What Do You Think of this Spooky Depressing Barn? - The Sopranos: Media Club Plus S03E02
Transcriber: jay (jay8325)
Introduction        1
Episode one        5
Episode two [01:30:59]        60
Introduction
[“Shame About It” by Jack de Quidt begins 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. You can support us at friendsatthetable.cash. This season, we are watching The Sopranos. I'm Sylvi Bullet, and you can find me on most social media platforms @sylvibullet. Like I said, you can support the show at friendsatthetable.cash and check out everything else we do over at friendsatthetable.net. With me, as always, is Keith J. Carberry. Keith?
Keith: Hey, my name is Keith Carberry, and if that music was too loud for, not the listener, but for the rest of us here on the podcast, it's because it's our first time pressing that button and I didn't know how much louder than Sylvi's voice it was going to be.
Sylvi: It made me feel like a radio host. It made me feel very like—Like I felt very like, you're tuned into to WXK-whatever. Welcome to Media Club Plus.
Keith: I'm fixing it now. We all agree it was too loud? In comparison to Sylvia?
Art: Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Art: I mean, I don't know what it's gonna sound like, but you can fix that.
Keith: Yeah, I can fix that in post. It's literally half of a second to fix that in post, but I don't want it to drown us out here, so I've permanently just turned it down on my mixer.
Sylvi: Hey, listen, I hit my lines clear.
Keith: You did, yeah. Everybody's gonna be applauding. They're gonna cheer—After last week, people are gonna be cheering when they hear how clean that was.
Sylvi: Now you have to keep that in next week. Now you have to. Fuck you, man.
Keith: Anyway, you should listen to Run Button. You haven't listened to Run Button yet? What are you, a fucking idiot?
[Sylvi laughs loudly]
Sylvi: Also with me is Art Martinez-Tebbel.
Art: Hi. You can support the show at friendsatthetable.cash, and if you don't, you're a fucking idiot.
Sylvi: True.
Art: Should I have gone something else? If you don't, your colleagues will walk by windows that you're looking at.
Sylvi: And call you a fucking idiot.
Art: Call you a fucking idiot. That's the first one. It was the first one. I shouldn't have tried for a second reference. It's fucking idiot on this one.
Sylvi: We also have, as once again, as always, Andrew Lee Swann, hello!
Dre: Hey, uh, you can find me on Bluesky @swandre3000. Uh, and if you enjoy the show, make sure to leave a review. Don't forget about it.
Sylvi: Don't forget about it. The one thing you should not forget about. Also want to give a shout out to Jack de Quidt for making the incredible song you just heard. You can, uh, should be able to get both the intro and outro at notquitereal.bandcamp.com. Also, of course, as always, you should go listen to Friends at the Table, uh, the, the sort of flagship show that we do. I think that it's great. Perpetua has been going fantastic.
Keith: And it's a show that contains flagships.
Sylvi: It's true. Uh, might've even gotten one recently. Um, it also—We also have Side Story, sidestory.show. I want to give another mention to that. That's a gaming podcast that Austin hosts most weeks, um, that alternates schedule with this one. So if you want, if you want more of us talking about media that instead of you watching with your eyes, you also like, uh, hit like plastic buttons and stuff to make things happen on the screen, check out Side Story. It's pretty good. We watched 2 more episodes this week. We watched Denial, Anger, Acceptance, which was written by Nick Gomez and directed by Mark Saraceni. Apologies, I couldn't find a pronunciation out there. So if it's Saraceni, my apologies. And then we also watched Meadowlands, the 4th episode of season 1, written by Jason Cahill and directed by John Patterson. Alik Sakharov continuing to be—or probably Alik—Alik Sakharov continuing to act as cinematographer. Um, and one of the reasons why I want to bring up who directed the, uh, second one specifically is because John Patterson is going to be a name we hear a lot, typically at the end of seasons. Um, he directs—I found this out today—every finale other than the series finale, um, for The Sopranos. So, um, interesting to get him in here first for Meadowlands to see like, what he's working with.
Art: Well, there's a trick to that, but we'll get to it much later.
Sylvi: Well, yeah. Um, what, uh, what did you guys think this week before we get into the big summary? Just overall, still feeling good about The Sopranos, our two newbies?
Keith: I thought that both of these episodes were better than episode 2. That's what I thought.
Sylvi: That's great to hear, because I remember you saying episode 2 felt like a bit of a step back.
Keith: It felt like—it definitely felt like a step back. Uh, I definitely warmed on episode 2 as it went on, but it kind of started slow. Um, and I thought that both episodes 3 and 4 had like, more going on, and then everything that was going on was kind of tying back into each other in a better way.
