Meow - The Sopranos: Media Club Plus S03E05
Transcriber: jay (8325)
Introduction        1
Episode 9 [00:24:32]        17
Episode 10 [02:03:35]        84
Introduction
 Sylvi: How are you, Keith? How was your birthday?
Keith: Uh, it was fun. I had a great time. I went to one of my favorite, uh, places to eat, uh, downtown and watched, um, world-famous Martin Scorsese movie, Bringing Out the Dead?
Sylvi: Oh, nice.
Keith: Which I promised for some reason that I would watch in episode 1 of Sopranos, but I don’t remember why I said I would watch it.
Sylvi: I don’t remember that at all, but like—
Keith: I said that I would watch it. Or maybe it was episode 2. It was the one where Kundun makes an appearance.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Keith: Uh, so whichever recording session that was, I vowed to watch Bringing Out the Dead and report back. Again, I don’t remember why I did this. Um, and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll keep this in at the start. I thought it was really good. I’m not surprised that it’s one of his sort of least, uh, liked movies, or at least, least, um, talked about. Because it’s got a really atypical structure. There’s—the plot is very loose. It’s kind of like following Nicolas Cage.
Dre: I should not have asked you this question before the podcast started. I am so sorry.
Keith: I’m gonna just tack this at the very beginning. This is coming—this is pre—this is gonna come pre—
Sylvi: Cold open?
Keith: This is the cold open, yeah.
Sylvi: Holy shit, it’s just like the pilot of The Sopranos.
Keith: Yeah, just like the pilot of The Sopranos. Uh, we’re pulling out—i think actually we also had a cold open for the pilot of our—of The Sopranos.
Sylvi: Was it the second episode that had the cold open, or the first? 
Art: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 
Sylvi: I thought they both did.
Keith: Oh, OK.
Dre: OK, we’ll cut out that part where I asked you about it and you had to tell me it was a cold open.
Keith: Uh, but you just kinda follow Nicolas Cage as he has 3 horrible nights being an EMT in New York. Uh, and, um, you know… He has—
Sylvi: I heard it was awesome.
Keith: He Nic Cages it up a few times, and we love that.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yes. Uh, but for the most part, he’s being—i love Nic Cage. I’ve always been a huge fan of his. I’ve never understood the—thing of like, he—for a very long time, like Keanu Reeves, people were like, he’s a terrible actor. Uh, but he’s not a terrible actor. He just has a wider than usual definition of what is appropriate for a role.
Sylvi: He also has had that whole era of when he was in like, bankruptcy and had just was taking every role that was offered to him.
Keith: True. And like all of those movies, he’s the best part of all of those movies.
Sylvi: For sure. But there’s still like, like you can’t like—it definitely—sorry, I just found out he’s starring as John Madden in a, in a movie about John Madden.
Dre: Wait, like football John Madden?
Sylvi: Yeah, Madden film. 
Art: No, Senator John Madden
Sylvi: Madden depicts the life of John Madden and his involvement in the development of the Madden NFL video game series directed by David O. Russell. 
Keith: Wait, so he’s BlackBerry-ing?
Dre: No, no, no. 
Sylvi: I would love Nicolas Cage to work with Matt Johnson. My goodness, what a dream for me that would be.
Keith: Is that who directed BlackBerry?
Sylvi: BlackBerry? Yeah, he’s the Nirvana The Band guy.
Keith: I have not seen I didn’t know that he directed that movie, and I also haven’t seen the Nirvana: The Band movie.
Sylvi: He’s also doing the Anthony Bourdain biopic that’s—
Keith: Oh my God, I don’t—i mean, look, I know that you like this guy, but can we chill with the fucking biopics?
Sylvi: No, I’m with you. I do agree that we should chill with the biopics. I do like that it’s, uh, it’s just focusing on one specific time in his life as opposed to being the—we’re gonna just do a, a fucking shitty documentary.
Keith: I was way out on biopics for years, for years, forever, for maybe all of my time knowing about movies. I did hear that the BlackBerry movie was great, even in an era of despising biopics broadly. Like, people, audiences are kind of bored of them.
Sylvi: It’s great. And I’m not just riding for it because it’s CanCon. Like, it’s really good.
Keith: Um, you don’t ride for all CanCon.
Sylvi: I really don’t. A lot of it’s quite bad, but I do ride for it when, when it’s good. I do really ride for it.
Dre: Um, is CanCon canceled content?
Sylvi: No, Canadian content.
Keith: Canadian content.
Dre: Oh, okay.
Sylvi: You know, after, after, after what happened to Drake a couple years ago, it can be both.
Keith: Yeah. Uh, anyway, I really liked Bringing Out the Dead. I thought it was really fun and funny and also really sad and kind of a tough watch in some ways.
Sylvi: Hell yeah. That’s a ‘90s Scorsese, right? Or am I—
Keith: Maybe it was ‘99 or 2000.
Sylvi: Okay.
Keith: It might have been ‘99.
Sylvi: Maybe this is what I do after we record today.
Keith: Yeah, it’s great watching him be a little more formless. I thought that it was great. I loved it.
Sylvi: Oh, written by Paul Schrader too.
Keith: It was written by Paul Schrader, and it was adapted from a novel, not a novel by Paul Schrader, but it was a novel by a former New York EMT. So that’s interesting.
Sylvi: This—I’m actually mad at myself for having not watched this yet.
Keith: Yeah, it’s about a guy who feels like he’s cursed to kill everyone that he EMTs for because of a bad experience he had not being able to save a homeless girl. [Sylvi: Oh my God.] Um, okay, it’s really good. I really, really liked it. And the highlight of it, the lights and the camera are so fun. Super striking visually. More than usual. 
Sylvi: Lighting and camera are good. Is the action all right too?
Dre: How are the aura and hype moments?
Sylvi: Sorry. [Keith: Listen.] I’m glad. I’m very glad to hear that.
Keith: Listen, it’s, it is the, it is the star of the show. The lighting of the movie. That’s like, it’s like, whoa, look at all this stuff. Flashing lights everywhere. The city looks great. The—every building looks haunted as shit. It’s great.
Sylvi: Hell yeah. Hell yeah.
Keith: Okay, that’s my, that’s my review of Bringing Out the Dead.
Sylvi: I really appreciate it. Can we get like an Ebert and Siskel style thumbs up?
Keith: Two thumbs up.
Sylvi: How many thumbs? Two thumbs up?
Keith: Hell yeah. Two thumbs up.
Art: You only get to give one thumbs up.
Keith: Really? Well, I’m Siskel and Ebert in this one, I think.
Sylvi: You’re Siskel and Ebert.
Keith: Well, ‘cause no one else, there’s no one to be the—of course I would be the Ebert. There’s no one to be the Siskel.
Dre: Yeah, sure. No, Keith has two hands.
Keith: I have two hands.
Dre: With which to give two thumbs up.
Keith: Yeah, no one else is Siskel and Ebert.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God, has—someone has to have made the joke of like, yeah, if he’s got a problem, he’s gonna meet Siskel and Ebert while holding up their fists. Like, right? Or—because if not, that’s mine now.
Keith: That’s really good.
Sylvi: I’m doing it all the time.
Art: Holding up their fists but their thumbs are out?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Who has two thumbs and is about to review this movie and then kick your ass?
Dre: Me.
Keith: I wonder what Ebert gave this movie. Ebert. Uh, Bringing Out the Dead. Roger Ebert, 4 stars, 4 out of 4, 99. Yeah, uh, I liked it.
[“Shame About It” by Jack de Quidt starts playing]
Sylvi: Welcome to Media Club Plus, a podcast about diving into the media that interests us and the stories that excite us. As always, we are brought to you by Friends at the Table and supported by our Patreon—our patrons over at friendsatthetable.cash. This season we are watching The Sopranos, and I am your host, Sylvi Bullet. You can find me on most social media platforms @sylvibullet, and you can support the show, like I said, at friendsatthetable.cash. Forgot to rewrite that part of the intro. It’s fine. Joining me as always is Keith J. Carberry.
Keith: Hi, I have a GIF. I have a gift of a GIF that I made. I spent 10 minutes doing this today. Oh, of Tony Soprano jerking off, doing the jerk-off motion with his hand. He’s not jerking off. That’s not in the show yet. There’s gonna be probably in the future we’ve got Tony Soprano jerking off, and I’m sure there’ll be a whole Fellas, Is It Gay to Jerk Off episode about it. Uh, based on the entire 60-minute Fellas, Is It Gay to Eat Pussy episode that we got today.
Sylvi: Well, I think now I’m removing that from my fucking summary. You’re getting ahead of me, man. Come on.
Keith: Sorry. You give her a [inaudible [00:08:00], whatever.
Art: Do it.
Sylvi: Also, here’s Art Martinez-Tebbel.
Art: Hey, how you doing? Um, oh, there’s a chance if you go to Lost in Cult, uh, and you can buy the Jack’s Marielda uh, soundtrack, uh, super edition vinyl. There’s probably a real word for this. Um, but there’s also a chance it’s sold out by now. [Sylvi: You should check either way.] So, uh, if that’s the case, um, yeah, check either way.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Look at it at least. Look at what you can’t get.
Art: notquitereal.bandcamp.com is a place where you can get some sonically identical, but paraphernalia very different versions of those same songs.
Keith: By sonically identical, Art means that it can do a spin dash.
Sylvi: It’s true. Uh, someone else I know who could do a spin dash. Andrew Lee Swan is here.
Dre: That’s not true. What?
Sylvi: I could have sworn.
Keith: Yeah, I thought I saw you do one. Oh, is it that you can do a, um, uh, super peel out?
Dre: Oh, a what?
Keith: A super peel out? The non-spin dash thing that Sonic can do in Sonic CD?
Dre: Yeah. No, for sure I can do that. Yeah, for sure.
Sylvi: Sorry, my mistake. I got them mixed up.
Dre: Yeah, it’s okay. Uh, anyway, my dumb joke was going to be, you know, everybody wants to ask who eat the pussy, but nobody want to ask where is the pussy? Because where’s my uncle? Where’s my cool Uncle Big Pussy?
Keith: Where’s my Uncle Big Pussy?
Sylvi: Yeah. Big Uncle Pussy’s barely here this episode—these episodes. Is he here at all?
Keith: Uh, there’s a part where they do the hit on the guy. I think he’s there.
Sylvi: You’re right. He is in the beginning of the second episode.
Dre: Yeah, you’re right.
Sylvi: That is very true. Um, yeah, so we watched—once again, we watched two more. We watched episode 9, Boca, and episode 10, A Hit Is a Hit. Um, would it be worth just jumping into the summary and then we can, we can begin talking proper?
Keith: I think it’s worth it.
Dre: Let’s do it.
Sylvi: Okay, cool. So like I said, this week we watched season 1, episode 9 and season 1, episode 10. Uh, Boca was directed by Andy “Woke”, or Wolk, I don’t know. It’s, it’s Andy “Wolk” now to me. Written by Jason Cahill, Robin Green, and Mitchell Burgess. and edited by Sidney Wolinsky. A Hit Is a Hit was directed by Matthew Penn, written by Joe Bosso and Frank Renzulli, and edited by William B. Stich. Phil Abraham was cinematographer for both of the episodes this week. With indictments hanging over the boys, there’s only one logical place for The Sopranos to go: girls’ high school soccer. That’s right. Thanks to the new coach at Verbum Dei, Coach Hauser, Meadow’s soccer team is on their way to sectionals, and Tony, Silvio, and Artie are in full sports dad mode about it. Meanwhile, Junior and Mikey have to—are resorting to meeting at their lawyer’s office, doing business out of there so they can’t be wiretapped or suffer FBI scrutiny. Mikey in particular is still pretty concerned about there being a rat, and throughout the episodes keeps bringing up his theory that his part of Tony’s crew is talking to the cops, even going as far to hire a PI to follow Tony. Meadow’s off chilling with her friends in the woods after a game, presumably, or practice, and they’re drinking, they’re smoking, they’re talking about soccer. You know, high school shit. And then they notice Ally, the star player of their team, is not with the rest of them. That’s because she’s on a swing set nearby, self-harming with the knife still in her hand. Tony, hearing about this, tries to talk to Melfi about it, who introduces the idea of suicide versus suicidal gestures to him, which is definitely going to end well for everybody. He also gives her the most half-assed apology of the series yet for calling her a sex worker in the previous episode. We get a little brief introduction to Junior’s girlfriend, Bobbi, who’s helped him skim $20K from the Joint Fitters Union for their upcoming trip to Boca Raton. And then it’s back to the retirement community. As it turns out, all of Tony’s pals, in quotes, are moving family in because apparently the Feds aren’t going to surveil an old folks home. Their plan gets interrupted, though, when Tony reads the newspaper and finds out that snake of a soccer coach is in fact leaving to coach a college team in Rhode Island. Artie and Sil—
Keith: And it gets worse.
Sylvi: Yeah, what? No, but he’s such a nice man! Uh, Artie and Silvio try to confront him at—it gets much worse. Artie and Silvio try to confront him at practice about it, during which Meadow tells the coach to go fuck himself, as well as this genius of a man saying, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, to a member of the mob. Sure, this’ll go well. Down in Boca Raton, Bobbi and Junior are having the time of their lives, and this is also when we’re introduced to the most important question in the show thus far: Fellas, is it gay to eat pussy? Junior and the mob seem to think so, with him being very clear that his munch status must be kept secret.
Keith: It’s only gay when someone else eats pussy. When I eat pussy, it’s normal.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm. Uh, back in Jersey, Tony and Artie are out at dinner, with Tony once again telling Artie he can put some money out on the street for him. This came up earlier at the soccer game too, uh, and also, like at the soccer game, Artie dodged the question. There’s a guy there too who Tony intimidates into taking his hat off, and Artie gets real wet over that. In between scenes of Ally coming back to the soccer team and Bobbi trying to undo the gossip she’s been spreading at the salon, Paulie shows up to bribe/intimidate Coach Hauser with a flat-screen TV and his winning personality. Sorry, did I say Paulie? I meant Clarence. [stage whisper] It is Paulie, but he says his name’s Clarence. [normal volume] Unsurprisingly, trying to talk to mob guys like they’re teenagers on a soccer team does not work out for the coach. There’s another classic dinner scene this episode. Actually, we’re 2 for 2 for these episodes, where Meadow keeps trying to steer the topic of conversation away from her soccer game. Livia, of course, gets under Tony’s skin. And most importantly, Carmela makes a few really good zingers about Junior’s vacation with Bobby, leading her to—leading her to telling Tony, about the, uh, the “rumors” later that night. After one more attempt to intimidate, uh, Hauser by, uh, with Chris and his dog, uh, Tony tells Meadow the next morning that he thinks the coach is sticking around, which leads to an argument between the two of them where Meadow reveals that Coach Houser has been sleeping with Ally, and that is the reason behind her self-harm. This leaves Tony with a dilemma: whether or not to kill Hauser for this, something that Artie and Silvio are quick to throw their support behind. Uh, the next day, Junior, Mikey, Tony, and Silvio are golfing, and because of a jab from Junior over Tony’s high school baseball career, he decides to start making failed jokes about Uncle Jun’s appetite. Turns out, this was not the right move, because in the locker room a little while later, Junior tells Mikey that Tony’s seeing a psychiatrist, and even floats the idea of putting a hit out on Tony—something that Mikey is obviously excited about. After letting slip to Charmaine that the coach problem is going to be, quote, dealt with, Artie’s talked into trying to convince Tony to go to the police instead. This, paired with a talk with Melfi about why Tony thinks it’s his responsibility to dole out punishment, are enough to get him questioning what the right move is. The two argue, but Tony spends the rest of the—the two being Artie and Tony—the two argue, but Tony spends the rest of the day drinking in the back of the Bada Bing, watching the phone, and eventually calling the hit off. With the word out about his proclivities, Junior goes to see Bobbi, and despite his threats to go 10 rounds with her if she talked about their love life, he instead just shoves a key lime pie in her face. walking out while Bobbi cries about loving him. The last scene of the episode is Tony coming home after Hauser’s been arrested, belligerent from mixing alcohol with the Xanax he was prescribed a couple episodes ago, and falling asleep on the living room floor after telling Carmela, I didn’t hurt nobody. That’s the end of Boca. A Hit Is a Hit opens with Paulie, Pussy, and Chris—see, he’s in there—robbing and killing a Colombian drug dealer, something that Tony terms a once-in-a-lifetime score, becoming convinced that the best way to use this money is to invest it into something legit so they can keep making a profit off of it. Chris, instead of celebrating with the guys, takes Adriana out to see Rent, grabbing burgers afterwards and running into Massive Genius, played by guest star Bokeem Woodbine, a gangster rapper who invites Chris to talk about business after finding out he’s part of the Soprano crew. Turns out Massive wants to talk about Hesh and royalties owed for one of the artists he, uh—for one of the records he released back in the ‘60s, saying he wants to give it to the mother of a deceased artist that Hesh exploited. After getting home with Adriana, Chris goes on an insecure racist rant about how he’s jealous of gangster rappers being able to talk about their business as well as profit off of it, whining about how Italians used to run the record industry. Meanwhile, Carmela started to worry about the family’s future if, God forbid, the worst happens to Tony, despite his insistence that he’ll be taken care of—that she’ll be taken care of. He also hides the big score from her, just repeating that she’ll be fine. While Chris visits Adriana at work, she brings up the idea of getting into music management after their conversation the other night, mentioning Defiler, the band of an old ex of hers, and wondering if Massive might be interested in signing them if Adriana brought them to her—brought them to him. Since he organized a sit-down between Hesh and Massive, Chris figures that Massive owes him and agrees to see what he could do. The sit-down goes about as you’d expect. Hesh digs in his heels after Massive asks for $400,000 made out to the mother of—i actually forgot to write down the name of the artist, but the mother of the musician that he’s seeking reparations for. This is our dinner scene this episode after that, but this time it’s at the Cusamanos’, Tony’s next-door neighbor who recommended Dr. Melfi to him, and who earlier in the episode Tony gave some Cuban cigars to. I just realized while reading this that I left that out of my summary.
Keith: Jimmy Willis, by the way, is the name of the artist.
Sylvi: Thank you. I was—i knew it was Jimmy. I just couldn’t remember. It’s Little Jimmy Willis.
Keith: Little Jimmy Willis. Yeah.
Sylvi: The dinner scene this time takes place at Dr. Cusamano’s, and Dr. Melfi is there in attendance, with everyone around her gossiping about the Sopranos. Dr. Cusamano in particular is very excited about his proximity to the mob. During this dinner, Melfi excuses herself to peer out the Cusamanos’ bathroom window at The Sopranos, only to hear very, very loud grunting and straining coming from the house. Chris and Adriana take Massive to see Defiler, who have now renamed themselves to Visiting Day, and the less I say about how they sound, the better. But Massive’s still interested. Definitely in the band and not Adriana, trust me. Chris, on the other hand, is still hesitant, but he goes along with it anyway. In their next session, Tony tells Melfi about his hesitation to branch out socially among his suburban neighbors, talking about how he considers himself and his other Italian friends different than Cusamano, who he calls Amerigan or Amedigan? I think it’s spelled with a D, but it’s got that kind of like weird inflection on it that makes it sound like an R sometimes. Worried that if he befriended more of those types of Americanized Italians, it will reflect poorly with the guys. The next day, though, Tony and Carmela do go to the neighborhood barbecue, and despite his efforts to engage with the other husbands about the stock market, they keep pushing the conversation away from it. While Carmela, on the other hand, gets a solid tip from the other—from their wives. Uh, and, uh, invests in a pharmaceutical company that’s—i think she talked—it’s—
Keith: It’s called American Biotech. 
Sylvi: Was I hallucinating that they mentioned something about erectile dysfunction drugs?
Keith: Yeah. Uh, they have a side effect-free ED drug.
Sylvi: Sure.
Dre: Yes, that was real. Also… Fartaceuticals.
Sylvi: I was hoping no one noticed.
[laughter]
Keith: I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice. Revolutionary new pharmaceuticals.
Art: I did notice but wasn’t going to say anything.
Sylvi: Visiting Day tried to—no, you’re fine. It was really funny. Visiting Day tried to record a demo, but after over 60 takes, the sound engineer decides it’s as good as it’s going to get. And Chris is—
Keith: Can I get you to reread that line about the less you say about their sound, the better?
Sylvi: Um, sure. The—Chris, uh, and Adriana take Massive to see Defiler, who’ve now renamed themselves to Visiting Day. The less I say about how they sound, the better.
[musical sting from Keith]
Dre: It’s not even their best song.
Keith: Oh my God, it’s funny.
Sylvi: We—
Keith: I will—
Sylvi: We are going to talk about the guys who wrote this—the song, because I looked them up and it’s really funny, some of the things that they’ve worked on, because they’re both—they are both music producers.
[same musical sting from Keith]
Sylvi: Oh my goodness. Chris is angry about how much the studio time is costing him and tries to get the band to do crank so they can work better. But Richie turns down the meth and instead gets hit with an acoustic guitar. While Carmela is buying 500 shares of American Biotics, the fart-aceutical company we mentioned earlier, Meadow comes home asking—asking her mom, like, what she knows about the stock market. But Carmela almost immediately just talks about it being a backup plan, in case the worst happens to Tony. She also talks about how women are better savers, then is immediately like, we should go to the spa, um, which I thought was pretty funny. Women do be shopping, and I’m allowed to say that.
Keith: Uh, yeah, I didn’t find that funny at all. I thought that was normal.
Sylvi: You’re an ally. I’m, I’m really like, proud of you.
Dre: Didn’t you talk about how she talked about, you know, financial independence for women?
Keith: And that I thought was all great. Yeah, that’s awesome.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: And then I didn’t think anything about Day of Beauty.
Dre: You know, I thought she really deserved it after all of the undue emotional labor that she’s doing in the household. That’s what I thought about it.
[hysterical laughter from Sylvi]
Sylvi: All right, all right, let’s all gang up on the evil tranny. I get it.
Art: Um, I, I think we should, we should just, we should clip this for when, for later Carmela moments. I want everyone just on the record about what a big fan they are of Carmela.
Dre: Listen, I got critiques for Carmela in these episodes.
Sylvi: Uh, where did I—where am I? All right.
Keith: Um, uh, you’re at the part where you hate women.
Dre: Yeah. 
Sylvi: That’s the whole thing, man. Oh, my mom listens to this. I hope you know it’s a joke, Ma. Um, Tony finally takes Cusamano out for a— [Art: Pick yourself up something nice.] Yeah, I’m gonna bring her some CDs like Tony in the first episode. Um, if I had to set the record straight, she is nothing like Livia Soprano and would resent the comparison. Oh my God.
Art: Maybe a nice LaserDisc player.
Keith: Livia would also resent the comparison.
Sylvi: I’m gonna get a phonecall when this drops. Um, Tony finally takes Cusamano up on that invitation to golf, but much to Tony’s chagrin, the three other men keep bringing things back to mob matters during their conversations. Eventually, just to satisfy them, Tony makes up this—
Keith: That’s their podcast, Mob Matters.
