were not their voices on the phone, either.
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A bunch of strangers say they overheard Kevin talk to the bartender, and just feel too sorry for the guy and ask him to join them.
He refuses because he didn’t feel like socializing right now when he’s got a whole overflowing plate of things to figure out. Then there’s a young beautiful dark-haired woman among the strangers… and he changes his mind.
Some things don’t change, do they?
At the table they all blow smoke up Kevin’s ass about what an accomplished career-man he’s been. He makes a sound impression on everybody — particularly the lady — and sits in that interaction just as if he was Kevin.
He just denied tooth and nail that he was the solar heating system-salesman in question. The whole reason he is here, and he is this distraught, is because he is not Kevin and his life has been switched with somebody he doesn’t know.
Before we really reach our arms around that thought, though, he says something that’s so true to life that it doesn’t matter if it was said in a coma-dream or 3am at the train-station.
“I’m 46 years old. Who am I? Where am I going?”
Kevin Finnerty
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The Kevin Finnerty-dream’s significance is most likely another battle within Tony. The greatest internal dichotomy has been between two sides of Tony’s personality, those being the brutal and the caring sides. He does not have a “battle of good versus evil” inside of him, that would just be too easy and ultimately not fit his personality.
College (S1E5) brought the actual nature of this battle to the forefront, and ever since then we’ve gotten good chances to explore it. Dream-episodes are just a step beyond in those terms because things don’t have to be viewed via the restrictions (regularness) of real life.
The internal dichotomy here is different from brutal vs caring, thought, I think. It’s one of outlook.
Between Tony’s determinism and (distant admiration of) existentialism. Believing in pre-ordained destinies versus making your own meaning in life. Tony lives a deterministic life, a fact he established as early as in Down Neck (S1E7) when he said, really confidently: “you’re born into this shit. You are what you are.” Accepting existentialism is a kind of “letting go”, at least of many old belief-systems that used to serve you. Well, at least it would be for Tony Soprano, as for so many of us who are born into religious families. Of course when I say religious and talk about Tony, I don’t mean Catholic. I mean La Cosa Nostra. Along with the mob-lifestyle has come some things Tony has had to do or just did due to lashing out. Things he most likely can’t face in their whole capacity. People he can’t face. Ralph, Pussy, Adriana, Tony B who represent the greatest amount of regret for Tony, in his life and his death. Freud said that “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” Kevin’s never gonna let that suitcase go.
Somebody he doesn’t know…
Tony’s subconscious, Tony’s soul and Tony’s intentions that were with him since he was born into this earth… don’t know who Tony Soprano is at 46. Life turned out so different for him that he doesn’t really know himself anymore.
Maybe, that is.
You see that’s an interpretation that I just thought up. Wasn’t lifted from any note or anything. This is how quick and easy it is to project something that deep and contemplative, to this vague-enough but potent-enough narrative.
Tony’s leaving the hotel bar and sees a TV’s screen.
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He’s making out with the dark-haired woman in front of the hotel. He…
doesn’t cheat.
Do some things change, after all?
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The lives of Tony’s family and close friends are all on-hold as Tony — who we see for the first time in real-life after the shooting — rips his breathing-aid out and has no idea where he is.
“Who am I? Where am I going?“
Tony Soprano
It’s a full plunge into the devastation felt by everyone, but the hardest by Carmela. It’s every bit as uncomfortable and scary as any high-stakes hospital trip, is. Most of the responsibility to convey the gravity of this situation, was on Edie Falco and that’s why she is this episode’s MVP in my opinion.
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The family stays with Tony over the night.
Kevin checks into a hotel next door. He’s out of options. He has to inevitably use Kevin’s ID, even though he swears he is not him. He can’t be him.
He sees some monks who ambush him about some faulty heating-system Kevin has sold them. As he’s trying to explain, as he so desperately once again finds himself pleading that he is not Kevin Finnerty, he cannot be Kevin Finnerty, that he lost his whole life along with that suitcase again…
Just as he’s trying to get all that out he gets slapped by one of the monks.
Slapped by a monk. …okay, The Sopranos.