Sylvi: It's a little more focused than episode 2.
Keith: More focused, yeah. Yeah.
Sylvi: Dre, what about you? That sound about right, or?
Dre: Yeah, it's interesting because it is more focused, but I feel like there's just like, stuff is just happening. Like, it's just, yeah, lots of things are happening constantly. Lots of gears are in motion and just spinning.
Sylvi: Oh my God. Aren't they ever? This one was, I had to, I had to like edit down my summary a couple of times to make it like a little more serviceable than, than our pilot summary. Um, so, you know, if I miss anything, don't, we will get to whatever you guys want to talk about, but, uh, I tried to be as functional as possible with them this week. Should we—Do we—Are there any high-level thoughts, or would it be easier for us to just get into the summary and then we can talk about this first episode here? Um—
Keith: I very quickly—Sorry, I want to get into the, the, uh, the recap quickly because I know that what I want to talk about is in the recap, and it was my favorite thing that happened in these episodes. Um, and it's basically the first thing that we get in episode 3.
Sylvi: Okay, well, um, uh, going forward, I've mentioned this on the last episode with the second one, I tried to group sort of—this isn't necessarily told in the linear way that the show is. These storylines get weaved in and out, but I wanted to sort of sum up a plotline when I start it and end it, and then move on to the next one. 
Episode 3
Sylvi: So we're gonna start with some Chris and Brendan, and then get into Tony, and then the Buccos. So let me read my recap for Denial, Anger, Acceptance. This episode opens with Christopher and Brendan, and the first shot, literally the first shot of this week, is them returning the truck they had stolen last week episode to Comley Trucking, but crediting the return to Tony instead of Junior. This, of course, gets back to Uncle Jun, like, immediately, who is not happy about it in the slightest, once again feeling undermined by Tony and his crew. Brennan and Chrissy stay blissfully unaware of this for most of the episode, either bickering about listening to Tony or selling crystal meth to Meadow and Hunter, whose entire episode revolves around them needing speed to study for exams. The Christopher story for this episode does end though when Junior, after getting the okay from Livia, takes care, in quotes, of Brendan but not Christopher because he's like family to her, much like he is to Tony. Instead, Junior pays a couple Eastern European mobsters to rough up and mock-execute Chris, leaving him with a messed-up neck, poopy pants, and the belief that Tony was the one who ordered the attack on him. Speaking of Tony, he's way too busy dealing with the impending death of his best friend, Jackie, to even notice what's going on with Christopher and Junior. Throughout this episode, we keep getting visits of Tony going to Jackie while he's in the hospital, with his friend/boss's health continuing to decline with each consecutive visit. And despite Dr. Melfi's best attempts to make Tony actually confront the reality of Jackie's situation, he spends most of the time—Most of the episode denying it. I wonder if that title means anything? Trying to behave like everything's business as usual. The business, speaking of, in this episode, happens to be forcing a Hasidic motel manager to agree to divorce terms on the request of his father-in-law. After the prerequisite Paulie and Silvio beatdown for a few days? A day? It's a little hard to tell. He acquiesces to demands and gives Tony a 25% cut of the business on top of everything. When Tony gets the chance to tell Jackie about this, it seems to finally sink into him that his friend is dying, with Jackie barely able to pay attention to Tony—to what Tony's saying while he's there. Finally, the last major storyline in this episode, at least to me, is, uh, while all this is going on, Carmella is busy enlisting the help of/taking pity on the Buccos by hiring Artie and Charmaine to cater a fundraiser she's hosting for a pediatrics hospital in the area. You see, the Buccos have just moved into the school district after Vesuvio burned down, and Artie's still struggling with the loss of the restaurant, especially since the insurance company is suspecting arson and refusing to pay. This is a sore spot between Artie and Charmaine, because Artie doesn't see the difference between accepting money from Tony outright and this catering job for Carmella. This job does in fact turn out to be more complicated for Charmaine, who realizes that Carmella is trying to treat her both like the help and her old friend at the same time. And after she's given a pretty direct sign that Carmella's opinion leans towards the former, she admits to a brief fling she had with Tony when they were younger, leaving Carmella stunned. Oh, and Artie and Tony get into a food fight, which I thought was really cute.
Keith: It was really cute.
Sylvi: And that's, that's about it for the episode. The episode—and I will say I started with it, but the episode ends with Christopher's mock execution. So if anyone's confused about what's going on there, it doesn't just end after Tony and Artie get in a food fight. I just wanted to end on a cute note.
Art: It ends with a bitchin' montage.