Sylvi: Yep. Tony takes—makes up this obvious lie about meeting John Gotti and Gotti outbidding him for this last Bungalow Bar ice cream truck, which I don’t know what the fuck that is. Adriana and Chris go back to Massive’s again, showing him the demo. And even though Massive says he likes it, Chris is clearly suspicious of his intentions. So he takes the demo to Hesh afterwards, who summarily shits all over it. And he’s right to. It’s bad. At his next therapy session, Tony talks to Melfi about this kid with a cleft palate that he and his friends knew when they were younger. And he tells a story about how they would keep him around to make him sing or say things that sounded funny because of his speech impediment to them, uh, just so they could laugh at him. And it’s something Tony couldn’t—
Keith: Uh, just a great example of like Tony getting 85% of the way towards a good point.
Sylvi: It’s a really good scene. Um, it’s something that he couldn’t relate to until he went golfing with Cusamano, he says, and that he felt like the dancing bear for their amusement.
Keith: But then he still ends it with a joke about Jimmy Smash.
Sylvi: Of course he does, ‘cause he’s a shithead.
Keith: ‘Cause he’s a shithead.
Sylvi: Hesh calls Massive back about the owed money, denying the payment, and in return Massive threatens legal action. Hesh, however, owns the master suit recording rights, or the master recording rights of a song that Massive sampled, and threatens a countersuit, ending that little plotline for us. Chris breaks the bad news about Visiting Day being complete ass to Adriana, including his suspicions that Massive is just humoring her because he’s attracted to her, and the two argue about it, with Adriana thinking it’s just a way for Chris to keep her down, and eventually she just walks out on him. Tony, wanting to get back at Cusamano for the way he was treated, gives him a package filled with sand that he asks the doctor to hold onto just for a month or two, leaving the Cusamanos to wonder what it is, heroin, a gun, could be anything. Right before the credits hit, we get the mystery of those grunts from earlier solved, with the reveal that it’s just Tony working out. Also, Defiler plays over the credits, and it’s absolutely dreadful. Thanks. That’s the summaries.
Keith: The sign of a bad band. This is not 100%, but if you have—
Episode 9 [00:24:32]
Art: OK, but we have to talk about the first episode.
Keith: We do have to talk about the first episode.
Sylvi: It’s true, it’s true. But like, you can get this thought out, and I’ll—we can simmer on it.
Keith: You shouldn’t have a song that is about the name of your band.
Sylvi: Yeah, that’s fair.
Keith: Defiler shouldn’t have a song called Defiler about defiling.
Dre: Hmm.
Art: Uh-huh. I, um, we ended up delaying the recording of this episode, and I think it actually worked out very well for me because the second episode took over my brain.
Sylvi: It’s got—there’s so much going on.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: And then I would—i went back yesterday, like, I should refresh myself on these episodes. I can’t, I can’t just do this episode on notes from stuff I watched a week ago. And it’s like, oh, this other episode has an awful lot of plot and an awful lot of character that I shouldn’t forget.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Dre: They’re both like—both these episodes are really dense.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: I was like—
Art: So buckle in, folks.
Sylvi: Yeah. So get ready. This is what—we’re going 7 hours, baby.
Keith: I believe that we can keep it brief. [laughter from Sylvi] Not too brief. The perfect amount.
Sylvi: Brief for us.
Keith: Brief for us.
Sylvi: Um, so yeah, let’s start with Boca, um, because there’s also a lot going on here. But admittedly, I think it is the one that had—no, because it’s like I think about it because the name makes me just think about the Junior plotline and I’m like, yeah, but everything going on with Tony and the coach and like, the way that the show deals with like, child sexual abuse is like—there’s a lot to talk about here.
Keith: And vigilante justice.
Sylvi: Yeah, no, like for real. And like the sort of, um, the sort of like, judge and jury role that, uh, that like, they think the, the mob guys want to play.
Keith: Yeah. Something I noticed about these is, it’s something that we talked about in the last recording, which is both of these episodes have a lot of character perspectives and then like, big conversations where each character is becoming like an avatar for their perspective. Um, that is like—both of these episodes are full of this. Um, and I just think that’s fun TV. For me, that’s fun TV.
Sylvi: I think the, the stronger the character POVs tend to be, um, the better a show works out. Like, you gotta, you gotta like actually feel like these are people.
Keith: Speaking of people, yeah, this episode starts with Livia in the cemetery with Junior and, um, Anthony Jr.
Art: Oh, it’s such a funny scene.
Keith: It’s a really funny scene because you have the—i mean, this scene is like really just to do two things. It’s to remind you that Livia and Junior are both still thinking about, um, the—that, that Tony’s going to the psychiatrist. And then it’s also to have, like, Livia being, like, so upset that her son has a weak mind, is weak mentally, while she’s, like, yelling at AJ to stay away from the cemetery dogs that might spontaneously develop rabies and bite him and kill him.
Sylvi: They’re gonna start foaming at the mouth!
Art: Those are cemetery dogs!
Keith: It’s really funny.
Art: It’s okay that we all do Livia impressions, right? That’s—
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Have I done one?
Sylvi: I will always do an impression of an Italian.
Keith: You can always do an impression of an Italian.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: There’s no situation where you can’t.
Dre: Sure. Yeah. Golfing with your friends is a great time to do it.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: It’s interesting that you focus on Livia, ‘cause I will admit that like, I, this is a scene where I like, was really thinking about Junior more than anything.
Keith: Uh-huh.
Sylvi: There is like, such like—he really loves AJ and Tony and you can like, kind of feel it like, a lot in these. And then whenever the business comes up, it like, ruins that between him and Tony and it makes me so sad. Like—
Keith: Yeah, there’s just like really—oh, go ahead.
Sylvi: No, I was just gonna say like the show isn’t that like, at least to me, doesn’t feel like it’s not—it’s being subtle about how Junior is more of Tony’s dad than Tony’s dad was. Uh, in a lot of ways.
Keith: Agreed. Totally agreed.
Sylvi: And like, this episode in particular, I think, really, really drives that home. Um, especially like, I don’t know, like things are good between them until that golf scene is the thing. Like, they’re like this—they’ve been doing like—they’ve been on the same page for the most part the past few episodes, and it’s been nice. But then it’s just like Mikey and like, Tony’s pride and Junior’s pride getting in the way.
Art: Well, yeah, Tony cannot abide the needling about his athletic career, which is so fucking weird.
Sylvi: It’s so funny.
Dre: I mean, that’s one of the first things we learn from Tony about his relationship with Junior, is that Junior makes fun of his high school athlete abilities.
Sylvi: Didn’t ever make it into varsity athlete.
Dre: That’s the pilot, right?
Sylvi: Yeah, he says that. That’s the voiceover he says when Junior’s introduced.
Art: But, like, yeah, I like—AJ says to Livia, why don’t you breathe in a cemetery? Why shouldn’t you breathe in a cemetery? Something like that. And Livia’s like, who says? And Junior says, it’s a joke, for Christ’s sake.
Dre: It’s a joke. Chill out.
Sylvi: Say why.
Art: Say why.
Dre: Why?
Art: And yeah, it’s good.
Keith: Yeah, all right, why?
Art: Huh?
Keith: Why?
Dre: Yeah, why?
Art: Oh, you’ll make the dead people jealous.
Sylvi: Great.
Keith: Oh, what?
Art: I thought the rim shot was coming right away.
[rim shot]
Art: Oh, there it is.
Keith: I was on the wrong page. I was on the wrong page. 
Art: But it’s, it, it’s, it’s killer. Um, um, yeah, you know, we get good Junior here. Junior is a character that, um, that I feel needs these moments because otherwise he can be a little one-dimensional.
Dre: He’s a little—
Sylvi: Yeah, he kind of becomes a little too comic relief-y without this stuff sometimes.
Dre: And it kills like the possibility for empathy, I think, especially when Junior is played for laughs the way he mostly has been, recently.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, I’m, I’m really glad that they’re fleshing him out more. Um, besides just him being like, like, like you said, the last few episodes has basically just been him being made a fool of, uh, without knowing.
Dre: And that continues, to be clear.
Sylvi: It definitely does continue, but like, the adding the layers to it and again having more POV from him, like—
Keith: But this is—that’s all part of the tapestry of his whole deal, which is like, you know, he can’t stop perceiving slights, but also he also can’t stop, like, taking that hurt and, like, giving it to people that he cares about, which then causes them to, like, then act out on him. And no one is more ready to do that than Tony, the guy who is, like, the most similar to him in the whole show. Like, they just keep kind of knocking each other and then being hurt that they get knocked back.
Sylvi: You said all that, and, uh, you like—you could have been describing Tony too, right?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Like, yeah.
Dre: But also, Keith, very importantly, never like, really telling each other directly that they’re hurting each other. Just like, constantly like going back and forth.
Keith: Every once in a while, Tony—like in one of the first episodes, Tony says something like, can’t we just talk? Like, that’s the closest that they ever get. And then everything else is like, yeah, uh, uh, Junior says something about Tony not being good at baseball. And then so Tony’s like, I’m gonna tell everybody about how much this guy loves to go downtown.
Dre: Yeah. And also like set him up to take the fall for an FBI sting, potentially.
Keith: True, true.
Dre: Um, you know, while we’re in the Junior Defense Force, uh, I, I wanna, I wanna—i don’t think it’s—i don’t think Carmela gets to lecture Tony about making fun of like telling that he shouldn’t make fun of Junior for going down when she starts it.
Sylvi: It’s true, like—
Keith: It’s true. Yes, totally. 100%. She’s being a hypocrite.
Sylvi: Damn, she’s got some good lines though.
Dre: She does. No, it’s very funny.
Art: She’s got a whole TV writers’ room behind her on this.
Sylvi: Her tight 5 in this episode is incredible.
Keith: Do we want to hear that scene?
Dre: Oh, please.
Sylvi: I mean, yeah, let’s just focus on—we can just focus on Junior for now and then we can do the coach stuff after if that works for y’all.
Dre: Sure.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Carmela: So, Ma, you gonna come to the big game?
Livia: Game? What game?
Tony: Ms. Meadow’s soccer team is going to the sectionals.
Livia: Nobody tells me anything.
Tony: Did everybody hear me just tell my mother about the game?
Meadow: Can anybody think of anything else to talk about except soccer?
Tony: All right. Uncle Jun, how was Boca?
Junior: Wonderful. I don’t go down enough. 
Carmela: That’s not what I heard.
Keith: It’s good.
Junior: About what?
Carmela: Nothing. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m talking about.
AJ: Last time, Aunt Bobbi bought me live piranha.
Tony: You believe that was a piranha? Come on.
Livia: That woman is not your aunt. 
Junior: Livia, I warned you, statazit. Bobbi’s a sweet, sweet girl. 
[audio ends]
Keith: The little laugh.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: It’s so funny.
Sylvi: Your wife’s got the giggles. Uh, she’s great.
Art: That woman is not your aunt is—
Sylvi: That whole scene has such—it’s so snappy and funny.
Art: She cares so much.
Sylvi: She hates her.
Keith: Dude, Junior’s been dating her for almost 20 years. She’s been part of AJ’s life for his whole life. That’s his aunt.
Dre: It’s not right. It’s not right. Livia’s just not right. 
Sylvi: It’s also like—it’s really funny too, given how quick they are to refer to other people as like cousin or uncle. 
Keith: Like, yeah. Yeah. It makes me think that Livia’s got some, like, judgment about them, like, not being married or something. Like, is that what it is? I don’t—
Sylvi: I mean, maybe.
Keith: Maybe.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Junior’s an old guy.
Sylvi: Leave him alone.
Dre: Yeah. No, I mean, you know, she just criticizes everything.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: She just criticizes everything.
Art: And there’s something in, like, their relationship, which is, like, not romantic, but is not that different from what, like, some old couples are that, like, there is a—
Dre: It’s like a level of devotion and intimacy. Yeah, for sure.
Keith: But also, she’s mad at him right now. Yeah, for being an arrogant jackass ever since he became boss.
Dre: Yeah, and for a brief minute, he’s mad at her for being mean to everybody.
Keith: Yeah, uh, yeah, he is like kind of like—he’ll go to her to complain about Tony, but then when she complains about Tony back, he always tries to like, pump the brakes a little bit, which is very interesting. Maybe you should stop going to her to ride on Tony then.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, another great moment with Junior in this episode. I really like this. This is very indicative of his whole personality to me. When we first see him in the lawyer’s office and they’ve got the guy delivering them sandwiches—oh God, I could go for a sandwich—and somebody else gets pepper and eggs and he’s like, oh, pepper and eggs, that’s what I should have had. He always fucking wants what someone else has. He’s always jealous of someone else’s thing. Even at lunch.
Art: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: And it’s, it’s not fully related, but it’s kind of funny. They eventually make a soundtrack album of The Sopranos and it is called Peppers and Eggs.
Keith: Really?
Sylvi: That’s really funny.
Keith: That’s really funny.
Sylvi: I also did not know about that. Uh, gotta check that out. Um, yeah, I mean, like, that kind of ties into the role that he’s playing now with, with Johnny having passed away. Like, I—you can very easily picture him having been jealous of Johnny’s life, and then now he’s kind of got it.
Keith: I mean, more than Johnny ever had.
Sylvi: Yeah, true. 
Art: He has to put up with his miserable ex-wife. 
Sylvi: I guess I mean the family thing more than anything, right? Yeah, it’s fucking miserable.
Keith: Um, yeah, the thing that Johnny seemed to have was a pretty good attitude.
Sylvi: I don’t know, man.
Keith: He seemed like a pretty happy guy in that episode.
Art: I mean, that’s not how Tony—remember, like, Tony describes him like wasting away from cancer and that his, his mother was—
Keith: Yeah, shriveling into a gerbil.
Art: Doing it to him.
Sylvi: Yeah, she’s the albacore around his neck.
Keith: Yeah, she is the albacore around his neck.
Art: Albacore around his neck.
Keith: This is, you know, this is, uh, yeah, I guess this is maybe the, uh, before he was gerbilized. 
Sylvi: Yeah, it definitely is. Because that’s—that the, the him being, um, sick, I think, was implied to be happening when Tony was like, already an adult. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Art: Yeah, I think that’s right.
Keith: I have it in front of me, the headstone. Let’s see the year on this thing. Hold on. Let’s see if I can get a better—oh, it doesn’t have a year.
Dre: Oh.
Keith: Yeah, it just says John Francis Soprano, in loving memory, uh, of a husband and father. No, no dates. That’s good so that you don’t have to, you don’t have to fix anything.
Sylvi: You don’t have to think about it.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: You can just have died on it. He died.
Keith: He died. The guy died.
Art: He died 20 minutes before the first episode started. It was—
Sylvi: Yeah, exactly.
Art: They didn’t talk about it more.
Keith: Yeah. We’ll decide later when this happened. Um, uh, the, um—
Dre: And the prequel, right? 
Keith: Oh, I bet. I hope, I hope Johnny’s in the prequel. I wanna see that.
Art: You don’t, but he is.
Sylvi: No comment.
Dre: I knew that. Yeah, from, from my understanding, we don’t wanna see it.
Sylvi: It’s, it’s, it is so like, nothing is the thing. It’s not that bad. It’s just kind of nothing.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: At least that’s my take on it.
Keith: Yeah. Um, do you wanna talk about soccer at all or do we wanna keep talking about Junior?
Sylvi: Yeah, I, I wasn’t sure if we wanted to stay on Junior, if we wanted to get back to soccer.
Keith: Yeah, let’s talk about soccer.
Art: The soccer plot until it becomes not fun is the most fun I think I’ve had this season.
Sylvi: Yeah, for sure.
Art: Silvio walking the sidelines in the, in the old-timey collar.
Keith: Oh, kicking dirt at the ref.
Art: Kicking dirt at the ref. Like, this is really the Silvio Dante coming out party episode. He’s having a great time.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: And does he, does he have a kid on the team?
Keith: He does.
Dre: Or is he just there?
Sylvi: He does.
Art: He does. Yeah.
Sylvi: He calls out to her at one point.
Dre: Oh.
Keith: Heather.
Art: I think his wife—oh, is it—is it not mis—yeah, yeah, there is a Heather Dante in the cast. I don’t know if that’s—is that wife or—
Sylvi: That’s his daughter, because he calls out Heather Dante, $100 for a goal.
Art: Okay. I know at some point they, they cast and then recast his wife, and it ends—it ends up being, uh, Steven Van Zandt’s actual wife.
Sylvi: Oh, that’s cute.
Keith: That is cute.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: She’s like an actual actor. He’s great in this. He’s so fun.
Art: He’s a musician.
Keith: Say again, Art?
Art: Uh, she’s an actual actor. He’s a musician.
Keith: Yeah. That’s the—
Sylvi: Well, I’ve been watching him. I think he is also an actor.
Keith: I think he’s an actor. 
Art: Yeah, he’s, he’s really precious. 
Keith: He takes a little bow. The whole, the whole stand cheers for him for like, kicking dirt at the ump, but he takes a little bow. That’s great. Great stuff. Uh, so the, the—something that I didn’t pick up on immediately was like the timeline of what’s happening with this soccer thing. Nobody knows anything about this coach until that, um—
Dre: Until he’s leaving.
Keith: Until the, the scene where they can’t find Ally and she’s on the bench with the knife. And that’s—it’s after that that Meadow understands what’s been going on.
Art: It’s not 100% clear.
Keith: It’s not 100% clear.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: ‘Cause they were like—
Art: ‘Cause they talk about how she’s been spending a lot of time at their house.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: And so it’s possible that Meadow did know, and this was like, just a big escalation.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Art: Meadow gets a lot of information in a short amount of time, but that is a thing that could have happened.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah. There’s just a part where they’re like talking positively about the coach, and then later on she’s like, this coach that we all hate. And it’s like, well, you liked this coach at minute 15 of this episode.
Sylvi: Again, then she received a lot of information.
Keith: Right, that’s what I’m saying. I was confused.
Sylvi: I think that was what caused the turn.
Keith: I was briefly confused that like, it seemed like maybe she had known something was going on for longer. I don’t know, I’m not 100% sure. It doesn’t really matter, I just was confused.
Sylvi: Yeah, no worries.
Keith: The way that, uh, the coach coming into view as a predator, like how that happens is like it becomes very clear in one particular scene later on when, uh, Ally and Meadow are on the floor watching Beck on MTV. I think it’s Beck.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Like, in that scene, it becomes very clear that something is wrong, and the list of things that could be wrong are pretty short. Uh, and so you immediately get the sense that like, oh, something like, really bad is happening with this coach. Uh, nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody’s—no, no—they’re clearly hiding something. Uh, they’re trying to dodge questions, and they’re getting angry when it doesn’t seem like it makes sense to. Uh, and I just had like, this sinking feeling of like, oh, something really bad is gonna happen with this coach. Meanwhile, he’s trying to move to Providence to, uh, take a job at a university. And there, Tony and the, uh, what do they call them? The—what about the—what is uh—
Sylvi: The guys at the Bada Bing?
Keith: The guys at the Bada Bing. Your friends at the Bada Bing. They’re like trying to threaten him into staying.
Sylvi: Yes.
Dre: Um, like bribe and/or threaten.
Keith: Bribe. It’s a bribe threaten. Yeah. It is like a silent—
Art: It is a bribe that is also a threat.
Keith: Take this TV or else.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: It’s, it’s stay here and listen, it’ll be great for you. But if you leave, [Sylvi: If you leave…] If you leave, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
Sylvi: Now the little bit of Tony Sirico in this episode as Paulie is great though, I will say.
Keith: Um, in both. Yeah, he’s in both only a little.
Sylvi: Only a little bit. But, uh, whenever, whenever Paulie isn’t on screen, I’m asking, where’s Paulie?
Keith: It’s an interesting—
Art: I understand that this isn’t a reference because of, uh, linear time, but, um, this guy’s a gangster. His real name’s Clarence, like, went through my head when he says his name is Clarence, which is from the climax of, uh, uh, 8 Mile?
Sylvi: I mean, maybe they will not come out for—maybe 8 Mile referenced this. You never know.
Dre: You never know.
Art: You can’t ever know.
Keith: You can’t ever know. I haven’t seen it.
Sylvi: It’s a mystery to everybody. I haven’t seen it either, but I know that scene ‘cause—
Keith: I don’t know anything that happened.
Sylvi: I was in 8th grade at one point.
Keith: Um, me too. What are you accusing me of?
Sylvi: This motherfucker skipped grade school.
Art: He’s dropped out at 7th grade. 
Keith: I dropped out of 7th grade, so I I never learned about 8 Mile.
Sylvi: Yeah, that’s why it’s called 8 Mile, because you have to be in 8th grade to know about it. Um, while we’re talking about the, the soccer plot line, before things get like—take the turn, uh, the—I’m obs—i get—i mean, in general I’m obsessed with it, but the Tony-Artie dynamic is, uh, so much, and I love it. I love them so much. There’s like—they are constantly like, like, uh, like, I, I wrote “my two gay uncles” when I was watching the scene of them on the soccer field with their arms around each other talking about the game. Um, but then also there’s like this little thing Tony does when Artie’s on the phone with Charmaine, uh, at the Bada Bing, where he just keeps tapping him on the bald spot, and it’s really funny. Uh, I just, I really wanted to, um, to bring that up.
Keith: Oh yeah, it’s funny that in a culture that’s so concerned about being perceived as gay, there’s a lot of male touching in The Sopranos. There’s a lot of Tony holding Artie around the waist and threading his hands through Christopher’s hair.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Dre: Can I just—
Art: As an observation, this homophobia might not be based in a strict logic. 
Sylvi: What are you talking about? It’s, it’s—everything here is perfectly sound. They’ve clearly thought it through.
Keith: I mean, they had the meeting about what was and wasn’t gay.
Dre: Is that like an emphasis on the Italian part of Italian-American? This kind of more like, European like, sense of like, camaraderie and male friendship?
Keith: Lots of kissing.
Dre: More like, touchy-feely and like, playful? I don’t know, man.
Sylvi: I, I don’t think I could say, uh, one way or the other, like, definitively.
Keith: Kissing my handsome protégé is straight. Eating my wife’s pussy is gay. I don’t know what’s so fucking hard about this.
Dre: Well, it’s because a pussy is like a dick, if you think about it. 
Keith: Right, if you suck a pussy, you might suck anything.
Sylvi: You’ll suck anything. Yeah. Fuck, this fucking episode.
Dre: Well, you know, that, that one time Melfi told Tony that the clitoris is like kind of like the tip of the penis, and then he was just like, well, you know, well, that’s—that just means that that makes you gay if you eat the pussy.
Sylvi: Oh my God. Why would I want to eat Pussy? He’s my friend. Cannibalism is way too far for me.
Keith: Yeah, he does have—he has a personal exemption. Yeah, I can’t do this because my friend’s name is Pussy.
Sylvi: Whenever he gets down there, he hallucinates his face on the cliff.
Dre: [crosstalk] Do you think this is DJ Khaled’s favorite episode of The Sopranos?
Art: [crosstalk] That would be hilarious.
Sylvi: It really would be. Sorry, what was that, Dre?
Dre: Uh, do you think this is DJ Khaled’s favorite episode of The Sopranos?
Sylvi: Shut the fuck up. Oh no, because Tony still admits to doing it at least once a year. That’s true.
Dre: Yeah, no, it is seen as positive behind closed doors.
Keith: That hurts his feelings too. I really like that. Yeah, I do too. Yeah. When, when, uh, Carmela’s like, I’m not gonna brag about it. You only do it once a year. Like he kind of gets hurt by that a little bit.