At night in the new room he’s acquired, Kevin calls his wife who’s as concerned as he is. He’s really in the thick of it, though, and is there alone at this moment.
He simply has to get some sleep.
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The next morning Kevin’s walking along the hotel-hallway.
He walks past some pictures on the walls that could only really be labeled, for their intent and purpose, to be depicting freedom and depicting simplicity. Something as straight-forward as a wide scenery. No inhabitants. The Big N–
–Oh and I don’t know if you noticed this, but Tony’s on the seventh floor. This much gets revealed when you look closely above the door-frame as he enters the stairway.
The same stairway he’ll end up tumbling down, in very scary fashion.
Calling back to the Seven Souls-bit in Members Only, Tony falls down after walking down a hotel hallway full of images depicting all kinds of freedom — scenery, growing plants — with a roof that’s so low he can barely fit.
Seven flights of stairs.
He his fall stops at the fourth flight.
“Number four is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk’s body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.”
The DVD’s “scene selection” menu titles the part that this scene’s in “Seventh Circle.”
Also, oh my oh my. There was a Dr. Ba in the hospital, who was mentioned in the episode! It was the bald Asian doctor and I just found that out from Talking Sopranos when they talked about it, like a year after I took this writeup’s notes.
Ba is the first of the seven souls that is not immortal. Numbers 1-3 — the floors Kevin doesn’t reach due to stopping his fall midway-through the stairway — are numbers of souls that “go back to heaven for another vessel” at the moment of death.
Kevin Finnerty fell just short of infinity.
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Carmela and Meadow have stayed all night with Tony, and it’s plain as day from Carmela’s face that she hasn’t gotten a wink of proper sleep.
Barbara is there to see Tony and is horrified. Nothing prepares you for that.
Meadow gives Carmela some shit about being courteous to Dr. Prepler. There’s almost a feeling for a fraction of a moment that she thinks her mom’s being fake, but no one could possibly conceive of being fake in a situation as life-and-death as this is for Carmela.
But Carmela doesn’t even think about it. Her mind is stuck on this nightmare eventually being over.
Janice comes inside and starts yapping some irrelevant shit about her favorite trauma-hospitals in town. Carmela still couldn’t care less.
She’s devastated, and desperately trying to make a semblance of sense out of any of this.
Janice comes in Tony’s room to see the condition her little brother is in, and can’t handle it either. She breaks down crying and everybody else has to — needs to — come to her aid and offer her all the comfort they could spare.
Y’know. Sometimes in a family-disaster. Sometimes you just say things you might not mean. Things that are a way in to how you really feel.
Yes, Join the Club has an inescapable atmosphere — more in the hospital-scenes than in the coma-dream, I find after all my rewatches — but it still makes us feel scary things, real things, so viscerally it’s unbelievable.
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Junior’s being interrogated by a Federal agent about his shooting Tony.
“If somebody shot my nephew it was him himself! He’s a depression-case.”
Junior Soprano
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Christopher’s in Tony’s hospital room looking profoundly distraught. Quiet, lost.
Tony just lays there on his back.
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Eugene Pontecorvo just lays there on his back. He committed suicide at around the end of Members Only (S6E1), an episode that gave his actor, Robert Funaro, probably equally (if not more) material to work with than he got in all his three seasons prior to that point. It was a very focused showcase of his character that revealed so much of him but still ended in a devastatingly surprising fashion.
Now he’s dead.
The rest of the Soprano-family’s higher-ups are congregating in the back of the room where service is held.
At the funeral, Vito says Junior “Marvin Gayed his own nephew.”
Marvin Gaye’s last concert was in Costa Mesa, where the Kevin Finnerty-scenes were all shot.
Seemingly as a move by the writers, a plot-twist, Silvio being acting boss for two episodes is such a fan-favorite development despite the less than ideal circumstances going on right now. Audiences have by this point become utterly enamored with this character. He’s showed such a solid front, especially in these last two seasons which started asking for more and more from the actor. Whatever might have not been there for me to connect to Silvio so much in the early seasons… Steven Van Zandt has really grown into his role by this point in the show. His first professional acting-job. So much that even I cheer to see him take — or at least briefly occupy — the big seat.