Sylvi: Duh-duh. Yeah. Oh, with the choir and everything.
Art: Yeah, and uh—
Sylvi: It's fantastic.
Art: There's like a weird runner in these 2 episodes of Tony thinking he's witnessed—He's doing something like wholesome and family-like, and something much darker is happening that he doesn't know about. [Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.] In this case, like looking up at his—so proud at Meadow singing the song, not realizing she's like off her mind on crystal meth. And in the next episode, he thinks he's doing like, good parenting and the other guy thinks he's threatening to murder him with an ax. It's, you know, it's—There's a lot of—It's, it's a, it's a good little 2, 2-episode connector.
Sylvi: I'm, I'm really glad you mentioned that because I do really love how Tony is—Tony is a guy who's obsessed with appearances, right? Like, I've kind of gestured at that before. Uh, like he needs to be, be seen as both strong and like personable.
Keith: And he has a pretty good, like, reason. Like, his job is a job where it really does matter.
Sylvi: But, um, we get—I think it's more in the second episode—we get to see how that can kind of backfire on him too. Um, or, or more specifically, backfire on the people around him, uh, without his realizing. Um, but yeah, that's, uh, what we should—we should focus on. We'll focus on this one for now. Keith, I'm assuming the thing you wanted to talk about was Chris and Brendan?
Keith: It's not, actually. I kind of forgot, even though it's the first line of my notes here, where I wrote, “Brendan is back. If I were the mafia, I would have him killed.” [Sylvi laughter] Well, yeah, good news for me.
Sylvi: Great news. You're locked in with Livia here.
Keith: Yeah. 'Cause that is like the first thing that happens is, uh, um, Christopher gets like the shit scared out of him, literally. Uh, and, um, then, uh, oh, I love the way that Livia like, suggests that they kill Brendan.
Sylvi: Right.
Keith:  Which was—It's so good. Does anybody have like the line?
Art: Suggests? Livia orders a murder in this episode.
Keith: But what were the words she used?
Sylvi: She says—
Art: I don't know him.
Sylvi: I don't know him. Specifically, the whole line is, she's like, Christopher, uh, Tony thinks of him like a son, and I do too. He put my storm drains up for me one year. This Filoni kid, I don't know him. And then she does this little shrug. And again, I can't say enough nice things about Nancy Marchand's performance in this show.
Keith: It’s great. She's really great.
Sylvi: She has more gravitas than fucking Marlon Brando in The Godfather does, if I'm being like real. Like, she really nailed that shit. I'm like, I, I stan. We stan a diva.
Keith: It's kind of crazy to hear her say that she loves Christopher and so does Tony. Like, to, to even start with her being like, Tony loves him and so do I, like, that's so crazy from what we've seen of her that it was almost surprising.
Sylvi: But the thing that I like about it is that it's immediately backed up by like, he did this, this thing for me. Like, he did, he did a tangible, like—He did like, what I asked of him.
Keith: But if we saw Tony—
Sylvi: Which I think is clear, like a thing she wants.
Keith: If we saw Tony putting up the storm windows, she'd say something critical to his face. She'd say something awful and snide about how he didn't do a good job, or how it won't keep the cold air out even if it keeps the rain out. You know, some like, fucked up mean thing she'd say.
Sylvi: But because he's a step, he's like a step removed from Tony.
Keith: Yeah, and [crosstalk] also maybe not there.
Sylvi: [crosstalk] He doesn't have the debuff of being her blood relative.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Like that—Sorry, what was that?
Keith: He's not there. Like, what would she—it made me curious what she would say about Tony behind Tony's back, uh, which I guess she actually did do a little bit of when she was complaining to Junior about being in the, uh, what did he call it, an asylum? Uncle Junior calls it an asylum later. Just insane. These people are out of their minds.
Sylvi: Um, I mean, they should be put in an asylum. It's—I'm—It kind of mirrors how Tony talks about both, like, Junior and, uh, his mom to Melfi though, right? Because he's always like, He'll, he'll be the like, oh, she's a sweet old lady, um, or like talk about how he loves his uncle because they used to play catch and shit like that. But in front, when he's like, actually dealing with them, it's all the—It's—You can see all the hostility getting brought out. With, with, with his mom, it's a bit more, um, baited out of him, I suppose.
Keith: Uh, the other thing I like about this early stuff is, uh, when Mickey is like trying to rile Uncle Junior up and Uncle Junior says, uh, you know, it's not a cowboy movie. And then he like, is kind of like, why is Tony treating me like this? Um, I bought him a $400 surfboard when he was a kid.