Sylvi: I can resist the urge to gossip. The delivery on it’s great. Yeah.
Dre: Like, That scene with them like, having little like, gossip and like, play fighting in the bed is one of the most adorable like, couples scenes.
Keith: There’s a couple of really cute couple scenes in this episode between—in these two episodes between the two of them.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the 2nd episode has it right at the end that I think is, is really good. Um, okay, I’m sorry, I’m a little off track of where we are.
Keith: Well, they bring the coach to the Bada Bing.
Sylvi: They bring the coach to the Bada Bing. They try to give him a private dance, but the dancer’s a little too old for him. 
Dre: Ohhhhhhh.
Keith: The early implication is that he’s just a faithful husband. 
Sylvi: Yeah. Wrong. Not the case.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: It’s quite the lifestyle they live, though. Isn’t that what he says to them when he’s leaving?
Sylvi: Yeah, he’s like, oh, you guys, this is quite the lifestyle. It’s wild.
Dre: Ah, gee whiz.
Sylvi: Yeah, this is when they like, they’re, you know, they’re trying to be, they’re trying to be best, best buddies with him, show, show off what big shots they are. And then he, yeah, Artie gets the call, uh, where, where Charmaine is like, hey, can you, can you come home and help me do this thing you said you would help me with?
Keith: Yeah, I think she’s painting the house.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, and so that’s when, when they leave, uh, and when, uh, that’s when the under—the crooked cop shows up, right? Where—to tell Tony that he’s being followed by a PI that Mikey hired.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Sylvi: Which I think is the only—like, Tony—that Tony’s aware of it now, but like, I don’t—i don’t think that side of the equation brings it up that much, aside from when like—like Mikey will bring up that he’s having him followed, but Tony doesn’t really talk about it too much outside of this scene. Let me know, please correct me if somebody else has notes to the contrary.
Keith: No, the only thing that I can think of is that at the restaurant scene with Artie, he has the waiter check the plates of the guys that are sitting next to them.
Sylvi: Yeah, but that—he says that he thinks they’re cops.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Which is different.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, at least to me.
Dre: But I think it’s a nice, like, bit of, like, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s vague.
Keith: He knows he’s being followed.
Dre: Yeah. But we don’t necessarily know, is it the cops? Is it Mikey’s PIs?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, but I just wanted to bring up that that’s like—that Tony’s aware of that from, like, early on in the episode. And I also think I didn’t mention in the, the summary that Tony is aware of the fact that he’s being followed from now on. Let’s see…
Keith: We also get the scene of Junior telling Mikey, telling Mikey off for like trying to get Tony followed. Is that, is that what it is? He tells Mikey off?
Sylvi: Yeah, they’re in the bathroom and he thinks he keeps—he’s like, you, you—he basically like, like, admonishes Mikey for being so gung-ho about like—because Mikey is basically saying Tony’s the snitch. Tony’s—Tony’s ratting on us.
Keith: Right.
Sylvi: And Junior’s like, fuck, lay off.
Keith: Yeah, ‘cause Junior knows about the psychiatrist, and he’s mad. He does consider that a security issue.
Sylvi: He does, but it’s like, he also—the, the—i think this is a good thing that comes out like, a, a really nice bit of the performance here that comes out throughout the episode, is that he’s like, he is still clearly annoyed about this, but he doesn’t want to mention it to Mikey because he knows it’s putting a target on Tony’s back.
Keith: Which then—until—
Sylvi: Until they get in their fight.
Keith: Right.
Sylvi: Yeah, like, that’s the whole thing, is it like this scene is what makes the scene in the locker room work for me. Like, it makes it sadder that this is—this is where they end up.
Keith: Because he already had like, sort of protected him.
Sylvi: He’d been—he’s been defending him more than like anybody the past few episodes. Like, ever since he became boss and got what he wanted, he’s been very like, ah, Tony’s under a lot of stress, stuff like that. Um, aside from like the few times that they had some, some, like, some, some, uh, headbutting on things. But for the most part, that, like, he’s—like we said, he kind of defends—he defends Tony to Livia. Um, he defends Tony to Mikey. And then finally, eventually, eventually, he, he’s—he—that guy talked about me, about me being a diligent lover. We gotta kill him.
Keith: We gotta fucking kill this guy. He’s spreading vicious rumors of my generosity.
Sylvi: Yeah, um, it’s fucking—masculinity is a prison. That shit’s crazy.
Keith: Yeah. Um, uh, we then move on to the scene where they’re drinking and smoking in the woods.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, where this is like very brief, but, uh, like the one line that makes me laugh really hard is when Meadow says that the coach made soccer seem like a metaphor.
Keith: [laughing] It’s really funny.
Sylvi: What’s that mean, man? I like, you know, you’re a drunk 17-year-old or whatever, 16, I think 17. Yeah, about to graduate. Like, I get it, you’re not thinking straight, but like, what, for a metaphor for what?
Keith: For life, for all of life.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Anyway, the sport is a microcosm of the world.
Sylvi: I love the, um, the, the prop work here where they all have the brown paper bags. So they can just put whatever the fuck they want in the—in them. So it doesn’t—they don’t have to find like, a bunch of fake liquor bottles.
Keith: Um, it’s also like, they’re, they’re not—the mythology of the brown paper bag is it’s for drinking in public without being arrested because you can’t—like, you have, I guess, maybe you have plausible deniability that there’s alcohol in there. Uh, they’re not drinking in public. They’re very much trying to not get caught, which makes having the paper bags completely superfluous.
Sylvi: It is very much for the audience more than—
Keith: Yes, it’s to indicate alcohol.
Art: Well, they’re in a public place.
Dre: Yeah, they are in a park-ish area.
Keith: Yeah, but they would get arrested for underage drinking because they’re children, not for public drinking.
Dre: Well, not if they don’t know. Well, no.
Art: Yeah, that can be anything.
Keith: I don’t know. I don’t think—i think that they would get it. I think that the—this paper bag is doing nothing for them. I think that this is—you have—i guess there’s the reality of the show. The show wants to indicate alcohol. I think if I’m a 17-year-old, what I’m thinking is, um, I don’t know, you just put it in brown paper bags. Isn’t that just what you do with alcohol?
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah. Um, obviously the, the, the major thing in the scene is not what they’re drinking.
Art: Right.
Sylvi: It’s the—it’s what’s going on with Ally. They find her with like a Swiss Army knife, a Swiss Army knife in her hand, and like, uh, cuts on her arm. It’s like very like—they’re—they, they do not like—they don’t, they don’t pull the punch on it. Like, they show you that she is hurting herself.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: And then it hard cuts to Tony talking to Melfi about it. Um, and that’s when we get the, uh—
Keith: The small cutting, clinical term.
Sylvi: The small cutting, yeah, versus suicide, genuine suicide attempt or suicidal gesture. Um, I wrote down the line, teenage girls are under a lot of stress. Finally somebody says it. Um, it’s—you’re so real, Melfi, for that one.
Keith: I wonder if Tony is gonna ever do a suicidal gesture.
Sylvi: So this is the thing I wanted to bring up, is that he’s clear—he brings up that he’s scared Meadow would do this. And it’s—to me, that’s obviously because of—i mean, we saw the conversation he had with Chris last episode. I don’t think it’s a jump to say that Tony Soprano has suicidal ideation in some way, shape, or form.
Keith: True.
Sylvi: Um, dude thinks about his death constantly. Um, and like, I think that, you know, this is another extension of the stuff that he was worried about with AJ, about like passing down the things that he sees as like fucked up about himself.
Keith: When Meadow looks at a barn, does she see the rotted-out old tree?
Sylvi: Yeah, exactly.
Keith: Did the Harvard—the smartasses at Harvard get her with the trick painting too?
[laughter]
Art: All right, but in like an hour when I have another joke on this callback, everyone has to come in fresh.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, we’ll—yeah, we’ll reset on that.
Sylvi: Um, yeah, we also get—
Keith: I jumped the gun on two jokes today.
Sylvi: That’s fine. It’s okay. The super half-assed apology he gives her, which is like not even an apology. He just says, I might have exaggerated a little bit.
Keith: Yeah. Um, uh, you know, I mean—look, Tony was out of line. I think that he was out of—he was out of line in how he addressed his feelings on this. I would say that he was right to be mad that he would be charged for a session that he did say in advance he might not make it to. That’s just the state of the healthcare industry.
Sylvi: I think the ambiguity is the problem there.
Keith: People being charged for healthcare, I think that they shouldn’t be in general.
Sylvi: To be fair, yeah, I agree. But also he’s good for it. 
Dre: I mean, he’s good for it.
Keith: The real issue is the hypocrisy.
Dre: Did not handle that conversation well.
Sylvi: Oh, she did not handle it well.
Keith: She didn’t handle it well. The issue is the hypocrisy of not understanding that he also shakes people down without considering their circumstances. Not that he’d be mad about being charged for healthcare, which I do think is—i think people should be mad about being charged for all medical care.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: It’s a reality. But yeah, the apology was half-assed completely.
Sylvi: The apology was really half-assed. Yeah. Um, after this, do we have more to say about that scene between him and Melfi?
Keith: Uh, no, it was really short.
Sylvi: I don’t want to move too fast. Yeah, I don’t mean to be, uh—
Dre: I have some, I have some Melfi stuff, but I think honestly it’s better to talk about in the next episode.
Sylvi: Yeah, I, um, I figure that—there’s, there’s a lot of, uh, there’s a lot of stuff to talk about with her next episode in terms of, uh, how she handles this.
Keith: I’m, I’m very interested. I’ll—i want to set this up at least for when we talk about her more. I think it’s interesting where in the last episode we leave her like, kind of being on her husband’s side more, uh, than she started in regard to like, Tony being a subhuman criminal that doesn’t deserve mental health care, uh, to then jumping to her feeling kind of reflexively defensive about her friend Tony Soprano who lives next to the Cusamanos. Uh, I just think that’s interesting that we kind of just get to this place after where we left off last.
Sylvi: Hmm.
Keith: Just to set that up for next time.
Sylvi: Yeah, um, I think that’s a good flag to plant.
Keith: Do we have anything to say about, uh, her meeting, uh, or, uh, Junior meeting his girlfriend Bobbi at the thing? It’s a pretty brief scene. We sort of talked about it.
Sylvi: It’s very brief. They’re, they’re—i think the vibes are cute with them from the beginning. They’re like, oh, they’re so excited to embezzle together. Uh, yeah. Um, and then also we got a little like, uh, a guy bribing Junior about a job for—in the Joint Fitters Union.
Keith: Um, yeah.
Sylvi: But it’s not like—i don’t think there’s anything real major here. I think the next scene has some, some fun big picture stuff about how Greengrove, uh, the retirement home is becoming like—sorry, retirement community, uh, is becoming the, uh, like new spot for like the, the sort of the, like, mob capos to meet, because we get, um, uh— [Keith: Uh, Lucky?] I know Jimmy Altieri is one of them, and then I forget the, the first guy who has the nice shoes’ name.
Keith: Ah, I fucking know what it is. Hold on.
Sylvi: But, uh, he has a really funny line.
Art: Oh, Larry Boy. It’s Larry Boy. 
Sylvi: Larry Boy, thank you. Larry Boy Barisi. Yes. Uh, she—one, Livia’s constantly like, just all she can really talk about is his shoes in the scene, except for when he’s like, oh yeah, my mom was throwing artichokes at someone, and she goes, she better not throw any artichokes at me!
Keith: Uh, I think this is really funny. I would love to get a 3rd beat on this joke, but every time she sees Larry Boy, she out loud reveals something bad he’s done.
Sylvi: Oh, you’re right.
Keith: Because in the last episode, he was like, you remember Larry Boy? And she was like, are you still cheating on your wife?
Sylvi: Yes, you’re right! And this one, it was—didn’t he burn down a house?
Keith: He burned down his apartment building, yeah. Uh, so I really, really would like Larry Boy to show up and for Livia to reveal some other thing that he did bad.
Sylvi: It’s kind of like how when Artie comes up, she’ll talk about how, uh, she’ll always say something about how good of a son he is. Like, oh, I just saw his mother, or his mother just mentioned him to me.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: I think it’s funny that she’s got like one trait that she assigns to all of Tony’s friends and just will never shut up about them. Um, this is also when Tony finds out that the coach is leaving and goes directly into the scene of, uh, Artie and Silvio.
Keith: Uh, by the way, actually, there’s no way that leaving all of this criminal stuff at the retirement community doesn’t become a huge part of this season’s arc.
Dre: Oh, I can’t wait.
Art: What?
Keith: I can’t—like, there’s no—i just—it’s, it’s such a small scene, but the flag that it plants is so huge. I can’t—we have—i have to highlight it at least. I know, Sylvi, you already said, but I—it’s—this is a big deal, this scene, I think.
Sylvi: I mean, yeah, it was doubling down on what we saw last time, right?
Keith: Yeah, yeah, we—we—i think I already—i think in my last, uh, notes I was like, this is a terrible place to leave your guns and money. And who knows, maybe it’ll all work out. When that guy said they’ll never surveil a retirement community, I was like, you want to fucking bet?
Sylvi: Real, uh, guy saying, what’s the worst that could happen in a horror movie? Um, uh, yeah, we got, we got Silvio and Artie. It’s, it’s both of them, right, that show up here trying to talk to, to the coach?
Keith: Yeah, it is.
Sylvi: He—this is—
Keith: It’s a closed practice.
Sylvi: The main thing here is, is how he is like, able to sort of like, take control of the situation over from Silvio when like, usually the mob guys are like, very in charge of everything. But it’s the only situation where he’s able to really do that, and it’s because he’s yelling at teenage girls.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, like that is the only reason why they—that he’s able to be like the big shot here telling them like, oh, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Again, stupid thing to say to a guy who like, maybe you don’t know for sure, but like, you gotta at least know what Tony’s deal is, that they’re part of the mob.
Dre: It seems like everyone else in the world knows.
Sylvi: It’s literally on the news.
Keith: It’s on the news.
Sylvi: But they’ve mentioned Junior Soprano on the news. I swear they have. Maybe I’m wrong, but, um—
Art: Yeah, in the, the Christopher is jealous episode.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. I’m, I’m, I’m glad I, I have my facts straight. What were you gonna say?
Art: The one episode where Christopher’s jealous.
Keith: Um, yeah, otherwise he’s been totally normal and fine, well-adjusted young man. Um, I can’t remember. I guess it’s plausible that he wouldn’t know about Silvio.
Sylvi: Yeah, he might just think he’s a guy who owns a strip club.
Keith: Yeah, it might be the writers wanting to do a reference more than this guy, but I don’t know. Because these two episodes kind of are both—both have, you know, non-Italian white guys being—making asses of themselves about mobsters.
Sylvi: That is true.
Keith: Um, so I don’t know, maybe it is that.
Sylvi: I don’t know.
Keith: I don’t know.
Sylvi: Something to think about.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, this is also when Meadow tells this guy to go fuck himself, and I cheered. You tell him, Meadow.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, and you know, he does the, the high school coach thing of being an asshole about it because, you know.
Keith: I didn’t cheer because I didn’t know yet.
Sylvi: Yeah, no, that’s fine. I, I’ve—I’m—i have—am blessed and cursed with knowledge, so I get to—i get to know these things ahead of time.
Art: I am mad at Keith for not having a stronger—
Keith: Yeah, I didn’t know until the Beck scene. Which—oh, that might have already happened. So maybe I did assume, actually. The—
Sylvi: Yeah, maybe. Um, no, we should talk about that scene. Um, now, do you want to talk about that scene now, or should we wait? Uh, because that scene is technically, I think, after the dinner? No, it’s before the dinner scene, but it’s—
Keith: Uh, it’s after the dinner. It’s the—it’s after the dinner with Artie with the hat. Yeah, it’s right after that.
Sylvi: Yeah, sorry, I meant after the big dinner scene, like the, like, family dinner. Yeah, yeah, the signature family dinner scene that is—that, like, that’s been in multiple episodes now. Um, yeah, okay, we have the—yeah, we got the dinner with Artie. We didn’t—we kind of glossed over this. Uh, I, I mean, I definitely glossed over—oh, somebody lost over the—
Keith: Ali joined by mistake, I believe.
Sylvi: Which really surprised all of us. [laughter] Um, All right. Um, uh, earlier in the episode, Tony offers—because, because, uh, Artie’s working at this place called the Dimples, I think is what he calls it. Uh, like, it’s like, it sounds like it’s like a buffet or some shit. Um, but, uh, he’s offered to put some money out. Like, if Artie can put some money out on the street, Tony can, can help it, like, can make it make money for him, basically. And like, get him involved.
Keith: The stock market. The Italian stock market.
Art: Loan sharking.
Sylvi: Loan sharking, yeah. Like literally he’s like, you should get in on this. And Artie changes—Artie never says no, but he does always change the topic. Like that is his move here.
Art: I don’t know the math. And it’s like, I don’t think you’re—you’re not—
Keith: You don’t need to know the math.
Art: You’re giving the money to a loan shark. You’re not doing the loan shark.
Keith: Which is funny because it’s kind of the reverse of what most people do with a loan shark.
Art: I think that doesn’t—
Sylvi: You need two—
Art: there’s two kinds of people you need to do loan sharking. A guy with some money and a guy who’s willing to hit people in the head.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Dre: And a guy who needs money. That’s also important.
Keith: Mm-hmm. Oh, so there’s two halves. There’s a—there’s the loan and the shark, and Tony’s like, I’ll be the shark if you have the loan.
Art: You be the shark, I’ll be the loan.
Sylvi: It’s beautiful.
Keith: Damn, we should get this in front of Hesh.
[Sylvi laughter]
Sylvi: A hit is a hit, and that’s a hit. Um, but yeah, that mostly—after Tony brings it up again, uh, he also asks it—why does, uh, Charmaine hate Tony, and Artie’s like, she doesn’t hate you. And I get—i—this is a classic Tony line to me, is you lie as well as I play the French horn.
Keith: Damn. Now in order to make that make sense, we need to see him play the French horn, and then I’ll decide if it’s funny or just a thing he said.
Sylvi: Cinema sin. We’ve never seen Tony play the French horn. We have no idea. We have no idea.
Keith: We have no idea. Yep.
Sylvi: Um, then Tony like, intimidates some guy into taking his, his baseball cap that says been there, done it, uh, off.
Keith: I have a question. Do we think—actually, I have a statement. First of all, I’ve seen this scene. Third scene of The Sopranos that I had already seen going in.
Sylvi: Okay.
Keith: As soon as he walked over to the guy with the hat, I was like, I’ve 100% seen this scene. From when he starts talking about the hat until he tells the waiter about the, uh, the cops. I had seen that, uh, which is interesting. Just randomly saw this clip somewhere, I guess. Um, do we think that he—i believe that he was genuinely annoyed about the hat. Everyone for some reason seems really bothered about the hat. Um, this is a kind—this is a part of life that I couldn’t give less of a shit about, frankly. But the waiter, Artie, and Tony all agree that the hat is unacceptable. Um, but I did get maybe the sense that he did this just so that he’d get a better look at the guys at the table. 
Art: No, no.
Keith: No? Coincidence?
Sylvi: Genuine—like, there’s like some real anger there.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: I mean, it could be both.
Keith: It could be both.
Art: It could be both.
Keith: I just—it just doesn’t—it’s just one of those things that there’s no—you couldn’t ever explain why having a hat on is disrespectful. It’s impossible because it is made up. It’s one of the least cons—I’m a guy that doesn’t wear hats, so I have no skin in this game. But I’ve just, ever since I was a kid, when someone’s mad about someone wearing a hat at an inappropriate time, I’m like, what are you talking about? Why are you bothering to get upset over this?
Art: No, take your hat off. It’s a nice restaurant. What’s the matter with you?
Keith: It’s so eerie. I don’t get it. Why? For what?
Art: They don’t sell hot dogs here. They took the bleachers out last year.
Keith: That’s a great—it’s a great joke. It’s a great joke.
Dre: Keith, we live in a society, you know?
Keith: And so then, and the—there are plenty of rules that exist because of society that you could explain to me the reasoning, but you could never explain why you shouldn’t have a hat on in a restaurant beyond you just don’t do it. There’s no other explanation. It’s just something you don’t do because.
Dre: I mean, I’m sure it’s one of those like manners that was—that came about from when like, people wore hats all the time to like, keep dust off of their face or whatever. And so taking your hat off was like, necessary to not get shit dirty anywhere.
Keith: Sure, totally. If you’re—that should—then there should be a rule against dirty hats.
Art: Now, no, don’t wear your hat in a nice restaurant. Don’t wear your hat anywhere nice. If it’s nice, take your hat off.
Dre: Keith, Keith, you go wear a hat wherever you want.
Keith: I don’t wear a hat anywhere, so I don’t ever want to wear a hat anywhere.
Sylvi: So you’re already wearing your hat anywhere you want. And where you want to wear your hat is nowhere.
Keith: Right, exactly. Yes, I guess true. I’ve already accomplished wearing a hat anywhere I want. Um, I just, you know, it’s—this is a fake rule. Get out of here with the hat thing. No one cares.
Dre: Tony Soprano, big fan of fake rules though.
Keith: Oh yeah, the mafia is fake rules.
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah, if you don’t take your hat off at dinner, you’re gay.
Dre: If you don’t put your hat on a pussy, then you are a cop?
Keith: Yeah. Those are the first two rules of mafia.
Dre: Okay.
Art: You never see Big Pussy in a hat, I guess, until the beginning of the next episode.
Sylvi: Yeah, I was going to say we literally do, but you’re, you know what? I still appreciate the hustle.
Keith: Uh, we actually started talking about this so that we could talk about, um, the living room scene.
Dre: Yes, we did.
Sylvi: Um, um, this—i—this is such a good, uh, performance of awkward parents who are trying too hard to be friendly because they know some shit’s going on in your personal life. Uh, the—from, from Tony and Carmela here, the, like, the way that they greet her is so, like, overly friendly. Yeah, it’s like you’re trying to be normal, but by doing—but you’re doing too much to actually do that. Like, yeah, you, you can tell you’re trying. Um, and I think it’s, it’s, it’s a pretty—it’s a good bit. And also, like, this all seems really sad. Like, so, so Ally does not—ally’s actress does not have a ton of, like, actual screen time in this episode. I think it’s pretty much the soccer scene, the scene where she’s cutting herself and this scene, uh, are basically it. And like, she doesn’t have a ton of speaking lines here, but she does a really good job of having the sort of like, reluctant sadness about stuff.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: There’s also just so much dialogue here that is like, ah, why? Oh no, you should—oh no, what are they saying? Like, um, Carmela says, oh, I hope Coach Hauser didn’t pressure you into doing this, or something along those lines. And she’s like, oh no, because she—because Ally’s like, oh, I had to talk with the coach. And then Tony’s like, what? Pressure her how? How could he pressure her? And I’m just sitting on my couch grabbing my hair and screaming. Um, does he know? No, he doesn’t.
Keith: How—also, how could you not know how an adult can pressure a child into something, right? That’s like the number one thing adults do to children.
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah.
Keith: Um, by the way, this was not Beck. This is Morphine. This is the song Buena by Morphine.
Dre: Oh.
Keith: I’ve never heard of Morphine, but if you also haven’t heard of Morphine, think Beck. 
Sylvi: Write a 5-star review.