On the other hand, who else could it be? Sil’s been Tony’s confidant for a way longer time, back before they even got made, the both of them. I really believe it’s possible that Silvio’s election as acting-boss was just something everybody agreed with. Why wouldn’t they?
This shit makes me really happy, too. Makes me fan out.
Paulie has some issues about how Vito, after losing all that weight in-between seasons — seems to only get hungrier for more and more territory, responsibilities, earning-opportunities and eventually, power.
“Roseville’s been Junior’s territory since the big bang!”
Paulie Gualtieri
He only defends Bobby Bacala’s — Junior’s inheritor’s — position in this Roseville-dispute because Vito at this point is a bigger threat to him than he could ever predict Bacala to be. Paulie will be more adversarial toward Bobby as 6A continues, and more and more along 6B. It’s never about Vito to him, or about Bobby. It’s about him getting recognized.
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After the proceedings, Hesh and Vito make some comments about what possibly could’ve made Gene make the awfully final call that he did.
You’re right, Vito. That does happen, too.
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A news-reporter is talking to AJ outside the hospital. Liking the attention, the Soprano-boy thinks none-too-much of it and even answers yes when asked “would you call it Growing Up Soprano?”
That is just one of the most precious cultural references from this stretch of episodes. Because it was so current, but also because it sounds good on its’ own even now when most people probably don’t know/remember that show they had about John Gotti’s grandkids, called Growing Up Gotti in the States.
Carmela pulls AJ inside like a kid, gets mad at him and just wears that worn-down expression on her face like an imprint. It really highlights the light blue hue in her eyes. That’s just a bonus Edie Falco brings to the table.
I never knew her eyes could look like that, before.
Edie Falco is so amazing. I went into this episode fully expecting to have James Gandolfini (who finally talks here like James Gandolfini really talks) be my pick for MVP of the hour, but it ended up being her. I gotta say, though, these emotional extremes that Carmela reaches into, in this episode, in this really desperate time for her… whether it’s reminiscent, hysterical, beaten-down, haunted by dread, angry, she just carries all of these different emotions home in such an unquestionable way that you’re fooled into thinking it was ever easy to act this well.
Callbacks to Pilot (S1E1) abound, and the MRI-comment and whole history with that which Carmela connects to by saying how she regrets saying Tony will go to Hell when he dies… and in the coma-dream that seems just like a part of a preordained fate — the way things just must go — that an MRI is what Tony’s taking as that comment’s made.
There’s a feeling to this cut here. Like it, along with Tony, has this lapse in lucidity. How something so deep that Carmela says resonates and turns into a whole setting in Tony’s consciousness… these people are well-connected. There’s still a real connection. I’ve been caught a time or two making fun of the “arrangement” they had instead of a real lovers’ reunion at the end of Season 5, but if Carmela wouldn’t care, she wouldn’t…
I can stop writing that sentence right there, can’t I?
I’m sure that when this episode aired, at least somebody somewhere was happy that Tony’s still in something of a contact with the real world. It’s not over for him.
Alzheimer’s on the other hand… Alzheimer’s comes up in the fantasy — Kevin Finnerty gets diagnosed with it — because Junior Soprano’s life is the complete embodiment of everything Tony fears about the future if he survives the two preordained fates of a mobster. He stated those fates himself most-clearly in For All Debts Public and Private (S4E1). “There’s two endings for a guy like me — high-profile guy — dead, or in the can.” What if Tony survives dead or in the can? Being a mobster might relieve you of some of the worldly responsibilities that us Regular Joe’s live with, but not from the fact that life does not end well. Nobody escapes getting old. That springs from his subconscious just as strongly as the apparent trigger of “MRI” reacts with it.
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Meadow is by Tony’s side in his room and reads something.
“Our Father which art in heaven. Stay there. And we will stay on earth. Which is sometimes so pretty.”
–Jacques Prevért
We are treated to one of the most beautiful cuts of this whole show when Meadow gets done reciting that quote to her father.
The Soprano-house looks just idyllic in this shot.