Sylvi: It's so funny because remember the whole time on that episode, he's like, don't get him anything too big.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Art: And it's, take it easy, we're not making a Western here, which is a pitch-perfect line.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Sorry, that's my grandfather that calls them cowboy movies. I forgot. I was—when I was remembering, I was like, what did he call it? Did he call it a cowboy movie? No, that's my grandfather that says that. Um, uh, no, the thing that I wanted to talk about was Tony noticing paintings all throughout the episode. [Sylvi: Yes, this—] This is the episode where Tony's looking at paintings. Um, um, the—
Sylvi: Yeah, I very much kept this out of the, the summary because I figured it would be a major talking point once we got into our actual discussion.
Keith: It’s so good. So the first therapy scene happens pretty quickly. We get through the—That, uh, early Brendan and, um—There's like a scene with Brendan and Christopher, and then the scene with Uncle Junior, both with, uh, Mikey and then with, um, Livia. Uh, and then we're back in therapy, and it's Tony in the waiting room, and he notices a totally normal painting of a barn. Um, and, uh, if I could actually just play the audio of him talking about this, it's tremendous. Um, something for that for some reason has come up before, uh, but in the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where they all go to Dee's therapist, um, Tony Soprano is giving like Mac from that episode, like always thinking he's being tricked by the therapist.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: In some psychological way.
Sylvi: Uh, he thinks he can win. 
Keith: He—Yes. Yeah, he's trying to win therapy. It's really funny.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Tony: What's that, a trick picture out there?
Dr. Melfi: Which?
Tony: The barn and the old tree all rotted out inside.
Dr. Melfi: It's just a picture I bought. I remember, in a little gallery in Provincetown.
Tony: That is a special-made psychological picture. [laughter from MCP cast] What do you call a test? The Korschach.
[more laughter from MCP cast]
Dr. Melfi: You think I want to trick you?
Tony: I don't know.
Dr. Melfi: What does that picture say to you?
Tony: Says, hey asshole, we're from Harvard, and what do you think of this spooky depressing barn and this rotted out tree we put here?
[yet more MCP cast laughter]
Dr. Melfi: It's depressing and scary to you?
Tony: Not to me, but it's got that built right into it.
Dre: Not to me.  I'm not fucking scared.
Tony: Had a real good week. A friend of mine's in the hospital. It's never pleasant, but otherwise I'm having a good week.
Dr. Melfi: What's he in for?
Tony: First I thought it was an ulcer, you know, then this, then that.
Dr. Melfi: You worried about him?
Tony: Jackie? Jackie's so fucking mean, he'll scare that cancer away.
[audio ends]
Keith: I mean, just perfect. It's so good. Him, you know, we're from Harvard, what do you think of our spooky fucking tree? is so funny. The, like, you know, hey, you got a haunted painting out there that's trying to trick me into being depressed. And she's like, well, okay, well then how was your week? And he's like, I'm great, my friend's dying of cancer, but otherwise good. Like, it's so—and then we—
Sylvi: He's so oblivious!
Keith: He's so—yeah, it's so funny. And then, you know, the episode makes it very clear that Jackie is not going to be scaring that cancer away.
Art: But, but, Dre, can you, can you tell us a little bit about the trick painting portion of—
SLYIV: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm assuming you have some experience.
Keith: How many trick paintings do you have?
Dre: Uh, zero. I don't, I don't, I don't do Rorschach blot stuff either.
Sylvi: Korschach?
Dre: Rorschach?
Sylvi: No, yeah, you said it right.
Keith: I was—
Sylvi: Rorschach.
Keith: Rorschach is what it's called.
Dre: You know, the guy from Watchmen, the face.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dre: Uh, no, I just—this was just very funny to me. It's, it's nice to see that paranoia runs through the whole Soprano family tree. It’s not just his mom.
Keith: [laughing] Um, you know, uh, I thought about not bringing this up, but I just want to like—this, this thing gets like bookended because he's—Throughout all of these episodes so far he's been, like, toying with the idea of not going back to therapy. And that's been, like—
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: A constant threat that he's been making to himself, I guess, that he's not gonna go back for this reason or that reason. Um, and, uh, at some point in that episode, he quits going. Um, and the thing that pulls him back is he's, um, about to have sex with a new goomah, And, uh, he sees a fucking—again, it's like a hotel room painting, and he looks at it and you can tell that he's like, wait, the hotel can't have a trick painting, but why am I feeling so depressed when I see this empty chair? And so there's an empty—it's like the, the painting is like of a pool with an—with a chair, like a lawn chair by the pool that no one is sitting in. And you can watch him be sad when he looks at it. And then he asks the goomah, what do you think of when you look at this painting? And she's—I can't remember what she says. I didn't write it down.