Dre: Yeah, do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith:  Yeah, write a 5-star review. Um, the, the, the—this the part where Tony is trying to like—it’s interesting that Carmela and Tony are trying to like, diffuse the awkwardness from like, two different ends, and Carmela is like, it’s okay. You can like, tell us—you should tell us what—how this happened, and Tony is like, just leave it alone. Forget about it.
Sylvi: Between these scenes, I believe we also get the—a little Junior and Bobbi in Florida.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, the big things being Junior really, really driving home that she cannot talk about this to other people, uh, including when they’re dancing, the, my lips are sealed. And he says, not too sealed, right? And I go, that’s—hell yeah, dog. Uh, and then I—me and—me and—me and 93-year-old Dominic Chianese dap up.
Keith: Um, the, the later reveal that like, he’s telling her, hey, please don’t tell anybody about this, coming after he’s already told everyone about this.
Sylvi: Uh-huh.
Keith: It sucks so bad. 
Sylvi: It sucks. It really sucks. Yeah, but the scenes of them in Florida are really cute. Like, they’re cute all together. They really like each other. Um, and then the other thing here is that this scene ends with with a federal agent reporting back that, like, uh, like, he—that he sees, uh, Corrado Soprano and a companion at this club, and that even, even when he’s fled the state, uh, yeah, Junior is still under surveillance. That’s—
Keith: They, they should learn what the second half of the word fed is.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: Um, yeah, it’s, it’s interesting the way that they, like, approach sort of hiding, which for Junior is going somewhere with the woman he’s been dating for almost 2 decades, that they frequently go together, and staying in a nice hotel and spending $20,000.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: Which is not inconspicuous.
Sylvi: Didn’t really think that one through.
Art: If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking of evading the authorities—
Keith: Yes, spend a very small amount of money and then also don’t go out in public. If you’re hiding. Uh, the, the next scene is the scene where they’re trying to give, uh, the coach a TV to stay. It’s a, um, a 50-inch HD-compatible television. Um, it’s all—it also is labeled 50 large screen big inches. I don’t know why. It’s what it says on the box. The box says big screen projection television, 50 large screen big inches.
Art: What’s the problem?
Keith: I just don’t know what big inches are, I guess.
Art: Mm, sounds like you got too many little inches.
[hysteria from the group]
Sylvi: Got him! [manual klaxon sound from Sylvi] We’re all shooting Keith with guns right now. [klaxon sounds from the computer] Thank you.
Keith: I didn’t know what page it was on. 
Sylvi: I—the stuff I like in this scene with the TV are, one, him being like, I have friends in law enforcement, that they would call this extortion. Oh, obviously Clarence. So there’s three things I like in this scene. Um, when Houser is like yelling at them after they leave the TV on his driveway, he—the—character’s a piece of shit. The actor’s doing a pretty good job because he does this like, voice crack when he yells the hey at them and it’s like, so funny that he’s like, oh shit, wait a minute, I can’t yell at these guys the way I can yell at fucking children. Oh no.
Keith: I also like—who are these fucking bikers that he got to carry the TV? Don’t they—did they run out of Italian goons this week?
Art: I think those are 2 people from the Bada Bing. I think those are—
Sylvi: I think that is—
Keith: Oh is that is? They’re clearly wearing—they came from a biker bar. These are biker bar guys.
Sylvi: I mean, bikers go to strip clubs too.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Biker strip clubs, not Bada Bing.
Sylvi: Listen, I don’t know.
Art: I think the criminal element is a little more connected than you might think in the guys who can carry a big TV level.
Keith: That’s, you know, that’s fair.
Sylvi: I also would not be shocked if it’s like, get some guys who don’t look Italian. So there’s some more plausible deniability here. But I guess he does say, from your friends at the Bada Bing. So I don’t know. I don’t know. Um, yeah, that’s our only Paulie scene. Everybody cheers for Paulie.
Keith: Uh, yeah, thank you. I really like the line when, uh, he’s like, I know about your friends. Like, if you knew about them, you wouldn’t be whatever it is. Yeah, I’m with you. Uh, hold on, here it is. Tell your friends I know all about them. If you did, you’d do what they want, which is a great—
Sylvi: Yeah, it’s a good line.
Keith: And it’s true.
Art: He’s like, I know what this is about. And like, or like what this—paulie like, plays dumb in a very fun game. Hold on, maybe I have that written down. Oh, I don’t know what it’s about, but the TV stays.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: And you know, he might not, he just, you know, no, you’re right. Call up, give a TV to this guy. Make sure he takes it. All right, boss. I’ll go to the biker bar and I’ll get two goons.
Sylvi: Hey, good thinking.
Keith: Um, I just—hold on, I have to take a screenshot of this so that I can send—this is a very stupid pose from this piece of shit, uh, soccer coach. I’m mad, don’t give me a TV. [laughter] This guy sucks.
Sylvi: Yeah, this guy sucks.
Art: Guy sucks.
Keith: The, uh, this is where we learned that, that Bobbi has already sort of told about, uh, yeah, the, uh, the frequency of cunnilingus from her, um, good friend Corrado Soprano. Corrado?
Sylvi: Corrado, yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Um, uh, which—
Sylvi: Cool name, by the way, Corrado. It’s like, I’d be mad if everyone just called me Junior.
Keith: True, yeah. 
Sylvi: And my name’s Corrado. That sounds—i don’t know, I like how that sounds.
Keith: Um, shouldn’t have had a dad named Corrado then.
Sylvi: That’s a good point.
Keith: Yeah. Did you ever think of that? We talked a little bit about what’s next, which is the dinner scene, which we—
Sylvi: The dinner scene, yeah.
Keith: Uh, which is followed by the scene of, uh, Tony Soprano trying to get uh, Carm to tell him what the stuff with Junior was about.
Art: Well, in the middle there is Christopher returning the dog. It’s between the dinner and the—
Keith: Oh, is it? I thought that came after.
Sylvi: Oh, you’re right, that is, that is, um—oh no, that’s after the dinner. Yeah, that’s, that’s after the dinner.
Art: After the dinner and before—
Keith: And then, uh, and then it’s the scene in the bed, and then it’s a scene with, um, Artie and his wife, whose name I forget. And then it’s the scene with Chris.
Sylvi: Yeah, correct, correct. Do we want to go over the dinner? Is there anything we didn’t mention during the dinner scene, or should we—I’m more than happy to move on to the—
Keith: I think that we, you know, Tony has his own jokes about Junior’s absolutely terrible proclivity towards cunnilingus.
Sylvi: His fucking freak behavior.
Keith: Yeah. That he also does, that him and his friends all do, probably.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, do you remember what this fight with, um, Artie and his wife are about? What—also, please remind me of his wife’s name.
Sylvi: Charmaine. And I think this is—the fight is because he lets slip that—no, no, that’s later. Um, it’s because, it’s, it’s because they tried to bribe him.
Keith: Yes. It’s because they tried to bribe him. Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, that’s what it is.
Art: What is being offered a better job than being bribed though? I mean, right?
Keith: It’s true. Yeah. He was headhunted.
Art: Yeah. That’s a bribe.
Keith: That’s a bribe.
Art: Them being like, come work for us. We’ll pay you more and we’ll give your, let your kid come here. That’s a bribe.
Keith: That’s a bribe. Yeah. They paid, they doubled the salary and then also gave his daughter a full ride scholarship.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, the full ride scholarship is the, the real—
Keith: And I mean, I like this avenue because in the very next episode we get more stuff about this, which is like, what is the difference between, uh, criminality in the Sopranos sense and in the business world? And they come to the conclusion that it’s just whacking. That’s the only difference. But, you know, of course in business they kill people too. [Sylvi: Yeah.] So it’s not even—
Art: yeah, but this is 1999 and we didn’t talk about that.
Keith: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sylvi: Sort of a, uh, uh, an open secret.
Keith: They’re gonna talk about the Sacklers in this, in, in The Sopranos.
Sylvi: Um, all right. We should, we, I, I wanna get us back on track on this episode. Sorry.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, we have the Chris scene where he shows up with the dog. Um, was there anything we wanted to talk about with the argument? It’s mostly just that, like—
Keith: Yeah, just to catch them up that everybody knows about this bribing.
Sylvi: And, uh, Artie says, as if a TV set is gonna get somewhere with a man like Coach Hauser. He is like—he, he literally says earlier, he calls him an artiste, which is so funny.
Keith: I think he’s gonna eat this coach’s pussy.
Sylvi: He might.
Keith: He might.
Dre: Artie loves to view not great guys as just the best dudes in the world.
Sylvi: I mean, like, he—there’s like a clearly a weird and like an insecurity going on with, with Artie that, like, guys like Tony and this coach, like, he, he definitely, like, aspires to on some, some level, you know?
Keith: Well, it’s interesting because I don’t think that he views Tony as, like, honorable, but he clearly feels like this coach is, like, an extremely upstanding and honorable guy. Yeah.
Dre: Um, I think he kind of thinks of Tony that way, especially, like, the hat scene, at least.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: You think? Yeah. There’s like—
Dre: He’s, he’s maybe not honorable, but he’s, he’s a man who’s willing to do what needs to be done.
Sylvi: It’s also the kind of thing where it’s like, they grew up together. So like, there’s, there’s gotta be—there’s the, um—
Keith: He has affection for Tony.
Dre: Yeah, for sure.
Sylvi: Well, there’s that, and there’s sort of like he understands the like, weird skewed code of honor that a lot of these guys have.
Keith: Because he grew up in it.
Sylvi: I think because he grew up in it. That’s—yeah, that’s more what I’m getting at is like he—he, he does think that there is like a, a, a code that these guys are to, to—or like that he does—he doesn’t necessarily see them as, as, uh, bad in the same way that like Charmaine sees them. Which, by the way, again, the only voice of reason in the show. I can see why she tested so well. Um, but yeah, uh, I think—i mean, this is gonna be like, a constant thing with Artie, honestly, is like, idolizing people he shouldn’t. Um, particularly, uh, particularly the way he feels about Tony. Not gonna lie. Um, I guess that’s pretty obvious.
Keith: Christopher pretends to, uh, rescue this dog, this dog that everyone agrees was upstairs in the house. Uh, but don’t worry, he doesn’t want a reward. He’s just an animal lover.
Sylvi: It’s so funny. It’s really funny. Because the implication is that he broke into their house and took their dog while they were there.
Keith: Yeah, he dognapped.
Sylvi: That’s Lil Pussy right there. He’s quiet as a cat—
Keith: He cat burgled a dog! He cat burgled a dog.
Dre:  That’s some Agent 47 shit.
Sylvi: Oh my God. I need to mod that game so, so 47 is Chris and he just keeps talking about his character arc.
Keith: Now we’ve got Big Pussy, Lil Pussy, and Littler Pussy.
Sylvi: Yeah. Teeny tiny pussy.
Keith: Nobody tell Uncle Junior.
[Sylvi laughter]
Sylvi: Oh my God, I’m a child. I’m a fucking child. This is—i, I cannot believe how funny this shit is to me.
Keith: Um, unfortunately it’s about to get really less funny. Like, very quickly about to get very not funny.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, this is when the—it’s the next morning. Uh, Tony says to Meadow, trying to reassure her, like, oh, don’t worry, I think I think the coach is gonna stick around. And she is immediately like, what did you do? Um, which is kind of like, a, a thing that’s gonna like, be here for the rest of the episode, is Meadow really worried about what her dad is capable of. Um, which I think, you know, makes a lot of sense after the college episode when he mysteriously went and killed a guy.
Art: When she correctly surmised that he had murdered someone.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah. But, um, this is when—oh gosh, because actually, could somebody else take the lead on this while I have some water? My throat’s kind of—
Keith: Yeah, so they find her like, kind of depressed in her bedroom, um, and, uh, uh, Tony comes in to basically yell at her because they think that she’s being ungrateful. And—oh, you know what, it’s—she runs up to the bedroom after hearing about what Tony did, that Tony’s planning on making this guy stay in town. She runs away and he comes upstairs to yell at her, to call her ungrateful. And it’s like, you know, look, I did this because you and your friends were so upset about the coach leaving. And she’s like, that’s not why we were upset. We were upset because our friend almost killed herself because she’s sleeping with this coach and, you know, he won’t leave his wife for her and, you know, she’s losing her mind.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Art: I don’t think they’re rooting for him to leave his wife for—
Keith: No, no, no, no, they’re upset that their friend, that their friend is going through this, not that the, that the, that the coach is not being faithful to the high schooler. Like, I think that they think I think that they hate this coach for sleeping with a child.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: But Ally doesn’t. Ally’s the one who hates him for not leaving his wife.
Art: Ally’s in favor of it.
Sylvi: Yeah. Weirdly enough, the victim, uh, is unfortunately, uh, still dealing with the effects of being groomed. That’s crazy.
Keith: Yeah. And, uh, Tony—both Tony and Carmela are thrown off by this.
Art: You see Tony’s, like, brain crash.
Keith: Yeah, Tony’s brain crashes, and he basically is like, are you sure she’s not just bragging to score points with her high school friends? Which is insane.
Sylvi: And then he also does the, like, you know, she’s a very, uh, she’s a very pretty girl, maybe there was a misunderstanding. Which is like, also, Tony, shut the fuck up, man. What are you—what are you saying?
Keith: He crashes two different buses trying to process this.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, and Carmela is great in the scene, uh, by the way. I really think that, like, the way, uh, Edie Falco and—handles this is like really, really, really good, uh, performance-wise. And also just the way they’ve written her here of being like—
Keith: She understands immediately.
Sylvi: She understands immediately.
Keith: At her age, the coach shouldn’t have been in any position to, uh, where there’s even a remote possibility of confusion.
Sylvi: And like, she, she makes Tony leave. She’s like, you gotta, you gotta get out of here, man. You’re, you’re not helping with this. Yeah, I need to talk to our daughter. Um, uh, and like, yeah, it’s just like the, the like, heartbreak in her voice when Meadow is like, um, he said he was gonna leave, uh, his wife for her. And she’s like, leave his wife? It’s like, oh yeah, you are really like—this must have been going—it’s—there’s a like, oh, this must have been going on for like, a while now if this is a conversation they had.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: And then also, oh my God, this was in such close proximity to my daughter. What the hell?
Keith: Yeah. Um, all of the guys who—all of the, all of the parents who are—have kids on the team are all upset with that same thought. Like, yeah. And that becomes sort of the linchpin of what is Tony gonna do about this is like, it could have hap—this could have maybe happened to any of our daughters.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s, uh, I mean, that’s, that’s the conversation they have. Uh, Silvio and him are having this conversation at the club, um, when Artie walks in and he doesn’t know about the situation yet. But like, they’re both like—
Art: When Artie’s 5 timezones behind his own ass?
Sylvi: Great line. Great line. Um, I also think, you know, the—they handle this the way you kind of expect them to, where they keep kind of like, centering themselves, you know, in a, in a way where it’s like, I can’t believe this happened to my daughter’s friend. Um, like, I’m so, I’m so angry about this, instead of like, really thinking about Ally at all here. Um, which I don’t think is like, unrealistic, and I don’t think is like—
Dre: No, not at all.
Sylvi: I’m not, I’m not calling out Tony Soprano for this or anything, but I think it’s um, I think it’s like, consistent with the characterization that the, the people who are—the, the, the person we see handle this with the most like, care and concern for the people directly affected by it is Carmela here.
Dre: Um, it seems very intentional that this episode is, is structured in a way in that like, the—as you were saying, I think Sylvi earlier and maybe Keith too, like the people who are the actual victims in this get like two lines, or the victim, I should say. And then even the person who’s like second closest is Meadow. And even she gets like relatively few lines compared to everybody else talking about how they feel about this.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Um, but then they, they do set up like a, um, like, this sort of dynamic of Tony Soprano is the guy who feels like he needs to do something, slash, why Tony? Why you, Tony? Why do you feel that way?
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: I want to do something to, like, avenge my daughter’s friend, slash, protect other girls. And it’s like, and then, okay, well, what about the police? And he’s like, well, what about the police? They won’t do anything. Versus, yes, they will.
Dre: I mean, unfortunately, Tony Soprano is very accurate about the state of coaches literally sexually assaulting players at every level of women’s soccer. And I assume most sports, unfortunately. But there was a huge investigation into the Women’s Pro Soccer League in the US several years ago because like, three different coaches had sexually harassed or sexually assaulted players at multiple different teams and kept getting hired.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: I feel like it’s something you’d be allowed to talk about in school.
Keith: Which is Tony’s point that he literally makes that point that they just move him to another school. And it is—
Sylvi: Gonna go to Saskatchewan.
Keith: Uh, yeah, go to Saskatchewan.
Sylvi: Um, you know what he’ll do? He’ll coach high school soccer. Like, he’s not—it’s not a bad point. 
Keith: That’s what—you know, if I had to make a criticism of the episode, it’s that I think that the—i think the Tony Soprano shouldn’t take vigilante justice action against a pedophile is a little bit too optimistic about the justice system.
Sylvi: For sure.
Keith: I think that you could make a really good—is vigilante justice the right thing to do here? I think you can make a really good yes and no argument that doesn’t come to a conclusion, or does come to a conclusion, but I don’t know for sure that this episode does do that.
Dre: No, absolutely not.
Keith: It almost gets there. It almost does. It like, comes very close to making a positive case for not killing this guy. I really like—you know, oh yeah, I’ll just say the thing. I really like there’s like the one-two scene of Melfi being like, why do you feel like you have to do something? Like, why does it—why does it have to be you? And then the Artie scene of, we wouldn’t be doing it for them, we’d be doing it for us to make us feel better.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And if I was writing the show, I think that my reaction to that would be, it doesn’t matter if it makes us feel better because the consequence could help someone versus—and the reason why it has to be me is because no one else is set up to do this the way that I am. It can’t be Artie because he’s not in a gang like I am.
Sylvi: Yeah, he’s a civilian.
Keith: Right. I know about committing crimes and getting away with it.
Sylvi: They don’t necessarily have it in these terms, but there’s definitely that bit later where Artie’s like, you don’t think I wanted to do it? I drove by his house. [Keith: Right.] And like, it does kind of come up where it’s like, yeah, but Artie, you’re not—
Keith: Right. So they have this sort of mirror of it, like, we all want to kill this guy. But we don’t because that’s not what you do. You call the police. And I think that they’re—that, you know, I think that the show could benefit from the flip of like, well, why do we call the police and what’s wrong with calling the police?
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: But I don’t know that TV in the ‘90s is equipped with that either.
Art: The police are inefficient is not really like a—or like, bad or, you know, suck up to these coaches in this way, is not like, and therefore your local mafia captain should be the one who handles crime in your neighborhood.
Keith: Right. But as the local mafia captain, he wouldn’t have that negative bias against the mafia. He would have a positive bias against the mafia—towards the mafia.
Art: Right. But, but we’re also having this conversation because we are watching the show, right?
Keith: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, uh, I, all I’m saying is I think the show approaches you know, having a conversation about like, what are the pros and cons of vigilante justice, and the—they end up like, kind of hand-waving the actual issues with the justice system specifically. I mean, Melfi says something like, yeah, the police are actually much better about dealing with this sort of thing than they used to be. And it’s like, okay, Melfi, I mean, I don’t know what—like, that’s sort of—i think I’m not going out and killing anybody, but is that a sufficient argument for Tony Soprano? And it was, or it wasn’t. It was the conjunction of that with the conversation with Artie. Yeah, I don’t know. I just think it gets close to—
Sylvi: It’s worth talking about.
Keith: It gets close to something that I found that I would find interesting as someone who’s like, you know, not in favor of the police and not totally against vigilante justice. I would say more for one and less for the other than the average person.
Dre: It is interesting that Melfi is like the person who initially says like, you know, teenage girls are under a lot of pressure. And then to your point, Keith, kind of ignores the forces that are putting them under pressure.
Keith: Right. Yeah.
Dre: And not protecting them. Yeah.
Keith: Do you want to hear that first conversation with Tony, Dante, and Artie?
Sylvi: Artie? Yes, please.
Art: I like that you’re calling him Dante. It’s showing a level of familiarity.
Keith: Sorry, Sylvio. They do mostly call him Dante, not Sylvio, right? Am I—
Art: The, uh, no, I don’t think so.
Sylvi: I don’t, I don’t think so. No, yeah.
Keith: I don’t know. Maybe no one’s even saying his name and I just, I just go, that’s Dante.
Art: I mean, when I’m watching Clerks.
Keith: Leaning over and whispering, that’s Dante.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Silvio: Moldonado and his brother. They’ll handle it. Mal owes me a solid.
Tony: No, no hired help. This is personal. 
Silvio: Very glad to hear you say that. I’m gonna give him a real after-school special.
Artie: You out of your fucking mind? 
Silvio: What?
Artie: I know what you did. You kidnapped the coach’s dog and all that other shit, but if you do one more thing—
Silvio: Oh, shut up, Arthur. You know, You’re 5 fucking time zones behind your own ass. 
Artie: No, I’m fucking serious. You hear me, Tony? 
Tony: You’re serious?
Artie: Yeah.
Silvio: You want to hear serious? You want to know what your wonderful fucking coach did? He fucked little Ally Vandermeed, and who knows who else he fucked.
Artie: What are you talking about? Fucked? That’s crazy. 
Silvio: That’s why that kid slit her wrists, you stunad. And my daughter should know this shit? My daughter should have to think about that filth?
Artie: No.
Silvio: No. That self-righteous prick put his dick in my little girl’s soccer teammate. Yeah. She’s in 11th grade, for Christ’s sake. 
Artie: Oh my God. Chiara. He drove her home from the supermarket one night when it was raining. Oh, my little girl. Fucking degenerate son of a bitch.
Silvio: He deserves to die. Betraying children?
Tony: Artie, believe me, he ain’t gonna be doing that shit no more. I guarantee you that.
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, do we know what a stunad is?
Sylvi: No, I can look it up.
Keith: I believe that it just means like, moron.
Sylvi: Yeah, uh, stupid, uh, clueless, or dazed person.
Keith: Uh, you’re 5 timezones behind your own ass is really funny.
Sylvi: It’s great. Another, another banger line.
Keith: Uh, I also love the, just the audacity of like, they were just bribing this guy to stay. He—it’s only one afternoon into them knowing that this guy is a criminal piece of shit.
Art: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Uh, and, and they’re like, you’re way behind. It’s like, you’re only—he’s only one conversation behind.
Sylvi: No, they’re 5 time zones ahead. Um, oh, I, I think the scene kind of—you playing that kind of helps illustrate what I was talking about earlier with the way it—so much of it is in Silvio’s delivery with the, the, the like, my, my daughter’s friend thing.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Um, but yeah. Um, I’m just getting back to my, my notes here. Um, oh, it’s the golf scene next.
Keith: It is the golf scene next.
Sylvi: It is the golf scene next, which is a great, great, uh, little bit here. Um, it’s, uh, it’s Mikey, uh, Junior, and, uh—
Art: Silvio. It’s a big Silvio episode. Silvio has a great fucking outfit. The hat he’s wearing.
Sylvi: Did you hear, uh, Mikey going, that’s a great hat, in the background of that scene when they all walk up? It’s really good. Yeah. Um, my partner pointed that out. It was like, who just said that’s a great hat? [Keith: And it was.] it was a great hat. 