We are here on this earth, which is sometimes so pretty.
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Inside the Soprano-house, Carmela is showering.
It’s like a day when you come back from work in a tension-headache. That’s what I imagine the hot water flowing on top of her, is helping her topple. The stress of it. Warm showers are a tried ‘n’ true cure for when you (but particularly your skin) get tense.
I’m not saying this relates to any grander theme or anything. I was just having a tension-headache after school just before writing this, so it’s on my mind.
Vito lets out a huge fart on the couch.
AJ corners Meadow about some supposed look that she gave him. It’s all in AJ’s head, says she.
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I guess I can see a reason why people would think these two Kevin Finnerty-episodes are too much of a detour, boring or otherwise unfulfilling. There’s also people that think less time could’ve covered the coma-saga just as effectively, and that argument I don’t side with at all. I think if you’re gonna do a coma-fantasy — which already is set up in a way that’s distinguishable from just a regular ol’ dream, which The Sopranos helped pioneer almost — you better do it right and give it the time it requires. It’s a colossal story-opportunity for any show, especially one that delves into psychology as much as we do with this show here. It did everything else right, but had it been cut to the same length as the test dream in The Test Dream (S5E11), it would’ve felt like less than we earned.
Tony was shot in the gut.
He’s in a coma.
The story is never gonna get an opportunity like this again, to go even deeper — with a whole fully-fleshed-out new world and characters-quirks in the “alternative universe”, maybe even a little humor.
To draw a parallel to this story-opportunity’s greatness (that for me happens to be very effective): imagine you’re writing a Sopranos-blog. It’s a big brazen idea, isn’t it? You’re gonna do things a lot differently than in any other stuff you write about, you’re probably gonna initially surprise a lot of people but mostly yourself at how well it flows. When it’s over, if it was treated with time patience and due-diligence… it’ll stand the test of time as something that to you’ll be proud of when it’s over. When it’s over, you’ll be convinced that the idea of making such a blog, was worth pursuing.
The story of Tony getting shot and eventually surviving, stands out as worth pursuing because look how memorable its’ execution is! Read any good article about this episode and the one that follows it, and you’ll be amazed at the amount of connections, meanings and insights these things have inspired. Not to throw shade, but for example The Telltale Moozadell (S3E9) — which I’m writing about next — can’t compete with it in that field.
But given that the controversy among fans, is something that a blog like mine should address, my two cents about this Kevin Finnerty-stuff is that just like anything else in this show that can best be described as ambiguous, it gets better with repeated viewings.
There’s nothing dry or pointless about assigning meaning to TV and film, especially when the program seems to call you to do just that.
Meaning is assigned by experience.
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AJ vows to Tony that he’ll get revenge. He’s gonna get Uncle Junior for this. He doesn’t just get to do this.
We saw how well that turned out in Johnny Cakes (S6E8).
Even still, there is something to note about how AJ has — by Tony’s very example — been taught to answer all traumatic events such as this, with callousness and fits of rage. He’s grown now, his utter disregard in this family-crisis, his forgetfulness and such, turned a lot of people completely against him. And I don’t really blame them, even though if you’ve been reading this blog you’ve seen that my stance on the Soprano-boy is FAR more sympathetic than the average fan’s is. I even started this paragraph by mentioning that Tony’s influence as a half-absent father, who gives one kind of advice and lives another kind of life… is probably the reason AJ acts like this.
I believe it is.
It still doesn’t excuse AJ acting the way he’s acted throughout this episode. I haven’t recapped it, because there’s only one point to make about it: AJ is a piece of shit in this episode.
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I did feel, some viewings ago, like this Tony being in the hospital/Kevin Finnerty-material took longer than it did. Going into like the second viewing I had of this show, I said to Aki (it was his first viewing) that this coma-stuff is gonna take four episodes. Or three. Anyways, my memory was back then that this was longer, because it did feel long.