Sylvi: This reminds me of David Harkey.
Keith: Yeah, this reminds me of David Harkey or something. And I didn't know who that was, but basically she's like, nothing.
Art: That—I think that's her house. I don't think that's a hotel.
Keith: That's fair.
Art: Because she mentions why she bought the painting.
Keith: Oh, she does? I didn't even—
Art: Yeah, that's what she says. Like, it reminds me of this. Like, you wouldn't say that about a painting in a hotel. You've never thought about a painting in a hotel in your life.
Keith: But if you know who David Harkey is and you look at a painting and for some reason it reminds you of David Harkey, you'd say it. Um, I just don't know who that is.
Art: Also, I think—I don't know that you quite have enough information yet, but I think you can put together that this is not a new—
Keith: Yes, sorry. It's new to us, Guma.
Sylvi: She's, um, actually a recasting of the one from the pilot.
Keith: Oh, is that true? It's the same character? Oh, she—okay, she looks totally different.
Art: With the Kennedy's hat.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Kennedy, that's the same—that's supposed to be the same woman?
Sylvi: It—listen, they just—maybe the most egregious recast.
Keith: They took 10 months to make a show and they took 15 years off the girl that he's sleeping with.
Art: You can't keep guest stars. Guest stars don't have contracts that hold them to your show.
Keith: But they, you know, it's not—It's not that hard to find, you know, a 38-year-old blonde woman.
Art: I don't know. I don't know what—I didn't do it.
[laughter]
Keith: I just, you know, if it was me, I just would've tried to find someone that wouldn't be confusing. Um, okay. So it's not a new goomah, it's the old goomah, and she doesn't, uh, feel sad when she looks at the trick painting that she bought by mistake from the psychiatrist's yard sale.
Sylvi: From the Harvard guys. Yeah.
Art: The Harvard's trick painting store.
Keith: It's—you look at that, I have the screencap, it's gonna be screenshots of it in the screenshot post, and it's so funny because it's like, I can see what he sees when he says a rotted-out tree. It's really just a tree. It really is a tree. There's—It's not a rotted-out tree. It's got some light and shadow on it. It's not a haunted barn. It's not a trick painting. He's, he's deeply depressed.
Art: Yeah, I don't think—You're basically never supposed to think of Tony as a reliable source.
Keith: Yeah, I know. I just, I need to spell this out for the non-watchers out there that this isn't like, you know, it's not really even on the edge. It's just he's—He can't help but feeling sad thinking about anything in his life. Um.
Sylvi: Hey man, I get it.
Art: It do be that way sometimes.
Keith: Yeah. Um, is there, uh, is there a thread in here that we want to follow through? The next stuff is like more hospital stuff with Jackie.
Sylvi: I mean, might be the—it might be pretty easy to transition into talking about the Jackie stuff since we're talking about what's got Tony so depressed. Like, the tree and Jackie are pretty easy parallels to make.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: I mean, Melfi makes it, and then Tony's like, nope, ignoring that.
Keith: Yeah. Um, yeah, Jackie is the tree.
Sylvi: Jackie is the tree. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Jackie is, uh, not doing well. Like, last time we saw him, he was out and about. He was at the, uh, um, what is now Satriale's. But in this episode, he is bedridden the entire time. Um, we only see him in this hospital room. Um, we get like a really funny interaction between him and Mikey at the—When we first see Jackie, where Mikey just keeps talking about like, everybody he knows who has cancer. It's like, you got it better than this guy, he's got cancer in his brain or whatever. Um, and then the second he leaves, uh, well, when the, the like, rest of the like, core crew shows up, he leaves and everybody's just like, oh my God, that fucking guy. Um, which is really funny.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, but yeah, uh, this is kind of—This kind of is our like our main throughline through the episode is like coming back to check—Like, these Jackie scenes almost function like checkpoints as we go through things.
Art: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: This is where the sort of crime storyline for this episode gets started, because Silvio remembers the, um, the, like, Hasidic Jewish man who wants help getting his daughter's divorce. And that leads us into the motel stuff. And then later, we get more of Tony trying to act like everything is normal between him and Jackie—Like, with Jackie, by bringing a stripper to party with him in his hospital room. And then finally—
Keith: As a bit, like, but for real, but also as a bit, but also for real.
Sylvi: I love the reveal when he notices, when he's—when it's like obvious that she's a stripper and he's just like, I got you, you asshole. It's very funny to me.
Dre: When her tits were falling out, your face was like, blah.