Dre: Even hater Mikey can’t help but—
Sylvi: You know, hey, we don’t know if he’s got any problems with Silvio. We know he’s got problems with Tony.
Keith: It’s only Tony. But to be fair, Tony did, um, staple gun his chest.
Art: Okay. But he does have a really bad case of fuckfaceitis, which—
Sylvi: And staples help.
Keith: Yeah, they both help with fucking. Yeah, it’s the aluminum. So this is the thing that I like about this scene, I think. Tony’s having a tough day. Yeah, you know he’s got a lot going on. Junior’s slight is very minor here in the realm of slights being like. Uh, you, you won’t shut up. When you were a kid, you dropped a ball when you were playing baseball. That’s all that it took to have him go on this fucking, uh, performance. What was this, the song he was singing?
Art: Uh, South of the Border. Yeah, I don’t remember the parody, but it’s Down Mexico Way is the—
Keith:  Yeah.
Sylvi: He keeps just bringing up fish.
Keith: Yeah, he’s bringing up fish. So, you know, did somebody have sushi? It’s very juvenile. It’s not very funny. Um, uh, it’s funny that it’s not a good—it’s not that good of a bit. So he’s kind of like making an ass of himself over what I assume to Mikey and Junior seems like nothing. But we do.
Art: It barely feels like anything to me.
Sylvi: I mean, like, yeah, they like that—nobody knows what the fuck he’s talking about. That’s the reaction every time is like, why are you—what’s this? What’s he saying? Well, yeah, what’s this guy on about? Uh, until eventually he does realize.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Junior gets it. Um, and is trying to play it off.
Art: Although before that, he says about Tony when he’s talking too much, when he’s trying to tee off, that he yaps worse than six barbers, which is just like a funny—
Sylvi: Another good line.
Keith: Yeah. Um, and that’s when he’s like, yeah, you, you yapped when you dropped that ball or whatever. Like, it’s—
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, it’s so minor for Tony—for Tony to have gone this far, it’s like, crazy.
Sylvi: And yet, and yet it turns out this might be the thing that gets a hit put on him.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Uh, Um, yeah, basically there’s, there’s the one shot that I really like in this scene is after he makes that comment about Tony’s, uh, sort of athletic career. Um, and you just kind of—he goes up, uh, Junior goes up to putt and Tony just like, you see this, it’s sort of like—or not putt, drive. You just kind of like see it, um, working into Tony’s brain, like, slowly that it’s like, okay, okay, so he said that. Oh, okay, sure. I’m gonna, I’m gonna really lean into this now. This guy eats pussy.
Keith: Um, yeah, it’s so fucking stupid.
Sylvi: So petty and so dumb and so nothing.
Keith: You’ve got to be so far up your own ass to—to even have this opinion about cunnilingus. Like, it’s like, it’s just like these people are living in another world. I cannot—i have, I have like, I can only theoretically understand even what they’re upset about.
Sylvi: Yeah, no, it’s, it—it’s shocking, but a lot of the logic these guys are using is very flawed.
Keith: Yeah. Um, Artie’s taking part in my favorite hobby, which is, uh, sniffing the tomato where the stem has been disconnected. It’s a heady green smell.
Sylvi: Is that nice?
Keith: Yeah, it’s really nice.
Sylvi: Oh, okay.
Dre: Especially if it’s fresh off the vine. No, it is. It’s a nice smell. It’s a good smell.
Keith: Yeah. Um, I might call it the most pow—one of the most powerful smells. 
Sylvi: Wow. Okay.
Dre: Okay. Uh, where are we going next in this episode?
Keith: Um, sorry. In, in season 8 of Taskmaster, Joe Thomas brings in a tomato, uh, as his most powerful smell and describes the heady green smell of where the stem disconnects from the tomato as—
Sylvi: When you said that, that’s when I realized what you were doing. Um, this fucking guy. Um, after this is, um, I believe it’s the scene, uh, yeah, you’re right, it’s the scene in the garden and Artie kind of lets slip that, that Tony is going to take care of the coach. And we get Charmaine being like, hey, what the fuck?
Keith: Yeah, she figures it out based off of very little input and, uh, he doesn’t really deny it. it, and then sort of makes the case for not doing that.
Sylvi: Yeah, basically the—i mean, the big line here is like him being like, if I had the balls, I’d do it myself, and her being like, you do have balls, that’s why you’re not doing this. Just kind of summing up the anti-murder stance immediately for this episode. And then it—it’s—do you guys have more to say about this, or should we move to Mikey and Junior in the, the locker room, which we did gesture at earlier?
Keith: Yeah, I have a button for it if we want to listen to it.
Sylvi: Sure.
Keith: All right, this is my last one for this episode. 
[audio of The Sopranos starts playing]
Mikey: What was that bullshit with the sushi?
Junior: Nah, I don’t know what he was talking about. He, uh, he babbles.
Mikey: What was that?
Junior: You’re another one.
Mikey: Me? Hey, he completely lacked respect. 
Junior: Sick and tired of having to make excuses for him all the time.
Mikey: It isn’t right.
Junior: Of course he’s a fucking mental weakling.
Mikey: I know.
Junior: You don’t know shit, Mikey. He’s seeing a psychiatrist, for Christ’s sake. How about that, huh? My nephew is seeing a psychiatrist. Makes me want to cry.
Mikey: No shit.
Junior: Indictment’s being prepared. He’s spilling his guts.
Mikey: I fucking knew it. 
Junior: No, you didn’t fucking know it. I just told you. God knows how much of our family business he airs. If the place is bugged—
Mikey: That stuff’s not admissible. It’s that, uh, that, that doctor-patient privilege, just like us and Melvoin.
Junior: Melvoin’s a lawyer. He’s in the fucking ballpark. Suppose this shrink gets scared or something. Do you remember those two fucking Escovedo brothers or whoever the fuck over in California? They whacked their parents. The shrink was in a fucking witness chair.
Mikey: Shit.
Junior: Anthony wants to play games? Okay. I taught him games. I taught him how to play baseball.
Mikey: You talking about clipping him? 
Junior: Nobody would slap my wrist if I did.
[audio ends]
Keith: Do we think that’s true?
Dre: No. I mean…
Art: No.
Dre: In Junior’s mind, yeah, sure.
Sylvi: But yeah, because Junior thinks he’s the boss with no qualifications on that. But we know that that’s not the case.
Keith: Right.
Art: Well, and Tony’s a made guy, so that’s supposed to mean something.
Keith: And they’re related.
Sylvi: Yeah, I guess I just—i am always a little unclear on like, how much the boss can just get away with whatever they want when it comes to this sort of thing.
Art: Well, luckily that—i think that’s gonna come up in the more in the run of this show.
Sylvi: Oh, thank goodness.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: The—i really like how much you can see that this still bothers—this whole situation really bothers Junior. You know, I taught him games, I taught him baseball, which is true. Again, we know that that’s true.
Sylvi: He did, yeah. Like…
Art: Yeah, um, no, I think this—it’s the, the strength of the scene is that you can, you can really feel Junior’s turmoil. Um, I also really liked the, you didn’t know shit, I just told you.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Because it is true.
Dre: It is true.
Keith: Uh, because this whole time, you know, when earlier when Mikey’s like, he’s, he’s going towards the medical center, but he keeps, you know, ditching the tail. Um, like we know, and Junior knows that’s because he’s going to the doctor.
Sylvi: Yeah, because he mentions that he’s going—he loses the tail at the—around the medical center, right?
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Sylvi: And then it all just kind of slips out. And like, Mikey’s—the fuckfaceitis is going crazy in this scene.
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Sylvi: Um, I—his—he’s great at doing the most just like, obnoxious look in his eyes shit. Uh, I really like Mikey.
Keith: He’s one of my favorite characters, I think.
Sylvi: He’s, he’s, he’s a very fun presence in the show.
Keith: Yeah. And then this is Melfi’s scene with uh—
Sylvi: Yes. Yeah, this is the, um, this is the, the conversation you talked about earlier, and we mentioned with the, like, um, her being like, why do you think it’s up to—it’s your purpose to punish people. Um, I think—i don’t know if there’s a ton else we really need to talk about here. I do, I do.
Keith: I think that, um, yeah, her questioning why he always uses him is really great. Is like a key pillar of Tony Soprano.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Uh, because he does do that.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: I just noticed something that I never noticed before. On the Bada Bing sign, the Bada and the Bing have fucking nipples on them.
Sylvi: Yeah the B’s have nips.
Keith: The B’s have nips. I did not notice that. That’s so funny.
Sylvi: It’s great.
Keith: It’s so funny. Oh my God. I just thought—i mean, I saw the red and my eyes just like, totally glazed over the meaning.
Sylvi: That’s an interesting graphic design choice. Oh well. Yeah.
Keith: Oh my God, that’s so funny. I lied, I actually do still have a button for this episode because it’s— [Sylvi: Oh cool.] It is the—it’s the scene where, uh, Artie insists that Tony not kill this guy. Silvio’s waiting for the word that he’ll do the hit, and, uh, Artie’s like, you shouldn’t do it. Yeah.
Sylvi: Do you wanna—do you wanna—it’s good. This is—i mean, this is also the next scene we haven’t talked about, so yeah, if you want to play it, please.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Artie: It’s about the thing.
Tony: You know what? 
Artie: Nothing’s happened yet, has it? 
Tony: Just gotta make the call. I’m savoring the moment. 
Artie: You gotta call it off. 
Tony: Artie, don’t worry about it. You got nothing to do with it. You don’t go nowheres near this. 
Artie: I don’t care about that! It’s wrong, Tony. You can’t do it. 
Tony: It’s wrong? Oh, what he did isn’t? 
Artie: I’m begging you. I hate the guy too. 
Tony: What do you want to do, Artie? You want to call the cops? Hey, here’s the phone. They’ll arrest him, right? He’ll get out in two fucking years, and he’ll move up to Saskatchewan, and then you know what he’ll do? He’ll teach girls soccer, and he’ll start all over again. 
Artie: You don’t think I want to rip him apart like a fucking chicken? I drove by his house. I almost got out.
Tony: But you didn’t. 
Artie: Something happens to him, who’s it gonna help, huh? His daughter? That girl? No, you, Tony, and Silvio, and me, and whoever. It’s just gonna make us feel better. So don’t even think about calling this justice. Leave it to the cops.
Tony: Let me ask you a question. Who the fuck do you think you are coming in here talking to me like this? Now, your boyfriend is finished. You deal with it. Okay? 
Artie: Tony, don’t do it. This is me asking you. 
Tony: Why don’t you get the fuck out of here?
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, beyond the obvious, I do wonder if this buys Tony some cachet with Artie, who has been resisting Tony’s criminal influence, uh, because of Charmaine. Uh, you know, if I was like, thinking about what we could do with Artie as a character, this might let me make him a criminal off of this. I could turn—i could turn Artie into a criminal off of, I convinced Tony Soprano not to kill, uh, the coach. 
Art: This is how close Keith is to doing loan shirking.
Keith: Yeah, I’m like, one day away from being the loan in a loan shark situation, as long as I find a good shark. 
Art: friendsatthetable@gmail.com if you’d like to—
Keith: I’m just looking to do some crime. Is that so bad?
Art: I mean, you’re from Providence, or you’re living in Providence rather.
Keith: Yeah. Um, yeah, let me do a little bit of crime here in Providence, please.
Art: There’s a lot of mafia problems.
Keith: There is, yeah.
Sylvi: Come on, just a little bit. Oh, there is? Okay, I didn’t know.
Keith: Uh, yeah, there’s a ton. Um, the, uh, the—obviously the thing that happens in this episode is that he listens to Artie. He doesn’t—he, he calls Silvio off. Um—
Art: Silvio, who is apparently right there.
Keith: Literally outside his house in the car waiting to go do it. Um, and Tony, you know, maybe it’s the Xanax or whatever, but Tony seems elated to have not killed someone.
Sylvi: Yeah, it’s, it’s weird. It’s like, it’s kind of hard to tell if it’s, if it’s euphoria or like he’s like—
Keith: The smile on his face when he says, I didn’t hurt someone. And then he says, um, uh, I didn’t hurt nobody. Call the shrink, tell her the town’s gonna give her, uh, a fucking bonus.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, yeah, just like, it’s—i really like this scene, but I, I don’t know if I read it as cleanly, um, personally, because it just—it seems like it took so much for him that he’s like, kind of, kind of torn up over it.
Keith: Yeah, maybe he’s guilty that he didn’t do something.
Sylvi: Yeah, like it—i, I—that’s at least one of the ways I’ve kind of like, looked at it before.
Keith: Mm-hmm. But then what happens in the very next episode though?
Sylvi: You got to be more specific about what you’re—
Keith: The thing happens in the very next episode. The first thing he does is he gives Cusamano a box of cigars, he’d be like, you recommended a really great shrink to me.
Sylvi: Yeah, you’re right.
Keith: And I feel like that’s off the back of her giving him the advice, don’t take all this stuff on yourself, there’s no reason to. Why do you have to be the guy that does this? Just call the fucking cops, you weirdo.
Sylvi: I hadn’t thought about that.
Keith: So I think that’s why I thought of it pretty cleanly, is like, he’s, you know, he comes home, he’s singing, he’s drunk because he—i mean, I think he was probably drinking all day. He took Xanax because he was nervous. He probably drank more, maybe in relief, maybe just out of habit. And he comes home and is like, more open in his feelings than he might be had he been not, against advisory, mixing his alcohol and his pills.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Art: I mean, I think it’s—i think, I think we are supposed to believe this is relief. that Tony did not want to—ultimately did not want to do this. And I think you—the Meadow being up in the, like, mezzanine or whatever—
Keith: Yeah, that’s called the mezzanine.
Art: Of their house is also—
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah. That’s a pretty good point.
Art: Um, we get to see her relief that that is not what happened. I think Meadow, uh, who is almost definitely friends with this coach’s daughter also didn’t want him to get killed.
Sylvi: Yeah, that is kind of one of the things she keeps bringing up, right? Is like, uh, I can’t remember who the daughter is. Is it Dina or something? Dina. Uh, yeah, she’s like, I, I, and I don’t want to tell anybody because like, what, imagine how she’ll react if she finds out and stuff. Like, she did—when she’s just like freaking out because this—she’s finally able to get this secret off of her chest, it’s one of the things that comes up, is that she’s friends with his daughter.
Keith: Um, do we have final thoughts about this ep?
Sylvi: I think it’s a great ep. I love this ending scene. I—it—like, I mean, regardless of like, uh, like how you feel about Tony’s decision here and everything, I think just the visual of him saying, I didn’t hurt nobody, while super fucked up, uh, and Carmela taking care of him. Well, taking care of him in that she puts a pillow under his head. But like, the whole thing with Meadow seeing it, it’s, it’s so well staged and well put together. It’s a really beautiful scene.
Keith: Uh, we didn’t talk much about the pie in the face scene.
Art: Oh yeah, that’s a really beautiful scene. I mean, obviously it’s not—um, I’m against violence against women. Yeah. Um, but the—you, you had to see afterwards, like, Junior’s like, upset.
Sylvi: Yeah. He’s like fighting back tears.
Art:  Great acting from Dominic Chianese here in the whole episode, but that scene in particular.
Sylvi: That scene in particular also feels very like them letting their, like, old-school cinema—uh, maybe it’s specifically just the shots of him outside that makes me think of this—their, like, love of, like, old-school cinema kind of coming through with some of the framing and stuff.
Dre: Oh, for sure. I mean, I feel like that’s how, like, Junior sees himself in all this, right? Is that he is a—he’s a tragic hero. Yeah, he was forced to do something terrible.
Sylvi: He’s in—he’s in—
Art: Hit a woman with a pie.
Keith: And yet, yeah, it is tragic. It’s really sad. It’s very intense. You know, he’s furious because from his perspective she’s betrayed him. Also, he’s losing someone that we have to believe that he cares about. She’s upset because he seems like he’s gonna beat the shit out of her and then pies her in the face. But you have to admit that someone standing there weeping with pie in their face is a really funny visual.
Art: Yeah, I mean, look at this very violent pie-ing.
Sylvi: There’s like a piece of pie crust that stays on her chin that like, perfectly gives her like, a pie beak. Um, I’m very sorry, Bobbi, that this happened to you, but that, that was kind of funny to me. Yeah. 
Dre: I’m also noticing the like—.
Art: I wonder how many times they had to shoot it.
Dre: I’m noticing the, the, the like pie splatter on the, on the filing cabinet behind her, like a fucking like bloodstain from an actual shooting. Yeah, it’s so good. Oh man
Sylvi: Oh wow, I had never noticed that before, Dre.
Dre: Me neither, me neither, until Keith’s screenshot.
Keith: You’re gonna get pie splatter trajectory in here to do their fake science. Wow, where’d the pie come from? What angle?
Sylvi: It’s interesting.
Keith: This is what Dexter should have been about.
Sylvi: Yeah, Dexter should have been about cunnilingus.
Keith: Um, pie splatter.
Sylvi: Pie splatter. Yeah. Anyway, um, that’s, that’s it for Boca. Before we jump into our next episode, could we just take a quick 5, uh, so I can refill my water and then, yeah, get back to things? Okay, cool. Well, this isn’t gonna mean anything to the audience. You’re just gonna—we’re just gonna put a cut here.
Keith: No, I’m not. I’m gonna leave it in.
Art: 5 minutes of dead air.
Sylvi: Yep. I’ll be right back.
Keith: Let me get my credit cards. I’ll start reading them out. 
[musical sting]
Episode 10 [02:03:35]
Keith: Art, I have a question for you. Yeah. You said that this episode took over your mind for the past week. Can you elaborate?
Art: Oh, it just, it’s so, I just thought it was so much more—the like, Christopher Adriana stuff, I just was so much more into than the Boca stuff. Like, getting an Adriana episode, ooh la la.
Sylvi: Yeah. There’s a lot more of her here and it’s really nice.
Art: We’ll get into it when we get into it. But yeah, it’s a weird’un.
Keith: I really like that they make Adriana—it’s not like she didn’t make sense as Chris’s girlfriend until now, but they really—there’s a really interesting thread through Christopher loving movies, so he wants to be a screenwriter, and Adriana listening to the radio, she—so she wants to be a music manager.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: That’s so funny. And I mean, Chris literally says that. He’s like, yeah, you’d be great, you listen to the radio all the time.
Sylvi: Yeah, they make a lot more sense as a couple now.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: I don’t want to like, jump all the way to the end. But like they have this big fight at the end, like, you don’t believe in me. You don’t think I could be good at this. You don’t think I could know if this band was good. And she’s right about everything except that the band is fucking trash.
Sylvi: Yeah. 
Dre: Or is it? 
Sylvi: No, it is.
Art: Yes!
Dre: But you get the thing at the end where Hesh hears the song and it’s like—
Sylvi: It’s a different band.
Dre: Oh, that’s not them? Fuck me then.
Sylvi: Yeah. That’s, uh, Nobody Loves Me But You by Dory Hartley. 
Dre: Oh, okay.
Keith: It does sound suspiciously like Visiting Days, uh, except that the song was kind of good.
Sylvi: Okay.
Dre: Yeah, no fair. Yeah.
Keith: Um, uh, you know, I do think that you could make a case that, that the band didn’t sound much better or much worse than, you know, garbage alt music that was on the radio in the late ‘90s.
Sylvi: Uh-huh. And that, um, those songs were hits.
Art: It is worse. 
Dre: It’s much worse.
Keith: It’s worse, but it’s for teens.
Sylvi: Yeah, it’s playing in the space of that. Like, there’s, there’s, um, a part in one of the songs that is basically he’s doing the beginning of, uh, Everybody Hurts, uh, like vocally. And then like, like it is, it is an amalgamation of a lot of stuff. They, they name-drop, uh, Dashboard Confessional? No. [Keith: Matchbox Twenty.] It’s, um, Matchbox Twenty. Sorry. Oh yeah.
Dre: I was going to say that’s a little early for Dashboard Confessional.
Sylvi: That’s why when I said it, I was like, that’s wrong. Um, but can we—is this where I get to talk about what the, the guys who, who, uh, worked on this worked on out—like, because the—so Greg Wattenberg and, uh, Nick Fowler are the two guys playing Vito and Richie. Um, I think, I think Nick Fowler is the one who plays Richie, and then Greg Wattenberg doesn’t really have a speaking role in this. But they also wrote all the music for—they wrote both the Defiler song and they wrote the Visiting Day song.
Keith: That’s interesting.
Sylvi: And Greg Wattenberg in particular is a record producer. Like, he worked with like, the Goo Goo Dolls. I’m gonna actually—I’ll read out some of the bands he’s worked with. So Five for Fighting, Eve 6, The Goo Goo Dolls, Rascal Flatts, Gavin McGraw.
Keith: Okay, so it’s a lot of bands that are a better version of what they were doing.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, Rob Thomas, uh, did a Christmas album with Rob Thomas in 2021. But I do need to—it makes sense that he was so good, uh, at writing dogshit music because he also co-produced Hey Soul Sister by Train. Wow. Yeah, that’s really funny. That’s really—that’s one of the—like, it’s crazy that he produced music that’s worse than these songs. Um, and, but, and it went platinum, but here we are.
Keith: Not Drops of Jupiter though.
Sylvi: No, uh, not that I can see. Co-produced, co-produced Hey Soul Sister, which went—sorry, not platinum, went diamond, which is 10 times platinum.
Keith: I mean, this is what I’m saying, like, this music was ass, but like, the ass music that sounds like this music were hits. So that’s why I was like, are they bad? I don’t know, just because I don’t like them.
Sylvi: They didn’t have any choruses. They didn’t have any choruses. That’s the problem.
Keith: That’s what it was.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, I mean, they are, they are, they are very bad is the thing. But like, yeah, like you said, a lot of, a lot of popular music’s pretty bad. [musical sting] Well, maybe I’m—maybe I should reconsider what I’m saying. Maybe I’ve said I’ve been a little too hasty.
Keith: Uh, that—i mean, that song was so much worse than the one that they did at the bar too.
Sylvi: I, I don’t know.
Dre: I mean, their original work is the best one, right?
Sylvi: Which one? The Defiler, when the line, get out of my way and don’t be so gay. It’s so funny.
Keith: I couldn’t hear what they said when they said gay. It’s get out of my way and don’t be so gay? That’s really funny.
Sylvi: Yes. Mm-hmm. Um, there is a lot of really, like, Richie as a character is so funny on paper.
Keith: Okay. Can I say? I just wanna jump in.
Sylvi: The more they paint him in—yeah, go ahead.
Keith: The funniest sentence that has been in this show comes from Adriana about Richie.
Sylvi: I know exactly what it is.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvi: And do you wanna—do you wanna just say it so people know?
Keith: I’m just going to say it. Richie had third-degree burns from trying to grill that trout with a downed power line. At the same time, being electrocuted turned his life around.
Sylvi: It’s the funniest fucking line in the show.
Keith: That’s the funniest line so far in the show. It’s not even close.
Sylvi: Her delivery on it’s so good too, because she really feels for this guy. She says it so matter-of-factly. 
Dre: Yeah, she believes it.
Keith: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the, the, the emotional stake for Christopher in this is that, like, he doesn’t want Adriana to get, like, into something that she can’t do, and she doesn’t want her to get, like, stuck with this shitty band because Massive Genius is, like, interested in her. But the, the real thing is that like, she obviously loves this guy that she used to date still, even if not romantically. Like, she feels for him.