It actually took this many viewings to realize that that’s not the Kevin Finnerty-scenes’ fault at all. At least not anymore. Sure, back then the coma-stuff was so uncommon that it stood out in sore thumb-esque manner. But this two-episode storyline still feels long today even as these coma-fantasies are more familiar. It’s the single-note melody of things that happen around comatose Tony Soprano, that really makes these two episodes feel long now, after all this experience. I only really now started appreciating the nuances we get to explore of the people in Tony’s life. They get highlighted by this clear split of narrative focuses. Two disparate realities. This world is so full of well-developed characters, and even though we don’t like to think that, it would do just fine as the basis of a TV show even without Tony Soprano. It wouldn’t be as good because Tony Soprano is the greatest protagonist ever to be conceived, written or acted. But yeah. This is a peek into a life without Tony, moreso than the following episode even, because that’s where the Finnerty-storyline starts reaching its’ conclusion, which is way more hopeful than a coma-fantasy man realizing he has depression and dementia and might have been wrong about every single notion of identity he even has. That, and a family and group of friends desperate by Tony’s side in the hospital, no end in sight.
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This episode has one of my favorite ending-scenes of all time.
Kevin comes back to his hotel room after finding out about his diagnosis.
Walks over to the bed and sits at the feet of it.
Looks at the phone he’s been using to talk to his wife. Knows he should make the call.
Gets the phone.
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I know I should tell somebody how scared I am.
But I don’t want to scare them.
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Picks up the phone.
Doesn’t do it.
Looks out into The Big Nothing instead.
Beacon shines back at him from the night-sky, clear as daylight.
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That’s what depression is really like, you just… wanna reach out, but something suffocates that along with all other hope. You’re alone with it, and every thought that could spring hope into you — such as reaching out in any way shape or form — just finds a way to make you more devastated, beaten down. It gets easier just to stare ahead and do nothing, try not to exist for a little while. I’ve been thinking about nothingness, emptiness a lot in 2020. I’ve been thinking about the theory that Tony, as a person with deep psychopathic tendencies, has no real “self”. I’ve been thinking about how fucking absolutely sad it is that there are people in the world who look into a starry sky, people who look at the width of fields, the length of the white lines on the highway, the whiteness of winter and a picture taken at the golden hour of the night… and see nothing.
A “big nothing” has seemed to be a thematic centerpiece of The Sopranos, but these examples, these everyday-appearances of emptiness and space, aren’t really it. They’re just day-to-day connections we make to it, in our efforts to understand it. We try to understand the unknown, it’s in our nature as human beings. But when Kevin Finnerty looks out of that window into that deep dark-blue sky, where a beacon flashes regularly in an almost-blinding way… and Kevin has just learned that he can’t even trust what he sees anymore, what he perceives anymore. Meaning is assigned by experience, but what about now?
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I have a PayPal: https://paypal.me/jafarojala
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REFERENCES
- Vito says Junior ”Marvin Gayed” his nephew, referring the real-life 1984 murder of Marvin Gaye the Soul Singer Supreme, who was killed by his father in a family dispute.
- Rosalie calls AJ (who now has long hair) Van Helsing (the vampire hunter in the 2004 film of the same name) as well as Fabio (the model and advertising spokesperson from the 80s and 90s). These are both things Ralph Cifaretto used to call Jackie Jr.
- Policemen tell Carmela they have to ask her about Tony’s knowledge of the John Kennedy Assassination, after Junior mentioned some details about it to them.
- When Christopher encounters Dwight and Ron eating at Satriale’s, he greets them saying ”Oh, sheriff of Nottingham, my kingdom for a mortadell.” This is a reference, first to the legend of Robin Hood, then to the Shakespeare play Richard III where, after Richard is unhorsed in the midst of battle, he deseprately cries out, ”A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
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With freedom would come the responsibility to face the entirety of your psyche, the conscious and unconscious sides of what’s holding you together through the life you lead. Both sides, not just the justifications you make for things. Letting go, and accepting real freedom over his deterministic outlook would require Tony to face Pussy, Adriana, Ralph, Jackie Jr., Tony B along with numerous others. He is horrified of freedom and is justified in that, but his worst confrontation with real freedom is still yet to be seen. Mayham (S6E3) will be in the top 10 of this countdown, and that’s where we’ll finally get our conclusion.
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