Keith: It's funny because he has two big moments like that because the food fight is another one of these things where it's like he's just like, having—He's just like having a weird fun time with the boys.
Sylvi: He's a 12-year-old—Like, he's, he's, he really feels like a 13 or 14-year-old, really.
Keith: Like, yeah, except if he actually was a 12-year-old, he'd know how to hold an N64 controller, you moron.
Sylvi: Get his ass.
Keith: What the fuck was that? I've never seen anything like that in my life.
Art: Was that this episode?
Sylvi: Was that this episode? Or is that the next one? That's the next one. That's after his dream.
Keith: The next one.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, yeah, I, I love Tony's—like, how, uh, this is Tony being the sad clown in a lot of ways whenever he's around Jackie. And you slowly, you get that shit cracked—Chipped away at until the very end, um, when you get some like really tremendous face acting from Gandolfini, uh, when like, Jackie is like, unable to focus on anything but his, his fever. 
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, and Tony's there trying to tell him about how, how they got into the motel business and, uh, eventually just gives up and is like, yeah, you call, you call the other nurse, and just gives him this like sad, like, oh, you can tell he—It's—You know, the episode's called Denial, Anger, Acceptance for a reason. It's not exactly subtle.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: But the moment of acceptance is really well done, I think.
Keith: There is—I feel like Gandolfini has leveled up his face acting in these two episodes. He's doing so much with his face.
Sylvi: Um, probably just that it gets to be shown off more because like he's very good at that.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely like they're giving—Maybe they're giving him more time to do it. Um, and, uh, but I definitely noticed like he's got smirks, he's got, he's got tears in his eyes, he's got, you know, there's lots of stuff happening. His face when he's like he has the absolute pitch-perfect—back to the, the, the trick painting—
SLYVI: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Pitch-perfect shit-eating, I figured out your trick painting look when he says the Harvard line. It's so funny that he's like, I've got your number, therapist. You can't get me with your trick painting. It's hysterical. Um, doing a lot with his face in these episodes.
Sylvi: Yeah, I, I, I mean, it's gonna become a pretty common thing where I'm very effusive in my praise for James Gandolfini's performance, but like, it's, it's well deserved.
Art: I almost want to just save it. Just, I just don't want to say anything nice about James Gandolfini's performance until, [Keith: Until it's really hit its peak?] It's really, until it's like, a 10 out of 10.
Keith: Like, yeah.
Art: Yeah, yeah, this is a 9 out of 10, but let's—there's 10 out of 10s coming. Let's, uh—
Sylvi: Okay, that's true.
Keith: That's funny. I'm excited to see a 10. I'm excited to see the 10.
Sylvi: You might even get a couple 11s in there, if I'm being real.
Keith: No way. I mean, um, you know what I thought was an 11? Using, uh, a bellhop bell to smash a guy's head in. That was so funny.
Sylvi: Say bupkis.
Keith: Yeah, he won't say bupkis. There's a—the promise that there was going to be a lot of Italians talking about Jewish people was immediately fulfilled, by the way.
Dre: That's true. Yeah.
Art: Yeah. Um, yeah, I love Paulie's little like, Hasid ‘em, but I don't believe them, uh, in the first hotel, which like I've definitely heard my grandfather say, not quite that tone—My grandfather, Jewish, so not quite the same tone, but like, I've heard that joke from my grandfather who was, you know, of Paulie's generation, I think. Let's see. How old is—
Dre: It's, uh, I thought you were like Googling how old is my grandfather. Yeah.
Keith: Damn, they have that on there?
Art: 1942. He's, he's younger than my grandfather by a little bit, but you know, But I heard that same line from my grandfather, the Hasid ‘em, but I don't believe him.
Keith: Um, I mean, I honestly can't believe that someone else has said that.
Art: No, that's been said a lot.
Keith: Um, I guess that's like a whole—racial puns are a whole style of joke that you just don't hear very much anymore.
Sylvi: Yeah. Because of woke.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Because of woke. Yeah. 
Art: What I'll say, it's more acceptable for my grandfather to say it than for Paulie to say it.
Sylvi: Very much so.
Keith: Very much so, yeah.
Art: As an inter—as an intraracial thing, it's, it's better. It's not great, but it's better.
[Sylvi laughter]
Keith: Um, it's—yeah, so they're, they're trying to get this money from this family. I actually don't quite—So the plotline here, when there's—So there's this hotelier who's, or I guess motelier, whose daughter wants a divorce and the son-in-law won't grant the divorce. And so he's trying to extort 25% of the motel business from his father-in-law.