Sylvi: They grew up together. 
Keith: They grew up together. She’s known him since he was 3. Yeah, and it’s like, that’s why you can’t tell that this sucks.
Sylvi: Yeah, you’re too close to it.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah, it’s really—i—we have just immediately blown up just going in order, but it’s fine because I had to get it off my chest about the Hey Soul Sister thing. [Keith: It’s fine.] That’s crazy.
Keith: You know, I think this episode lends itself to a more scattershot discussion because of its— [Sylvi: Sure.] It’s—it has such a—it’s so much less dense in terms of there’s fewer scenes, the scenes are longer, there’s less going on.
Art: There’s almost no meta plot in this episode.
Sylvi: No, it’s weird because this episode kind of does more to just like, set up things. Like, the meta plot is, is, is very little. It’s mostly just this big score that they get. And then Paulie—
Keith: Paulie whacks—is he a crack dealer? Is that what he is?
Sylvi: He’s a drug dealer. Yeah. Yeah, they’re—what’s the line from Pussy? Crackheads and their small bills. Because they talk about how they can’t even fit all the money in the box that they brought. Yeah. Yeah.
Keith: And it’s a huge box. They’ve got a huge fucking box.
Sylvi: It’s a, it’s a fake fridge.
Keith: It’s a fake fridge. Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. They’re—so to, to lay it out, they’re pretending to move a fridge into an apartment here, and then they, they see this guy coming in, pull a gun on him, and go into his apartment and find, find his stash of money. Uh, once in a lifetime score. And then the, the big meta plot stuff related to this is, uh, one, Tony wanting to, to find a way to make a—have a, like, a legit income stream.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: And then Carmela—Carmela’s like investment stuff. I don’t think it’s, it’s a problem to mention that like her trying to be more financially independent is going to be more meta plot stuff as well.
Keith: Her—sorry, the second episode in a row with a really funny cardboard box, by the way. Did anybody notice what it says on the side of the refrigerator?
Sylvi: No, man.
Keith: It’s funny in a very similar way to the last box. It says refrigerator, 22.6 giant cubic feet. [laughter] Again, they’ve qualified the size of the feet in the same way that they were large inches. These are giant cubic feet.
Sylvi: Shout out to the props department. What the fuck?
Keith: Yeah, I mean, really funny, really funny to me. Uh, also there’s a great—let me see if I can get it. There’s a great shot of the dealer walking past. Oh fuck, I just lost it. Hold on. Hold on. Oh, I can get it. I can get it back. Uh, okay. It’s not the cleanest shot in the world, but, uh, they’re pretending to deliver a fridge. Uh, the dealer walks past them in the hall and all three of the gangsters peek out around the side.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: It’s so funny. Let me share this picture. Uh, I love this. I love them.
Sylvi: It’s a very—
Keith: It’s a caper. They’re doing a caper.
Sylvi: Yes, yes, that’s the word I was looking for.
Keith: They poke out like a fucking, uh, meerkat from behind this refrigerator box. It’s really good.
Sylvi: Oh, this is, this is how Chris gets the nickname Big Meerkat.
Keith: Big Meerkat. Um, 22 giant feet. Giant cubic feet of meerkat.
Sylvi: Whoa. That’s a big meerkat. That’s a big meerkat. That’s a huge meerkat. That’s terrifying. Wowee.
Keith: Put that shit in Palworld.
Sylvi: So I can shoot it with a gun.
Keith: You can. In Palworld, you can.
Sylvi: I know. I know. Yeah. Um, yeah. So they, they, they’re, they’re like celebrating at, uh, like a hotel with all their girlfriends. And Chris is like, all right, I’m going to go. I’m going to go take out my—take out Adriana. I’m going to—yeah, you got—you guys have fun with your extramarital affairs. I’m going to go hang out with my, my hot girlfriend. I’m going to take her to Le Cirque and Rent, which—him talking about Rent. It’s so funny. It’s like, what, so they turned his heat off? Chris.
Keith: Look, you know, I haven’t seen Rent, but I’ve long suspected that Rent sucks ass, so. I’m, I’m with Chris on this.
Sylvi: I also haven’t seen Rent, but I know enough about what it’s about that I imagine there’s some other shit going on in whatever scenes, 
Keith: Oh, there is, but I think it still probably sucks ass.
Art: I’ve seen Rent. It’s basically fine, but—
Dre: Yeah, it’s fine. We’ll see. It’s not going to change your mind about musicals if you, you know—
Keith: I like musicals. 
Sylvi: Oh, wow.
Dre: Um, well, then you’ll hate it.
Keith: Okay. Uh, I, here’s what I know though. I hate the songs that are in Rent. I know those songs. 
Sylvi: That’s kind of my thing.
Dre: Sure.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, like I’ve heard a couple of those songs and they seem bad to me. Uh, to me, and I know what I’m talking about, so I’m right. To me, they seem bad to me and I’m right. Cuban cigars.
Sylvi: Cuban cigars. Yeah. He gives, uh, gives Dr. Cusamano some Cuban cigars as a thank you for, for setting him up with Dr. Melfi. Um, it’s been—and that this kind of is what, uh, starts the sort of like, burgeoning friendship storyline in this episode.
Keith: Yeah, burgeoning and then rapidly unburgeoning.
Sylvi: Yeah, I mean, like, like, it’s pretty clear from the moment that like Tony isn’t—like, he’s talking about Tony without Tony in the room, that this is a novelty to Cusamano, right? Like…?
Keith: Yeah, I wasn’t sure ‘cause he doesn’t really start it. They ask about his no-neck neighbor.
Sylvi: Yeah, that’s true, but then he is so happy to slip into his like, fake mobster voice that—he’s so happy to code switch. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, no, yeah, he’s so ready to be like, yeah, safest neighborhood in, in town. And, uh, the only difference between, uh, the, the corporate world and the, the mob world is fucking whacking somebody.
Keith: His wife calls him out for like—he hangs out with Tony Soprano and then he starts swearing more.
Sylvi and Keith: It’s fucking this and fucking that.
Keith: Yeah. Um, I mean, great point, I think, about corporations, but I don’t, I don’t, I don’t trust the messenger.
Sylvi: No? [Keith: The doctor.] You don’t, you don’t trust this guy? Yeah. It’s really funny that he starts calling him Coos.
Art: Although it doesn’t get really funny until toward the end when he doesn’t like it.
Sylvi: Yes. That’s why it’s, it’s—
Keith: He gives a couple looks. The guys that are hanging out with, you know, chuckle at the Coos. Uh, but yeah, he doesn’t say anything until the very end.
Art: That’s not the reaction you want.
Keith: Hey, can you stop calling me that? Because of the ugly—
Dre: Wait, chuckling at the Coos? I thought we were talking about episode 10.
Sylvi: Thank you. Thank you for making it so I didn’t have to be the one.
[rim shot sound]
Keith: Oh, there we go. That’s for later.
Sylvi: Um, well, a little something for later.
Keith: I’ve never had a Cuban cigar because they’re hard to get. I guess they weren’t for a couple years, but they’re hard to get again.
Art: Um, they’re very easy to get in Canada.
Sylvi: I bet. Yeah.
Dre: Really?
Art: I mean, we don’t have an embargo there. Oh yeah. 
Sylvi: We don’t have the same relationship y’all do. 
Dre: Jesus Christ, yeah. Oh, you’re not a nightmare country. 
No, they are not. I did not say that. I did not say that. I pointedly did not say that. Canada is a nightmare country. It’s a different shade of nightmare though.
Art: And they have Cuban cigars there.
Keith: Do you wanna talk about Christopher getting racistly invited to, or racistly getting himself invited to Massive Genius’s house?
Sylvi: Yeah, he’s at this burger joint and he is mouthing off and saying all sorts of shit, uh, that I’m not repeating.
Art: Um, um, this is really nothing, but I have to say it because they’re talking about burgers the whole time they’re in there and they get outside and it’s very clearly a chicken restaurant. And I might just know this because I like, lived in New York at the time, but like, that’s a, that’s a chicken restaurant.
Keith: There’s a picture of a burger on the wall behind him.
Art: Yeah, when you go outside, it says like Kennedy Chicken on the, on the awning.
Keith: Oh, that’s funny. I didn’t notice that. Yeah, it says, uh, oh, it says fry—yeah, fried chicken. It’s hard to see. They, they, they—the camera moves by it very quickly. Um, everyone in this, this restaurant is getting way—they’re getting madder and madder at Christopher. Because he’s being racist and they’re all black.
Sylvi: Yeah. And we get the line—
Keith: Uh, Kansas Fried Chicken, barbecue ribs, seafood burgers, and ice cream.
Sylvi: Um, this also is when somebody says he’s just acting like that because he’s connected to the Tony Soprano crime family.
Keith: Yeah, the cop that was there.
Art: Yeah, a uniformed police officer who knows everyone who’s connected to the Jersey Mafia.
Keith: I mean, he was just—he just had his name in the paper.
Dre: On the news, bro.
Sylvi: Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, there it is. It’s, it’s, it’s cuz—word’s getting around. Oh my god, that’s Christopher Moltisanti.
Keith: That’s Christopher Moltisanti, loyal soldier of the—known associate.
Sylvi: He’s loyal to his people. I got him. 
Art: I thought it was Brendan Filone. 
Sylvi: Is that Brendan Filone? I thought he was dead.
Art: No, no, that’s his friend, Christopher.
Sylvi: Oh, all these guys look alike to me.
Art: Oh, right.
Keith: Sorry. Okay, uh, so the cool guy at the burger joint was actually a rapper named Massive Genius.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: It was supposed to be Master P, right? That’s—-
Sylvi: I think so. It’s kind of like—it’s—he’s kind of a combination of a few people, honestly. Like, there’s definitely a little bit of like, like the way they talk about his, uh, record label feels very much how people would talk about like, Death Row Records. Um, but very much sort of just like an amalgamation of the like, cultural imaginary of the like, like, top of the gang—the gangster rapper genre.
Keith: He points a Desert Eagle right at him.
Dre: The rapper mogul.
Sylvi: He points a gold-plated Desert Eagle.
Keith: Gold-plated Desert Eagle. Yeah, this guy’s got a Deagle.
Sylvi: Yeah, this is, uh, played—i think I mentioned it earlier—played by Bokeem Woodbine, who I’m a—he’s just like, a character actor who I’m always happy to see. Shout out to that guy, he’s good.
Dre: What else has he done?
Sylvi: Um, so at the time, this is like a kind of an earlier role for him. He had been in like, The X-Files before this, but like I think the modern touchstone a lot of people have these days would be Fargo season 2. He’s very major in that.
Dre: Okay.
Sylvi: Um, and then like—he’s—like I said, he’s just kind of like a working character actor is kind of how I, I think of him. Maybe, maybe someone will correct me on that and be like, he was actually the, the lead in this, this, and this. But, um, you know, he’s been like, I’m just looking at his list of credits here. He was in like, he was in Riddick, he was in the Total Recall remake, he was in, uh, like he’s in like a lot of bad stuff, I guess is what I’m saying. And then also sometimes, sometimes he’s just like, I’m gonna do some like, really good performances for a show that is not that great.
Dre: The life of a character actor.
Sylvi: I’m not talking about Fargo. I’m talking about Fargo. Um, he, you know, he was in the good season of that. Um, he’s in The Rock, but like, as a minor role.
Keith: Um, which season is the good season of Fargo?
Sylvi: 2. I like season 2. The ‘70s one. It’s pretty good.
Keith: I haven’t seen it. I mean, I like the movie.
Sylvi: I have a weird relationship with that show and with Noah Hawley as a, as a guy. 
Keith: That’s fair.
Art: I’ve only seen season 1. I liked it okay.
Sylvi: Yeah, season 1 was fine.
Art: As you can tell by not having seen season 2.
Sylvi: Yeah, you know.
Keith: Um, uh, Christopher gets out of this burger place in kind of a, uh, shame spiral. A still racist shame spiral.
Sylvi: The, like, super insecure about, like, I was like, oh man, we can’t talk about this, but they get to, to talk about it.
Keith: Do you want to hear some of that?
Sylvi: Their crimes? Yeah, actually, if you, if you’ve got it.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Massive: Mr Herman Rabkin. Hesh. I don’t know him personally, but I know his history. In the late ‘50s and ‘60s, he owned F Note Records. 
Chris: I don’t know what it was fucking called, but yeah, Hesh was in the music business. 
Massive: Little situation here. A distant but deceased quasi-cousin on my mother’s side, Little Jimmy Willis, ‘50s legend. 2 seminal hit records was his legacy. Drug tragedy. Such a Fool.
Adriana: Oh, I love that. They played it all the time on Oldies radio.
Massive: I know Herman. He’s just another in a long line of white motherfuckers stealing royalties from the Black men that made them the money in the first place. Jimmy’s mother out in San Bernardino, who I’m content to call my aunt, is owed that money. 
Chris: Hesh is the world’s sweetest guy, but I’ve heard his opinions on giving back pieces of Israel. I can only imagine what he’s gonna say about this shit. 
Massive: Enjoy the food and any other enjoyments.
Waiter: Champagne, sir? Ma’am? 
Chris: Yeah. That guy’s a gangster? I’m a gangster. I’m an OG original gangster, not him, fucking lawn jockey. He’s got the fly Hamptons house, Alec Baldwin comes over. Whitney Houston. What do I got? I sit in a fucking pork store, for Christ’s sake. But the mooleys, they got it going on, and they’re on TV.
Adriana: They don’t take no shit.
Chris: Soprano crew, it’s always secret this, oh man, to that. Fucking gets on my nerves. Junior with his moldy old sweaters, and he’s a fucking boss.
Adriana: You were just feeling so good about yourself. 
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, hey, I’m glad that clip included the part of the thing that I forgot to talk about, which is that the reason that they get invited to this is because this guy has business with Hesh. Yeah. Um, um, for a, a, a, an already existing thread of, uh, Hesh stealing royalties from like, young Black artists.
Sylvi: Yeah, they mentioned it, uh, in the episode where he’s being taxed by Junior. Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Um, and so I, I like that going into this, like, we already know that he’s guilty. [Art: Yeah.] Um, like, you know, if they had just let it be contained to this episode, there’s a chance that it might have been ambiguous whether or not Hesh had done this. Uh, I mean, I think the episode’s pretty clear, but, you know, still, it’s nice to have been like, oh yeah, they’re calling back to this thing that we already know about Hesh, is that you know, he made a bunch of money in the record industry by putting his name on songs as a co-writer that he did not co-write.
Sylvi: That is like how he got the—that’s kind of—it’s kind of implied that’s how he got most of the money that he uses for the loan shark business, right? Or am I just inferring things?
Keith: No, I think that you’re right. He made a bunch of money off of being in the record industry. Also, of course, uh, pro-Palestinian icon Christopher Moltisanti having conversation with Hesh about Israel.
Sylvi: Uh, you know, he’s, he’s very complicated. He’ll go on a racist rant and then also be like, well, you know.
Keith: Uh, that is, that was such a funny, like, part of his, his understanding of the situation is I don’t think he’s gonna give back. This is a guy who doesn’t like to give back stuff. 
Sylvi: No.
Art: Seems true. 
Keith: Seems true. Uh, because he does not want to give this money back. Um, despite having later on a moment where he’s looking at a wall where it seemed to me like maybe he was going to give it back, but it seems like he decided against. 
Art: Yeah, Hesh has like, this like, trip down memory lane where he feels, he seems wistful. He, it looks like he might do it. On another show he might’ve. And then he like calls him up and was like, fuck you.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but we’ll see. I mean, I hope that this plot line comes back because it’s kind of interesting. Um, uh, but yeah, and, uh, I do like how, uh, you know, we had talked about how his—that Christopher’s like, spiral here is about like, they get to be out in the open with, you know, being gangsters, but I’m the gangster. And I like how he still brings it around to the fucking Sopranos and their rules about keeping crimes quiet. Why can’t I brag about my crime?
Sylvi: Yeah. He wants to be one of these guys that the, the shitheads Tony goes golfing with are curious about. Like he wants to be the, the, the sort of like modern folkloric image of a gangster that like, just—I’m sorry, man, you’re not Al Capone. You’re—you were, you were, uh, sweeping a toilet for bugs a couple episodes ago.
Keith: He wants to get angry letters from Melfi’s ex-husband about how he’s hurting the Italian cause.
Sylvi: Yes, yes, yes, yes. I was really confused for—i was like, what? Yeah, no, you’re not wrong.
Keith: Um, the—what is it? What is the thing that he works for? The Italian Defam—the, the Italian Anti-Defamation League or whatever?
Sylvi: Something like that.
Keith: I don’t know. Um, yeah, yeah, get over it, Richard.
Sylvi: Get over it, Richard.
Keith: Uh, do we have anything else about, uh, that scene before we move on?
Art: Uh, not really. Oh, um, my mom, uh, lives in Manhattan and she sometimes goes to a coffee shop that Alec Baldwin is sometimes at. Okay. And sometimes Alec Baldwin is there with his like, billion children. He’ll just like, buy the drinks for everyone in the coffee shop to like, I guess, to apologize [Keith: For shooting someone to death?] for the inconvenice of being around Alec Baldwin. And I want to say it doesn’t seem that glamorous to be kind of near Alec Baldwin.
Sylvi: Yeah, that wouldn’t have been—
Keith: What if you really like 30 Rock?
Art: I think she does, my mom, but okay, didn’t—it didn’t help.
Keith: Fair. That’s fair. Um, I’ve never been near Alec Baldwin. My dad was near Bruce Willis. My dad was, uh, when on, on, uh, his honeymoon with my mom, they went to a hotel that Bruce Willis was also staying at at the time.
Sylvi: Oh, and he survived a train crash that they didn’t.
Keith: Yes. Yeah, yeah. My—so Bruce Willis and my parents both survived a train crash on their way to a hotel and then sat out by the pool together. That’s my—that’s the most—that’s the closest I’ve been to a famous person. My uncle hates Wade Boggs. My uncle knows and hates Wade Boggs. 
Sylvi: Okay. When I was 12, my mom met Pierce Brosnan in an airport, but I was too busy listening to the Panic! at the Disco first album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, to go say hi to James Bond.
Keith: Dre, how—who’s—what’s your connection to the most famous person you have been near, or someone you know has been near?
Dre: Uh, I mean, my dad claims that when he was a kid, he, uh, would like, hang out in the neighborhood with a, with a gang of kids that included Tom Cruise.
Sylvi: Whoa.
Keith: Your dad claims to have hung out with Tom Cruise in a gang?
Dre: Yeah, Tom Cruise is from like—he was born here and he lived here until he was like, high school. Yeah, so the timeline— [Keith: That’s a pretty big one.] I don’t know. My dad also claims that he was present when Tom Cruise peed his pants when they were playing Ghost in the Graveyard or something like that. I don’t know if I believe it, but I want to.
Keith: I actually have a really crazy one. This one’s—this—you’re the—tom Cruise peeing his pants reminded me, uh, my friend Vlad, his parents, uh, lived in Russia for, you know, until Vlad was a kid. Uh, and his father claims to have gone to school with and been on the wrestling team with Vladimir Putin, uh, whose arm he broke in a hazing ritual gone wrong.
Sylvi: That’s why they had to flee the country.
Keith: They were trying to haze Vlad’s father. and instead, by—you have to wrestle the captain of the wrestling team as a newbie, and instead he broke his arm. That’s the—that’s the claim. This is the most outlandish claim that I’ve ever heard that I mean, I guess could technically be true, but sounds like something that someone would make up also.
Dre: I think my personal one is I dated a girl in college who was—her father was a pretty famous MLB player.
Keith: That’s true. That is the—that is closer than your dad knew Tom Cruise. Which I do now believe. That’s true. And I believe that to this day he pees his pants.
Dre: Well, obviously.
Keith: I believe he—i believe that Tom Cruise pees his pants to this day.
Sylvi: That’s so brave of you.
Keith: Uh, Tony’s in a good mood because of all this money. 
Sylvi: Uh, yeah.
Dre: I mean, fair. 
Keith: Yeah, there’s a short scene, uh, you know, they’re, uh, Carmela’s looking at college brochures and he’s basically like, don’t worry about it. Um, you know, it seemed like they didn’t have to fucking worry about it already, frankly. But, um, uh, also Tony’s idea is that this money be legit, that they invest this money and that it, it not be crime money.
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah, make it work for them.
Keith: Right, which I think the crime money works for them too, frankly.
Sylvi: But yeah, you know—
Dre: Can’t, can’t be forever. Gotta have a way out.
Keith: Yeah, I guess it’s definitely, you know, the indictments are on his mind, obviously.
Sylvi: Yeah, I think that that’s the big thing, right, is like worrying about, uh, asset forfeiture and stuff like that. Yeah.
Keith: Um, the next chunk of scenes is like Adriana being like, I would like to manage my ex-boyfriend’s band, Defiler.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And listening to Defiler on Chris’s stereo.
Sylvi: It’s so bad. It’s so—do you have a button for the Defiler song?
Keith: Um, I’m—I’ll drop in Defiler.
Sylvi: Or do you just have Meow?
[“Defiler” by Defiler plays]
Sylvi: Yeah, I’m very sorry to our fans then. Uh, you don’t necessarily need to do that.
Keith: Nope, I’ll drop it in and it—and you can tell us in your 5-star review how much you did or didn’t like the ‘filer. It’s bad.
[“Defiler” by Defiler fades out]
Sylvi: Tell us your favorite Defiler song.
Keith: Defiler is—i mean, the da-na-na-na, meow, like, that’s pretty bad. I think the Defiler song is worse because it’s not funny. At least Meow is funny.
Sylvi: Yeah. No, the Defiler song just sounds like fucking South Park shit, honestly.
Dre: No, it does. Yeah.
Keith: Um, do they do a lot of music on South Park?
Sylvi: I mean, I just think they do sometimes. I think it sounds like something a 12-year-old would laugh at.
Keith: Oh, okay. Gotcha.
Art: The team that brought you the Book of Mormon?
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah. Good point. It’s like asking if Seth MacFarlane ever does musical numbers.
Keith: Was there music in the Book of Mormon?
Sylvi: It’s a musical, Keith.
Art: It’s a musical.
Keith: I just thought it was a play. I didn’t know it was a musical. Um, I decided very young that I don’t like them and I stopped paying attention. This has already come up on Media Club Plus. So smart.
Sylvi: Yeah, it has.
Keith: Um, uh, hey, I mean, this is also the reason why I didn’t watch 8 Mile, because all the 8-year-olds I knew loved South Park and Eminem, and I didn’t like them or anything that they liked. So I, I bowed out early.
Art: Look, Eminem is way better than South Park.
Keith: I’m sure that that’s true, but that’s only an expression of how bad I think South Park is.
Sylvi: Yeah, 0.1 is also bigger than 0.
Keith: Um, we get another view of Hesh’s horse farm. Horse farm?
Sylvi: Uh, ranch? I don’t know.
Keith: Ranch. Ranch is what you call a horse farm.
Sylvi: Stable is actually the word I was trying to think of.
Keith: Yeah, but I think, I think ranch is actually even more correct for what he has here. He has a ranch and he even has a ranch-style home.
Sylvi: True.