Art: 50%, he wants 50%.
Keith: He wants 50% in order to grant the divorce. Um, and so the, the initially the father-in-law or the, the father, um, I guess he's both depending on who you ask.
Art: Yeah, that's, that's true of many stories.
Sylvi: It is accurate.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, he's like, this guy is abusing my daughter. Um, but then the whole episode is kind of, uh, you get this guy like, making arguments for why it's OK for him to want 50% of the business. Um, I don't remember if he ever denies that he's been hitting his wife in here, or whatever.
Sylvi: No, he mostly just says, like, uh, he pays for her plastic surgery and trips to Israel, so it's OK.
Dre: And shopping, you know?
Sylvi: Yeah, as long as he pays for things, it's OK what he does, is the vibe I got.
Keith: Right, OK.
Sylvi: But I don't think he ever directly addresses that, because straight-up I don't think think any of the guys involved care.
Keith: [crosstalk] No, I just care as a viewer.
Art: [crosstalk] I don't think anyone cares.
Keith: I just wanted to make sure as a viewer that there wasn't a denial because he's like, my father-in-law's a piece of shit asshole and a snake and I hate him and he's extorting my labor and all this stuff. And I just wanted to make sure that inside all of these arguments for why fuck my boss/father-in-law, that there wasn't a, and I didn't even do the thing he said that. I just wanted to double check.
Art: Allow me to go back and say that I mean, um, no one in the show cares. I—
Keith: No, no, no, no, I know.
Art: Yeah, yeah, we, we all think domestic violence is bad.
Keith: We all do.
Sylvi: My domestic violence is bad t-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by the t-shirt is the real energy we just had there?
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, yeah, no, it's never, it's never directly addressed. I mean, like—
Art: Shaking my head to show that I think the mafia is bad.
Sylvi: I'm sure that I disagree with Tony Soprano, just so everyone knows. Uh, as long as—The thing is, whenever we're recording this episode, we're all shaking our heads the entire time.
JACK: Yeah.
Sylvi: Just to be clear.
Dre: Yeah.
Art: We do not approve of Tony Soprano. 
Keith: I do. I think it's fine. What did he do that's so wrong? What did he do that's so wrong? Whatever.
Sylvi: God.
Keith: He hasn't done even anything yet that's so wrong. I haven't seen any—I haven't seen one thing.
Sylvi: Fuck off.
Keith: Pick one! Tell me! Show me where he was so bad in these!
Sylvi: He burned his friend's restaurant down!
Keith: To save his business!
Dre: To get the insurance money!
Sylvi: Yeah, that's a good point.
Keith: Yeah, that was to help his friend. That was good.
Sylvi: The real villain's the insurance company. You're right.
Keith: Yeah, you're right.
Dre: You know what? That's true. That’s fair.
Keith: Yeah. Um, so far, Tony Soprano, unimpeachable.
Art: Do you not get the insurance money if it's arson, even if you weren't involved in the arson?
Keith: I think you totally do, I think.
Sylvi: Yeah, but I think that they need to prove—like, it needs to be proven that it was someone else, would be my assumption.
Keith: Burning down your whole restaurant to collect the insurance money is very common as far as arsons go.
Art: Yeah, it's probably not good enough to be like, well, my friend, the mobster, did it, but I didn't know. It's probably a hard sell at the old insurance office.
Keith: I mean, I really do hope he gets the insurance money for this.
Dre: Yeah, me too.
Keith: You've got to assume that Tony told his guy, by the way, don't make it look like arson or he won't get the insurance money. But, you know, it happens. It happens that people burn down restaurants to get insurance money.
Dre: We'll talk about it later. It doesn't seem like Tony—people always listen to his orders. Or do things the way he would like them to be done.
Keith: Where am I? I lost my place in, in the episode.
Sylvi: We were talking about the, uh, the, the motel stuff. We were talking about how, uh, we were talking about the conversation that Paulie and Silvio had with Ariel, the manager, the, the, um, uh, son-in-law to, uh, I think Shlomo Teittleman is his name, the man who's hired—
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Teittleman.
Sylvi: Yeah, who's hired the, um, the mob to, to, to take care of this and get, uh, the like sign-off on the divorce. The get, I believe, is the term.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Um, and yeah, I mean, I'm glad we brought it up how they never really addressed the thing about him saying, uh, his daughter has been abused by her husband, because I think that the, um, like sort of backseating the suffering of women is like gonna be a common trend with how these guys move through the world. And it's good to sort of put up—Again, pretty obvious flag to plant early, but like I think worth mentioning and pointing out.