Keith: Um, I think that’s a ranch-style home. Maybe I don’t know as much about homes as I think I do.
Sylvi: I’ll take your word for it. I don’t know shit about, um, about architecture in any way, shape, or form.
Art: I’ve only just heard ranch used to describe a single-level home.
Keith: You’re right. Yeah, you’re right.
Sylvi: This is the sit-down you’re talking about though, when we see the—yeah, this is the sit-down. Yeah, yeah, it does not go well.
Keith: It does not go well. Part of Christopher’s plan is that he’s gonna organize a sit-down with Hesh, and in exchange for this, he’s going to get Massive Genius’s ear for Adriana’s new music management business. And that part of it does go well.
Sylvi: Yeah, it does. With asterisks, you know. With a lot of asterisks. Yeah.
Keith: Uh, um, anyone have anything specific about this sit-down?
Art: Uh, um, he breaks the Fredo rule.
Keith: Okay. And what is that? 
Art: He takes sides against the family.
Sylvi: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Keith: Oh, sure. Okay. I’ve heard those words, but I didn’t know what it is. Um, Massive Genius would know what it is though, because he’s a fan of all three Sop—all three Godfather movies.
Sylvi: And he thought, yeah, he thought 3 was misunderstood.
Keith: I don’t doubt it. I bet 3 is misunderstood.
Sylvi: I just think it’s a really funny detail how constantly guest stars have to be like, here’s what I thought about the entire Godfather trilogy.
Keith: That should be part of the contract, is you should have to, you should have to say on screen what you think of each of those movies.
Art: Mm-hmm. And it’s not your character, it’s you, the actor.
Keith: Uh, when you and Little Jimmy were writing all his hits, did you write the music and him the lyrics or vice versa? That’s what this guy wants to know. Um, he’s fucking with him. He knows that this guy didn’t do shit.
Sylvi: It’s, it’s good.
Dre: Yeah, it’s good.
Keith: Hesh says, we had our own process, which is really funny.
Sylvi: Yeah, he tries to do the, uh, the, um, front offices win championships argument, uh, about this. And it’s like, not—I’m sorry, man, does not work like that. Um, Um, yeah, it, it sucks. It sucks.
Dre: It does.
Sylvi: Yeah, he says some real out-of-pocket shit here.
Keith: Yeah, they make Hesh say the N-word in this one.
Sylvi: Yeah. Uh, and then he talks, he says some like, I mean, I, I, he just says some shit that I’m not even comfortable trying to like, summarize, if I’m being real.
Keith: Yeah. No. Uh, okay. I mean, I have the, I have the quote.
Sylvi: If you have the clip, then yeah.
Keith: I decided I didn’t want to actually play the clip, but I have the words that he said.
Sylvi: Okay.
Keith: He says, you’re talking to the wrong white man, my friend. My people, uh, were the white man’s N-word when yours were still painting faces and chasing zebras. I mean, this is like outrageous racism. I mean, just the most racist thing that’s happened in the show yet, for sure.
Art: Buckle up, everyone.
Keith: Oh, Jesus Christ.
Sylvi: Genuinely, yeah, buckle the fuck up. This is not—this theme is not going away. Yeah.
Keith: Um, and it’s just like, I mean, this is a guy who really could just give the $400,000 being asked of him to this woman and probably not really feel it. Like…
Sylvi: Yeah, that’s kind of the implication.
Keith: Uh, you know, this is a guy who was just annoyed to have to give away half a million dollars recently. Like, he barred—he bartered down to $250,000 because he could, not because he had to. Yeah, he lives in a giant penthouse mansion in New York.
Sylvi: Yeah, like, I mean, literally all of these guys have—like, I think the only person you could say doesn’t have a fucking lot of money in the—on the, the mob side of this, like, sit-down is Chris.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Like, everyone else is at the very least pretty comfortable, but like, in my—they’re all—in my head, they’re all kind of like, if not up there with, with Tony’s net worth, around there. And also, they just had a huge score.
Keith: Yeah, you know, when they showed, um, the spring cleaning? They showed Big Pussy burning a bunch of documents in his backyard. It was kind of a bare backyard. He didn’t have a very nice grill. The house didn’t look very big. You know, my thought when I saw that was, wow, Tony Soprano has so much more money than his, like, number 2 guy, basically.
Art: Pussy is not his number 2 guy, Silvio’s his number 2 guy.
Keith: Okay. Number 3 guy?
Art: I think—i mean, I think it’s pretty clearly Silvio and then Paulie and then—
Keith: Paulie called himself half a wise guy, so I thought maybe, I thought maybe based off of that comment in the last episode that he was lower down than I thought.
Art: Yeah, I’m not sure where I’m not sure what—why they said that and what it meant.
Keith: Yeah. Does it mean he’s not a made guy? But he has to be.
Sylvi: He’s definitely a made guy. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t really have any good answers for you.
Art: Yeah, these hierarchies are not clear yet. And yeah, and I think they’re sort of making choices and they’re sort of gonna backfill it later, if you know what I mean.
Keith: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: That’s, that’s a, that’s TV writing.
Art: Yeah. They didn’t set out and make like a big chart and how much money everyone has and so on and so forth. They just like, yeah, are making it up as they go. Um, but Tony does have a nicer house than everyone else.
Keith: Um, for, yeah, like by a pretty wide margin. At least from what I’ve seen.
Art: And some of that is they picked Tony’s house and then they decided he wasn’t the boss.
Keith: I really like Massive Genius. He’s—he is doing a great—what was his name? Bokeem Woodbine? Yeah, he’s really good in this.
Sylvi: He’s a great actor. I like—yeah. Like I said, some of the—not always the greatest filmography, but that, that character, I’m like, I’m pretty good.
Keith: Like, literally—yeah, you know. Yeah. Hey, Nils is back.
Sylvi: Is he? 
Keith: Yeah, that’s Nils. 
Sylvi: Oh my God, I did not realize that was Nils.
Dre: I like, I was like, oh, who is this person she’s with? Yeah, is she dating somebody new?
Keith: That’s Nils from Shut the Fuck Up, Nils, or whatever.
Dre: That’s the guy at the restaurant who they couldn’t get seated.
Keith: Yes, this was the guy who was like bragging about being mean to the waitress or the hostess. Um, even though he kind of wasn’t even—he was just impatient. Um, who then gets big-timed by Tony Soprano. Um, but yeah, they’re having like, a dinner party at the Cusamano’s. Um, and, uh, this is where, where they describe Tony Soprano as his no-neck neighbor, which is a really funny way of talking about a guy they all know.
Dre:  It’s also really crazy to me that Dr. Cusamano, like, knows—like, he referred Tony to Melfi, and then he’s just like, talking about him in front of her.
Keith: He was, he was being coy.
Dre: I know, but, but still, it just—yeah, I don’t know. That whole thing was just like, really weird.
Art: Not coy enough.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, that was like—to me, that was like for TV.
Dre: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Keith: Um, but yeah, I don’t know. Maybe he’s just a really unprofessional doctor.
Art: Coos?
Keith: The Coos. Yeah. Unfortunately, Coos may be a bad doctor.
Dre: Oh man.
Keith: It doesn’t seem to have caused that many problems yet.
Dre: Yeah. Not yet.
Keith: Not yet. Uh, I hope that box of sand comes back up.
Dre: Me too. 
Sylvi: It’s such a funny bit.
Keith: Tony’s plot in this episode is mostly involved with an argument that the show is making that Tony Soprano doesn’t see himself as white in the way that this—these fucking cookout guys are white.
Sylvi: Yeah, they’re more Americanized, uh, is kind of the—
Keith: Yeah, well, and you know, Cusamano’s Italian, obviously, but I don’t know these guys’ names. He did—this guy doesn’t look Italian with the guy with the checkered suit that is like doing the sausage is phallic but tits aren’t. You know that guy?
Sylvi: You know, sausage is a little phallic, but tits on the other hand. Yeah, he sounds that exactly like that.
Keith: I’ve got that clip. Um, uh, yeah, they cut, they cut from being like, these guys are bores, are boring. To the—probably the most—i would hate to be at this cookout. I mean, it seems interminable. These people suck.
Art: Yeah. Uh, we don’t play the stock market, we win.
Keith: It’s like, it’s so bad.
Dre: Question, question. Yeah, because we—at the end we see Carmi like reading the newspaper and it says something about the stock.
Keith: Stock split. Yeah.
Dre: Is that good or bad?
Keith: Technically neither.
Sylvi: That’s supposed to be my question.
Dre: Okay.
Keith: Um, it’s an indication that they think that good things are going to happen.
Sylvi: Yeah, he reacts in a way that makes me think it’s good.
Dre: Like, is a stock split where they like, split up like a stock so it’s like, you know, one share turns into three because we need to be able to sell more shares? [Keith: Yes.] Okay, got it. Yeah. Okay. 
Keith: Um, yeah, it’s like It drives down the price of a single share, but if you already have shares, then your own shares will multiply. So it’s technically neutral for you, but it’s something that you would do if you think a lot of people are going to want to buy your stock, I guess.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: Yeah. [crosstalk] And in the future all your gains are tripled.
Dre: [crosstalk] 1 times 3 is smaller than 3 times 3.
Keith: Sorry, what’s that, Art?
Art: In the future, all your gains are tripled, right? If the stock goes up—
Sylvi: Right.
Keith: So I mean, that’s great news.
Sylvi: So she is winning the stock market.
Keith: She is winning the stock market.
Dre: Good.
Keith: But you know, you—the numbers just don’t go up forever.
Dre: What?
Keith: Unfortunately so.
Art: That’s not how it felt in 1999.
Keith: Yeah, well, what year does this show stop in?
Art: Uh, like 2008 or something? 2007?
Sylvi: It’s actually right—it’s 2007. So—
Keith: Oh my God. Oh my God.
Sylvi: Really funny.
Keith: Um, there’s a really funny, uh, because my understanding of the show 24, based on the only thing I know about 24, which is the Jon Boyce episode of Pretty Good about 24, which is one of my favorite half hours of video on all of YouTube. Uh, highly recommend that video. Uh, in that show, 9/11 never happens. It’d be a very funny show where they did the same thing, but for the crash and recession in 2000—
Sylvi: Oh my God.
Keith: Was it 2000? It wasn’t. It was earlier than 2008, right?
Sylvi: Uh, I think they started it when the shit hit the fan.
Art: Yeah. The financial crisis is in early 2008. Yeah. It’s sort of what loses the election for John McCain. Also, John McCain was bad.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: John McCain—
Art: But that doesn’t stop someone from being elected president.
Keith: No, no, certainly not.
Dre: Oh, certainly doesn’t.
Sylvi: It almost—oh, is that true?
Keith: It almost gained him the presidency.
Art: Certain presidents are bad. I am very smart.
[laughter]
Keith: Anyway, it’d be really funny if a show did that but with that crash instead of, um, 9/11. A show where the economy never crashed, so everybody is just still, still doing fine.
Sylvi: Oh my God.
Dre: Um, the Big Tall is what they’d call it.
Keith: Yeah, the Big Tall. Uh, any thoughts about seeing, um, Visiting Days live here where they get booed off the stage by a bunch of, uh, I guess guys who are expecting a better band.
Sylvi: I’m a—i got a mullet and I would also boo them. So Chris would not enjoy me here. This guy, these guys suck. I mean, don’t actually, don’t, don’t, if you’re at a, if you’re at a live local show and you’re not really into it, don’t boo. That’s weird. But like, still, I think this guy’s not wrong. Uh, I, I think it’s really funny, uh, when Adriana’s like, these guys put Matchbox Twenty to shame. Um, it’s just, just, she’s really good in this episode. I—it’s nice to have her be characterized a bit more and I’ll be like, oh yeah, her and Chris are, are perfect for each other in some ways.
Keith: Yeah, it turns out, I mean, she seems smart compared to him for a little while, but they are dumb in the same way.
Sylvi: Yeah, she’s just kind of like got a slightly, uh, better head on her shoulders. Yeah, with some things.
Keith: With some things, not with this.
Sylvi: With some things.
Keith: Not with Richie. At least not since he got electrocuted while trying to grill that trout.
Art: Um—
Sylvi: I do think it—oh, go ahead.
Art: I’m sorry to, like, allude to the future, but it is bothering me so much that this episode has a character named Richie, and the last episode had a character named Bobbi, which are both names that reoccur. And it’s driving me fucking crazy. And it’s not their fault. And people can have—more than one person can have the same name. But, oh, there’s another—
Keith: There’s a more prominent Richie and a more prominent Bobbi?
Sylvi: Yes.
Keith: Okay. Um, I’ll keep my ears peeled.
Sylvi: This is kind of like a—not specific to this scene, but specific to this episode. Um, that, uh, I, I think it’s fun that Adriana kind of has the same, I want to do something more with myself, that Chris has. I guess you kind of mentioned it with the movies thing. Um, but it could—because it, one, it like, you know, it’s always just good to have parallels between characters, but then it puts Chris in the kind of position that Tony’s in where he has to be the dream crusher. Um, you know, it’s just—i like, I like, I like when, when that sort of thing happens in a show like this.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: I like when the dreams are crushed.
Sylvi: I love when the dreams are crushed. Yeah, that’s exactly what I love.
Keith: What am I watching TV to see dreams come true? Fuck off.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Crush ‘em.
Sylvi: Put ‘em in their place.
Dre: Well, you gotta crush their dreams so they can have an arc.
Keith: Yeah. You know?
Sylvi: God.
Keith: Why do we think Dr. Melfi goes and spies on Tony Soprano’s house by standing on something and looking out the bathroom window?
Sylvi: I think she’s standing on the toilet. I think it is generally just like, genuinely just curiosity, right? It’s like, um, right here. Might as well.
Keith: She could just drive past it and look at it from the street.
Sylvi: Now, I’m not disagreeing.
Keith: Mm-hmm. Um, it’s—is it just for the gag that they do at the end of the episode?
Sylvi: I think it kind of is, and I think it’s also to be—to show that the, like, some—the boundaries are not eroding just from Tony’s side of things.
Art: Yeah, I also think it’s to show that the Cusamanos have a separate bidet in their bathroom, like [Sylvi: Oh yeah, that’s important too.] Um, to show just what kind of weird ‘90s rich people these are.
Keith: She stands on the bidet, not the toilet.
Art: She stands on the bidet. She walks past the toilet and stands on the bidet.
Keith: Nothing wrong with a bidet.
Sylvi: No, but shout out to the bidet.
Art: The best moment of my life was when I got a bidet toilet seat, but yeah, and then—I’m sorry, birth of my child, then bidet toilet seat. [Sylvi laughter] Birth of my child, then getting married. Getting a bidet toilet seat.
Dre: What about when we started the podcast, Art?
Art: All Friends at the Table is worse than having a clean butt.
Dre: You know what? Fair. Fair.
Art: A consistently clean butt whenever I want. My God.
Sylvi: We’re really pushing for that bidet sponsorship.
Art: There’s a fucking—
Dre: You know what? Yeah.
Keith: Friends at the Table, brought to you by the Bidet Consortium.
Sylvi: Well, there’s like that one company that—
Dre: Tushy.
Sylvi: Tushy Company.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: That, like, sponsored a bunch of podcast ads forever ago.
Keith: Uh, can I play a button?
Sylvi: And then mattresses took their place.
Keith: Can I press a button for this dinner?
Sylvi: Yeah, please. Please get us back on the rails. Thank you.
[audio from The Sopranos plays]
Barb: So, how’s your neighbor? The one with no neck? 
Jean: The Sopranos? Well, there’s a new car in the driveway every other week, but besides that—
Cusamano: He gave me a gift of some excellent Cuban cigars.
Barb: And you accepted them?
Cusamano: Mm-hmm.
Randy: See? Eroding the neighborhood values.
Cusamano: He was thanking me for referring him to a physician, which he is very happy with.
Melfi: Really?
Nils: What does that do to property values, having a gangster living next door?
Cusamano: Are you kidding? Safest block in the neighbourhood. And being a gangster, what does it mean anyway?
Randy: Yeah, that’s true. Some of the shit I see in the boardroom, I don’t know if I’d make a distinction. 
Barb: Oh, will you please? It’s not the same thing.
Cusamano: Buggin’? Bribes? I don’t know. Sometimes I think the only thing separating American business from the mobs is fucking whacking somebody.
Jean: Listen to you.
Cusamano: What?
Jean: Whacking. He hangs around with Tony Soprano for 15 minutes, and it’s fucking this and fucking that. 
Barb: We were over there for that fundraiser. I didn’t see any guns anywhere. 
Jean: Oh, but that bar with the Goomah Murano glass?
Melfi: I like Murano glass.
[audio ends]
Keith: Yeah, uh, everyone’s kind of quiet when she says that.
Art: Listen to you, whackin’! Sorry.
Keith: Um, that is funny. I mean, whack is the official term, I believe. He’s being accurate.
Sylvi: Yeah, he’s not wrong.
Dre: Uh, it’s their word. He can’t use it.
Keith: This is—i like that this is a, um, a world that, uh, Carmela has been trying to break into since the first couple episodes where she’s doing the fundraiser stuff.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: I’m glad that that came back up. That’s great. Um, I love to see that stuff. Um, and it’s funny that, like, Melfi kind of puts herself out of this world by kind of feeling defensive of Tony and also of, you know, their tacky Murano glass. I mean, I don’t know if it’s tacky. I don’t know what glass she’s talking about, but I get the implication that, you know, Carmela—
Art: Hold on, I’m looking it up.
Keith: Murano glass is like a multicolored glass from Murano, which is in Italy. It’s like a kind of glass. It doesn’t have— [Dre: This is nice enough.] It has—yeah, I think I think that it was very big in the ‘90s is the thing. I think it became a, like, kind of kitschy thing to have, like—
Dre: Murano glass and chicken wallpaper in the kitchen.
Keith: It’s—for her, it’s cultural. She’s got to defend her people.
Art: But they’re all Italian.
Keith: Uh, I don’t—i think only Cusamano is Italian. I think the rest of them are not Italian. They’re white.
Sylvi: Hmm, he’s white.
Keith: We don’t know their names, so maybe they are Italian, but even less Italian than Cusamano.
Sylvi: Yeah, we—yeah, you’re right, we don’t really get—
Keith: Cusamano feels like he has a foot in the Italian thing. Like, he doesn’t ask the stupid questions as much. He does—you know, it’s the other guys that are really trying to get info out of Tony about being a gangster. Like, you can kind of see on Coos’s face that he knows that they shouldn’t really be asking this stuff. They don’t even have enough sense to not ask, um, in the same way that Tony doesn’t have enough sense to not fish for insider trading tips.
Sylvi: I—you know what though? I appreciate his hustle.
Keith: I agree!
Dre: That’s what we’re talking about.
Art: Discussing insider trading in front of the criminal. I mean, yeah.
Keith: Yeah. I agree. I agree.
Art: The other criminal, because they’re doing something illegal right there.
Keith: Yes. They’re talking about sheltering money right in front of him.
Art: Yeah. Offshore money and insider trading.
Keith: Yeah. Totally. And Tony’s not an idiot. He picks up on it right away. Because he also wants to get in on some of that legal crime.
Sylvi: Yeah, he’s, he’s, he’s immediately like trying to, trying to get the, the tip. And then I think it’s Cusamano who shuts it down, right? Who’s like, guys, come on. Yeah, we don’t want to talk about this. We want to talk about how the only thing better than sausage is tits.
Keith: And you know, it’s his—
Art: He’s not the one who says—
Sylvi: He’s not the one who says that.
Keith: It’s—no, he starts it. He literally—it is him.
Sylvi: Oh, you’re right.
Keith: It’s him. Yeah, they all get in on it except for Tony, but um, he, he’s the first person to say it. Uh, but it’s their business that he jumps in to protect. But when they’re doing the same thing to Tony, he does not say anything. And that’s why he gets sent a box of sand.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm. Sent a box of sand makes it sound like he mailed it to him instead of the very funny thing he does.
Keith: Do you want to hear? So I actually cut out—this is two clips smashed together. Because I cut out the part where Tony was like, kind of giddy to hear that Melfi was spying on him.
Sylvi: Yes, I really like this.
Keith: Yeah, he has a very pleased little face when he’s like, oh, you saw my house. But I cut around that because there’s the part where he tries to convince her that he’s not white, and then there’s—right after that, the barbecue with the people he considers white. Right? Um, and you know, the show is giving him a point to me. Like, I don’t think he actually has a point, but the show is giving him a point. [Dre: Yeah.] You know, a cultural divide between him and these fucking lame-ass guys.
Sylvi: Yeah.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Tony: Wife thinks I need to meet new people.
Melfi: So?
Tony: Come on, you’re Italian, you understand. Guys like me were brought up to think the Meddigan are fucking bores. The truth is, the average white man is, is no more boring than the millionth conversation over who should have won, Marciano or Ali. 
Melfi: So am I to understand that you don’t consider yourself white?
Tony: I don’t mean white like Caucasian. I mean a white man like our friend Cusamano. Now, he’s Italian, but he’s a Meddigan. He’s what my old man would have called a Wonder Bread wop. You know, he eats his Sunday gravy out of a jar.
Melfi: You seem to want to branch out. What’s stopping you?
Tony: The guys, you know? What they’d think if I started hanging out with the Meddigan.
[cut to a new scene]
Cusamano: Mmm mm mmm, that sausage, huh? Where’d you get it? The little place in Garfield? 
Randy: Honey, where’d we get the sausage? 
Barb: That little place in Garfield.
Keith: Great joke.
Cusamano: The only thing better than a little sausage—well, it’s a pair of tits. 
Jack: I don’t know about that, but it’s a hell of a piece of meat. 
Randy: Sausage is kind of a phallic thing. Whereas tits—
[audio ends]
Keith: Whereas tits, not phallic.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, I—that guy’s voice is so funny to me.
Keith: Yeah. I just—
Art: These guys must be Italian because you, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t say it like that, you know?
Keith: I think he’s just saying it the way that Cusamano said it.
Art: Hmm.
Keith: Yeah. Um, he’s just, cause he sounds like a white guy doing someone else’s impression of a white guy.
Art: That’s not how I would do it, but I guess that’s not what we’re talking about.
Keith: Well, you’re a white guy. He’s just— [Sylvi: What!] Sorry. Hey, I’m sorry to say. Uh, but yeah, these are just, these are just losers to me. These are just like rich losers. Yeah. What if you were a rich loser instead of a cool, awesome guy like Tony Soprano with no problems? 
[Sylvi laughter]
Art: Yep. That’s what this show is about.
Keith: Um, wearing an apron. What a dumbass.
Sylvi: What a piece of shit.
Keith: He’s wearing a golf, a golf-themed apron. [Sylvi: I did not catch that.] Uh, it has greens and golf clubs and it says hole in one and par. Yep, little golf apron he’s got. Yep. Um, Yeah, I just hate these guys.
Sylvi: Yeah, no, I hate them too. You’re 100% right to hate them. They suck.
Keith: Yeah, they suck. Um, uh, we talked about this. This is where Hesh has his trip down memory lane. He’s looking at all these—i—it looks like there’s a, there’s a picture of him with the aunt maybe that, uh, um, Massive Genius was talking about, because when he leaves to sit down, he, he, he makes a point to tell Hesh that this woman called him a nice man.
Sylvi: Yes.
Keith: As a burn, because Hesh knows that he’s actually not a nice man. He’s a bad man.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: But not enough. Not enough to fork over the $400,000. Um, another one of the funniest things that happens is, uh, these 62 takes of, uh, this stupid fucking song.
Sylvi: Oh my God, that scene is so funny.
Keith: That ends with Christopher smashing Richie in the back with a guitar.
Sylvi: The sound guy is so haggard in this scene.
Keith: Yeah, ‘cause he hates this. This is the first clue that I got that this music sucks.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Obviously I could hear that it sucks with my ears, But, you know, TV music, it doesn’t have to be—
Sylvi: The bar is lower.
Keith: It doesn’t have to actually be good for the story to be about that it’s good. You know what I mean?
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 
Art: Yeah, for sure.
Dre: Yeah, yeah.
Keith: So like they could have, you know, even though the song sucked, they could have in fiction had a story about how this was a good song. And it was hard to know where they were going to go with it. Until this scene where the sound guy is like, this fucking shit sucks ass.
Sylvi: This is so bad.
Keith: Yeah, this is so—his complaint is that there’s no choruses. That’s not my complaint. I don’t care if there’s no choruses in a song.
Sylvi: Yeah, but it’s—it is a very easy for an audience to understand criticism of something, I think, is where I land on it.
Keith: I like his pile of 9,000 smoked cigarettes.
Sylvi: I missed that.
Dre: Yeah, they both seemingly went through them, huh?
Keith: There’s an ashtray next to him that is like piled to the ceiling of cigarettes, presumably smoked over the 62-take session. Um, uh, anything else about this scene that—
Art: Richie is like, it wasn’t mic’d right? 
Keith: Yeah, yeah, Richie is like, yeah, the problem was that the original, uh, instrument recordings were no good. I did think that it sounded better in the bar than in the studio.
Sylvi: I mean, yeah, but, uh, I think the, um, everywhere, the music, his vocals are supposed to sound a lot shitter—shittier when it’s just him doing it, like, because you kind of have to focus on it. I think the image of him and the guys in his band on the back backup vocals is really funny too. Um, yeah, I don’t know.
Keith: I don’t know. I think they should win a Grammy.
Sylvi: Well, I have great news.
Keith: They, they did?
Sylvi: Dude, I think that guy did win a Grammy.
Keith: For this?
Sylvi: No, not for this. For some shitter Train song or whatever. I gotta, I gotta get back on his Wikipedia page. Hold up.
Keith: Soul Sister’s a really bad song.
Dre: Such a bad song.
Sylvi: Sorry, he’s only been nominated. Oh, he’s only been nominated. Yeah. So, Hey Soul Sister is a very bad song. It’s one of the worst songs.
Keith: It’s one of the worst songs.
Sylvi: Uh, I think every Train song is one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard.
Keith: You could find—i think you—i maintain that you could find a lot worse songs than Drops of Jupiter.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would agree with that.
Keith: But that’s the only one.
Sylvi: That’s the only one.
Keith: Yeah, that’s the only one. And the Train guy knows and he’s cool with it.
Sylvi: I still hate him.
Keith: You can hate him. It’s fine. I don’t like him either. Yeah, I really hate Train.
Sylvi: They’re very bad.
Keith: They’re very bad. But I do think that it gets lost that Drops of Jupiter is not that bad. Compared to what came after. Oh my God. It’s night—it’s like, it’s so much worse.
Art: My opinions on Train are not as strong as yours. I’m not saying I disagree. I just don’t have the same animosity for—
Sylvi: They were—i, for the, the, when I worked retail, I had to hear a lot of Train on the radio. [Art: Sure.] And so, [Dre: Ooh God, I bet.] Yeah. That just kind of—that made that blood feud forever.
Keith: Um, Just if you read the lyrics to Hey Soul Sister, I know this isn’t fair to do to a song, to just read the lyrics out, but just look at the words of that song, man. That’s like, that’s a bad—that’s a bad way to have a song be.
Sylvi: Yeah, that’s not that. They should, uh, they should try him in The Hague for all that. Um.
Keith: It’s, it’s not a good test. It’s not a fair test for a song, but I’m giving it to Hey Soul Sister anyway, and it fails.
Sylvi: I mean, do you give it any—sorry, welcome to our music review show now. Yeah, you give it any sort of test and it’s gonna fail it. 
Keith: Yes, so you might as well give it a hard test.
Sylvi: Exactly. Um, all right.
Keith: I have like nothing really to say about this long golf scene where they’re grilling him about different, um, uh, his gangster stuff, but it is to me so embarrassing for them, like the—this is like, yeah, I don’t know, sitcom level of secondhand embarrassment. Like watching them ask him about assassinated mobsters and John Gotti and The Godfather.
Dre: This is like Michael Scott questions.
Keith: Yeah, this is Michael—i, I tried to get out of this without saying The Office, but that is what I had in my head.
Sylvi: Uh, So am I misremembering that there is like a, um, I might be, I might be thinking of a different thing because like when, whenever there’s a Black character in the show, there’s a 50/50 chance Livia is going to say something racist to her, uh, to them. But like, remember when she had the—did she do a like, um, like assuming she knew somebody? Or am I thinking of a different show where it’s the like, not all Black people know each other, uh, stereotype that, uh, someone brings up, or like someone assumes they all know each other because they’re being racist. It kind of feels like what they’re trying to do with Tony in this situation, where it’s like, you’re, you’re Italian, you’re an Italian mobster, so you know every Italian mobster.
Keith: This is sort of why I assume they’re not Italian.
Sylvi: Well, yeah, yeah, but my, my point is, like, it’s not the most graceful, um, sort of parallel to be—to, uh, way to do the parallel. But I do think it is like them trying to, to make this stuff more in conversation with what’s going on with the Massive Genius plotline that is so like, fucking racially charged the entire time, obviously. Um, the way they—the way that everybody talks about Massive and, and the, the comments they make about gangster rap and stuff like that.
Keith: IT is—yeah, it does make—it’s an, it’s an interesting plotline to pair with Massive Genius, who has like, a real like, structural and economic complaint about the music industry with an actual guy that they actually work with, um, who actually stole money from a bunch of people, seemingly.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Not even counting the loan sharking. Um, to pair that with Tony Soprano being like, I don’t like these white people, they’re boring, And they asked me stupid questions about being in the mafia.
Sylvi: Like, I think the specific thing is too that he wanted this to work out. Like, there is—it’s kind of—it gets kind of like lost because it’s a really quick throwaway line, but he’s like, it’s—i get bored talking like, about the same old shit with the guys all the time. So like, he is—he is trying to open up, you know? And then instead he just—like he says later, he just ends up feeling like the dancing bear.
Keith: Um, yeah, he doesn’t want to feel like how he made Jimmy Smash feel.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, no, lit—yeah, exactly right.
Keith: Um, and I, and I, I think that’s a really fun observation from, uh, Tony that like, he thought that he would be excited to be hanging out with them, and that it would bring him opportunities that he wouldn’t have otherwise. But then he’s like, they just wanted to laugh at me.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: And I don’t know.
Art: But he sort of seems interested in joining the country club.
Sylvi: Yeah, at first.
Keith: Yeah. ‘Cause I think he wants financial tips. He wants to have new conversations with different kinds of people.
Sylvi: He likes golfing.
Keith: He likes golfing.
Art: It’s also kind of like that too.
Keith: Um, and who doesn’t like golfing, frankly?
Sylvi: I like golf video games, I guess. I don’t know. Mario Golf. I like when Yoshi does it.
Keith: I only like—add it to the long list of things I only like when Yoshi does it.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, yeah.
[Sylvi and Keith make Yoshi noises]
Keith: Hell yeah.
Art: No, see, I hated that. I only like it when Yoshi does it.
[hysteria from Keith]
Sylvi: Oh yeah. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Keith: Um, it’s funny that Christopher even brings the tape, uh, of Visiting Hour—visiting Hours?
Sylvi: Visiting Day.
Keith: Visiting Day to Hesh because he kind of was a dick about the Massive Genius meeting from Hesh’s perspective. I mean, I’m learning that he broke the Fredo rule.
Sylvi: I mean, doesn’t he also like, straight up say like, you’re just saying that because I went against you at the sit-down? When Hesh is critical of it.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, but like, knowing that that’s how, because like, Christopher is ready to make that assumption when he says it’s no good, but he’s the one who went there, and it kind of feels like he was looking for Hesh to confirm his suspicion that this music is bad.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s, you just can’t really like, bring it—it kind of feels like it’s, yeah, he’s trying to get some confirmation on it, and also it’s like, I just need someone to tell me this is bad so I have an excuse to say it’s bad.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, like, I need, I need backup on—i need a corroborating witness on this.
Art: Well, this is also after he’s noticed that Massive Genius is, is just interested in Adriana, right?
Sylvi: Yeah, this is after the, the meow scene, I believe.
Keith: Uh, this is the—this is the meow scene. Oh, it bridges the two. It bridges the two.
Sylvi: That’s what I mean. Yeah, yeah, I think because he goes to see—does he see Massive first or does he see Hesh first? I can’t remember specifically. 
Keith: It’s him and Adriana and Massive Genius are talking about the album. This song is playing, and then it cuts to him playing the same song for Hesh, and Hesh is like, it’s not good. There’s good and there’s not good. This is not good.
Sylvi: It is not good. I can’t argue.
Keith: I can’t argue with that. Can’t argue.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, but yeah, the scene when Massive’s there, it’s like, so he does not look away from Adriana for a second during Chris, you got a shot of Chris’s face just being real grumpy about that.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah, it’s, you know, they’re not exactly, exactly subtle about anything.
Keith: And, you know, to drive it home, Adriana is about 1,000% more naked in this episode than in any other episode.
Sylvi: Oh, I didn’t, I didn’t notice because I was, I was just looking into her beautiful eyes and listening to her thoughts and opinions.
Keith: Oh, well.
Sylvi: See, I can make you guys sound misogynist too.
[Sylvi laughter]
Keith: Oh, I mean, let me—I’ll catch you and the listeners up. She’s not got clothes on for a lot of this episode.
Sylvi: No, she does not have—she is—she is—well, like, that’s what—one, yeah, there’s, there’s a few scenes where she’s just in her underwear. And then also one of Chris’s, um, like, caveats for her being a music manager is that he gets to choose what she wears, which like, okay, sure, man. 
Keith: I mean, what he chose was not that crazy. It was like a tank top.
Dre: What, Chris can’t have fetishes? Is that what we’re saying?
Sylvi: No, no, no, no, no, no. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that. I just, you know.
Keith: Am I wrong that the only thing we see that it seems the implication was that he chose was a tank top and like, leather pants? Um, it was not a huge amount of dresses.
Sylvi: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of unclear if he’s picking the like, shit that they—she wears when they like, go to the—to Massive’s place or like any of the other stuff that they’re doing, you know?
Keith: Oh yeah, Dre, maybe it was those dresses that she was like, showing him. Yeah, that just seemed like normal, hey, I bought two expensive dresses, which one do you like? And I’ll keep that one. That seems like—when I do that for people, that’s how that always goes.
Sylvi: Do they ever let you keep both?
Keith: Every time, actually. It’s never happened that I don’t get to keep the dresses.
Sylvi: Oh, I’m so happy, Keith. Happy belated birthday. I’m glad you got to keep it.
Keith: Thank you, I just got $5,000 worth of dresses.
Sylvi: Ah.
Dre: Wow.
Keith: But no cake.
Dre: Damn. How are you going to fill out that dress?
Keith: I don’t know.
Sylvi: Thank you. I was trying to figure that out.
Keith: I don’t know.
Sylvi: I was like, how am I getting from A to B here? Uh, I’m off my game, but I know my, my bestie’s always got my back.
Keith: Um, oh, I think that the—is it the last big scene? No, there’s two more big scenes.
Sylvi: We have the—there’s the demo, uh, is the scene we just talked about. Uh, oh, then it’s the therapy scene again where Tony talks about, uh, is it Johnny Smash or Jimmy Smash?
Keith: Jimmy Smash. I, I do have more from this dress scene. I have—yeah, this is the—this is the—this is the power of positive thinking scene that you referenced earlier. Well, referenced earlier in the day before we were recording.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Chris: You know how I use the technique of positive visualization?
Adriana: I know you talk about it. You’re fairly negative a lot of the time.
Chris: Well, I think you should mentally prepare for the fucking possibility that Visiting Day sucks.
Keith: Not what that is.
Art: That’s not positive.
Chris: I think the only reason you’ve gotten this far with Massive is he wants to be in your pants.
Adriana: Boy oh boy. 
Chris: I let some experts listen to the demo. They shit all over it. I’m sorry.
Adriana: Experts? Who, Hesh? That old fucking synagogue cancer?
Chris: Silvio. He owned rock clubs in Asbury. You heard what Squid said. He’s a professional engineer.
Adriana: What about my opinion? That it’s good, that it’s special?
Chris: His eyes are on your ass, Adriana, 98% of the time. You know that.
Adriana: This is just a way for you to keep me down.
Chris: Ah, that ain’t fair.
ADRIANA I don’t want these clothes. What’s wrong with it, huh? What’s wrong with Visiting Day?
Chris: I don’t know, but it’s a problem that you don’t know. Richie, he’ll sing anything.
Adriana: You just don’t want to believe that I could have a relationship with a man like Massive that wasn’t based on fucking, that was based on intelligence, respect, talent.
Chris: I’ll shut up.
Adriana: You saying I don’t have talent? I branched out, made new friends, new horizons, and you can’t stand that! Here, go silent. That’s you, either screaming your head off or fucking dead. 
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, that is a great line. 
Dre: Yeah. 
Keith: Go silent, that’s you either screaming your head off or fucking dead. Love it. That’s great. It is heartbreaking that she is wrong about everything because—
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Dre, I think you said this earlier, uh, that like, everything that she’s saying is right except for the facts of the matter.
Sylvi: Yeah. Except for the, the band is dreadful.
Keith: Yes, he’s right that it’s bad. Um, but also from the beginning, the, the positive visualization that this band sucks is so funny. Completely mis—maybe that’s why he’s so negative, is that he doesn’t know the definition of positive visualization. 
Dre: Oh, he doesn’t know how it works. 
Keith: So he’s accidentally been negatively visualizing this whole time because he didn’t go to math class. He doesn’t know positives from negatives.
Sylvi: Oh, maybe. Yeah, didn’t go to math is a really funny way to put that. That is really funny.
Keith: Uh, great scene. She’s a great actor. He’s a great actor. I really—because, and like, I mean—
Sylvi: Chemistry between them is really good on screen too. Like, chemistry in like, any—like, not just in the way people think of like romantic chemistry when you say that Like, they bounce off each other really well, like, in, in this scene in particular.
Keith: And I love adding the dimension. Like, we’ve seen him screaming. We haven’t as much seen him going quiet like that. And I thought it’s a really great bit of color to add to his character that, like, she knows either you’re freaking out or you’ve got nothing to say. Mm-hmm. Like, you can’t just be—you can’t just have a conversation about it, like, because Christopher is extremely dramatic.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s good. It’s, it’s really—i feel like I say this like once a recording, but it’s like some really efficient character writing. Like, yeah, it lays out some really good stuff about both Chris, Adriana, and of course their relationship, the way that they are sort of, she’s able to see through him a lot more than anybody else.
Keith: One of the things I love about the television show The Grinder is—
Sylvi: Oh yeah, I started watching that, by the way.
Keith: Did you really?
Sylvi: Yeah, I watched the first couple episodes, it’s funny.
Keith: It’s funny. I mean, I really loved the pilot. So, Sylvi, now you know he—rob Lowe’s character in The Grinder, he lives like he’s in a movie scri—or TV script. His emotional beats are the beats of a TV show, and nobody sees this except for his brother.
Sylvi: Yeah, it’s very funny.
Keith: And it infuriates the brother. And that’s where, like, the comedy of the show comes from, that, like, nobody can see how annoying and shallow Rob Lowe is except for his brother. Even the father, even his wife. And I think that this is like a drama version of that where it’s like Christopher is so into mobster movies and TV and becoming famous for being a gangster and wanting this big flashy life, and she’s just like, you can’t exist outside. Like, you can’t do a normal thing because you’re always in this like, performance mode of like, either blowing up or shutting down.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s, uh, where’s his arc? Well, buddy, you gotta stop trying to fucking fabricate it.
Keith: Yeah. Mm-hmm. That was—that is such a great scene because I assume that that will stick with, you know, us watching him be in an arc of a TV show for the whole TV show. But I love—one of the things I love is how he’s mad that Brendan gets an arc The reason Brendan gets an arc is because he’s dead. He died, and so you get to retrofit his life into an arc. But he’s in—he’s, you know, he’s living his life and being like, how come I’m not dead and people are talking about me at my funeral? Cowboyitis.
Sylvi: Oh, yeah.
Dre: Cowboyitis.
Keith: He’s got cowboyitis.
Sylvi: Um, for just the cost of a coffee a day, you can help by, uh, supporting the—
Keith: By buying a coffee for Christopher Moltisanti.
Sylvi: Yeah. Uh, so he won’t shoot a barista in the foot. Oh my God. Yeah. He hates, he hates having to wait in line.
Dre: He really does, huh.
Keith: This guy hates lines. Yeah. Uh, do we have anything more? I know that we’ve talked about the sand scene. Do we have anything specific about this?
Sylvi: It’s so fun. I love—the thing I really like about this is when he’s telling Carmela about the plan.
Keith: And she loves it. She thinks it’s so cute.
Dre: Oh, she loves it. Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. This is like, uh, oh, you see like, what it must have been like when these two were like, falling for each other.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: The way that she like gets her—um, the way that he gets her giggling about his like, goofy little prank.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: She’s like, oh, you’re so bad.
Keith: Yeah, she rubs his head and she says, you’re so cute when you’re being a bad boy.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: It’s actually really helpful that you feel that way because he is a mobster.
Sylvi: Yeah, that’s kind of his whole deal.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s, um, it’s really cute. I really like whenever we get a reminder that like it’s not just a completely dysfunctional marriage. You, you have to have some, some functionality in there for it to—the dysfunction to hit. Mm-hmm. And yeah, it’s one—we, like we mentioned earlier, this is when Cusamano is like, hey man, could you not call me the word that means vagina, please?
Keith: And he says, no, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.
Sylvi: Nobody thinks about it like that.
Keith: Yeah, especially not your friends that laughed at you when I called you that.
Sylvi: Yeah, don’t worry about it, man.
Keith: Tells him that the memberships are closed for the club.
Sylvi: He gets hit with the books are closed. He gets hit with the same thing that Chris keeps getting hit with.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Uh, which again, I really like. I—this episode’s kind of all about putting—it’s weirdly about putting Chris and Tony in like the positions the other one has been in, um, with like, both social—their social, like, um, yeah, their, their sort of social situations and then also the interpersonal stuff. Like, I like—i, I really enjoyed the mirroring of Tony getting hit with the, uh, the books are closed while Chris has to be the bad news to someone he cares about the way that Tony has been to him. Um, yeah.
Keith: Uh, then there’s the bit about him exercising very loudly that concerned Melfi when she was, um, looking through the bathroom window, which she brings up, uh, during therapy, and he’s like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And he’s just like loudly lifting weights in the, in the basement. Um, and it, it also concerns—shut your window, man. Uh, it also concerns—i mean, it should concern his family. His family should be like, Dad, are you okay? What’s going on? And he’s like, I’m just lifting too heavy of weights. Um, and they, they hear it while, while looking at the box.
Sylvi: Like, yeah, that—it’s like the last thing you hear before the credits hit. It’s a really funny bit.
Dre: So funny.
Keith: I wonder how long until they open it. Maybe never. Maybe this just never comes back up. Um, I hope they open it up. [Dre: Because he’ll know.] Um, uh, and hey, Christopher, looking—listening to a good song while, uh, or at least a better song. It was okay. It was kind of good. Uh, I don’t know who this person is. I looked it up. I knew what the song was because I had to look it up.
Sylvi: Yeah, I looked at—i also didn’t know who this was.
Keith: But I did, but it didn’t help me know who it was looking it up. I just was able to find the song on YouTube and the comments are all people being like, I heard about this song from The Sopranos, but it’s not on Spotify or whatever. So it didn’t—doesn’t seem like a hit to me.
Sylvi: Damn, get him.
Keith: I’m saying because I can’t find any information on it, that makes it unlikely that it was a hit. If it was a hit, I’d be able to find information on it being a hit song.
Sylvi: True.
Keith: Maybe they picked a song that wasn’t a hit to have Hesh say, this is—now this is a hit. And then it—but it wasn’t. I don’t know what the implication is.
Art: I think they wanted to pick somebody that like, wasn’t very well known.
Sylvi: Maybe. Hmm.
Keith: Oh, um, uh, anything else about these episodes before we close the books? 
Sylvi: No, I’m—i feel pretty good. You, what about you, Art?
Art: Yeah, there’s, there’s one thing in the beginning that I, I have my notes that I forgot to flag for us, which is that, um, we get the first of the breadcrumbs about the weird relationship—because they’ve called Christopher Tony’s nephew.
Sylvi: Oh yeah, you’re right.
Art: But in this episode, she calls—Adriana calls Carmela Christopher’s cousin.
Keith: Okay. I didn’t even pick up on that.
Dre: Oh, me neither. Yeah.
Keith: I remember her saying, your cousin, but I didn’t, I didn’t—
Art: Yeah, that’s—she’s referring to Carmela. Um, at some point they are going to have to go back and like, pull this all apart, and this is the first of those breadcrumbs.
Keith: Okay. Um, well, I’m interested to learn about how exactly this guy knows Tony Soprano enough to be his fucking underling. Despite being barely any younger than him for years and years. Um, all right, no new episodes until the next episode dies. Oh wait, no, we still have to do—we have to do reviews and stuff.
Sylvi: Damn. Uh, there are—we recorded, uh, so close together that there are no, uh, new reviews for me to read right now.
Keith: Uh, yeah, that last episode hasn’t even gone up yet because I was sick and then I had vet stuff to do.
Sylvi: Um, yeah, it’s been, it’s been kind of crazy for Friends at the Table.
Keith: Yeah. Um, uh, but we’ll get—
Art: And we’re recording like again, kind of right on top, right? Are we?
Sylvi: Uh, I gotta check.
Dre: Is it next Thursday?
Sylvi: We can talk about this after we wrap up.
Art: Um, but we’re gonna watch Nobody Knows Anything and Isabella. These are bangers.
Keith: Next Thursday. Oh, that’s—that sounds—I’m—okay. I’m interested in bangers.
Sylvi: Yeah, there is some real interesting shit in these next few. Um, I am very excited. And then after that—
Keith: Nobody Knows Anything sounds like someone’s gonna get interrogated. And so—
Art: Well, we already had—oh, this is my first note on this episode was “fucking trick title”, because after the last episode where they’re talking about what they might need to do about Tony, and then they call this one A Hit Is A Hit, and then it’s about music and not about murder.
Keith: Although there was a hit.
Art: There was, yeah.
Keith: At the very beginning, they kill that guy.
[“Shame About It (Vocals)” by Jack de Quidt starts playing]
Dre: Oh, that’s true.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, all right.
Keith: Yeah, that’s it. Bye.
Sylvi: Bye. Thank you. Bye.
[“Shame About It (Vocals)” by Jack de Quidt finishes playing]