Keith: And I think the thing that's funny about all of the trying to convince them to stop beating him up because of how bad Teittleman is, is funny because it's like, they're now—they're not doing this because they're good guys. They're doing this because they're promised 25% stake in a motel business.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: So they're trying to earn a huge amount of money by torturing the son-in-law. And so his arguments that it's like, I deserve 50% are like, yeah, well, we're the mafia. We don't care about your 50%. We want our 25%.
Sylvi: Yeah, it doesn't matter. Like, yeah, you got what you—He says literally at the end, because the way this all resolves is the, um, father-in-law is like, yeah, you threatened him, but it was business that brought him around. Uh, I off—you were demanding—he was demanding 50%, you were demanding 25%, and then I talked to him and he said 15%, so I just agreed with him and here's some money. And then Tony's like, I don't give a fuck, we're still taking our 25%. He can have his 15.
Keith: That's insane.
Sylvi: That means ours is coming out of yours.
Art: I can’t believe how stupid you would have to be to think that would work.
Keith: It's crazy because it's like, the idea that you'd have like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn't about the days of being beaten up that did it, it was just coincidentally he saw reason right after that. Like, who would buy that? No one would buy that in a million years.
Sylvi: How stupid are you?
Keith: You paid me to change his mind, I changed his mind. Yeah, it's crazy. But there were guys who may have not been so quick to backseat the suffering of women. I don't know anything about these guys, but the rabbi goons who used to smack the husbands around to get the divorce, they've been put out of business by the DA offices.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: This is the first I'm hearing of this, but that's a totally plausible thing that I'm just now learning about. And I—It brings up one of the big things that causes, uh, organized crime to be like a recurring emergent theme in human civilization, which is like, uh, kind of a worst-case scenario self-policing, uh, or like alternative policing of like, hey, um, sometimes people need goons. Sometimes you need a goon.
Art: Yeah, sometimes you need goons, and sometimes people who can't go to the police need [Keith: Goons.] Conflict resolution. 
Keith: Right. Via goons.
Art: As we will cover in Goodfellas.
Keith: Yes, totally. Yeah, this is definitely something that they touch on in that.
Art: But yeah, you know, if you can't go to the cops and you have a dispute with someone who also can't go to the cops, that's where, uh, that's where organized crime comes right in to fill that need
Keith: And so—
Art: And they always take shit from you. It's always a bad deal.
Keith: It's a bad deal, but it might be the best bad deal you can get.
Art: Don't do crimes.
Keith: Hold on, let me write that down.
Sylvi: Bold stance.
Keith: It sounded—Art, it sounded like you were taking notes, like you were writing on a Post-it note so that you don't forget, don't do crimes.
Sylvi: It's on a big whiteboard. Don't do crimes.
Keith: In front of a classroom, underline it.
Art: Yeah. Circle it. Um, yeah, it's—and, and the, the son, his actual son, Shlomo's actual son, is like, don't do this, right? You'll, you'll be creating a golem. And then at the end he's like, oh, he was right, I created a golem. And this also does not move Tony.
Sylvi: Well, it moves him in another really good Tony not understanding that a thing is not a person or whatever, when, uh, he says that Talmud says, and Tony says “I don't care what he says!” Real quick throwaway, but also really funny.
Keith: But then he does—being called a Frankenstein does upset him later on.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, uh, and a great shot too when, uh, Melfi asks him if he feels like a Frankenstein and he's in the chair and he's just like all hunched up.
Keith: Uh, Uh, I, you know, it's—
Art: When he looks like Frankenstein?
Sylvi: Yeah, exactly.
Keith: It's tough because, uh, going through, um, plotline, um, start to finish, it makes so much sense for the show itself, but it makes hell out of the buttons that I have to press.
Sylvi: Sorry, Keith.
Keith: No, no, no, I, I, I, I want to try to resolve the—these two things so that it makes sense. Because I know that I have the Frankenstein one. I just wanted to remember what it was titled. Here we go. It's easier to remember when, uh, they're in order why they're titled that way. But here we go.
[audio from The Sopranos plays]
Tony: Somebody called me a Frankenstein today.
Dr. Melfi: Really?
Tony: This Hasid I'm doing business with. These Hasids, I mean, they're out there, but they got their beliefs, you know. They're not afraid of death. At least this one guy wasn't.
Dr. Melfi: Maybe they have the belief because they are afraid.
Tony: I'm not afraid of death. Not if it's for something. You know, a war, something like that. A reason. But Jackie, to see this strong, beautiful man just wither away to nothing. You can't do nothing about it. You can't fight it.
Dr. Melfi: You envy the Hasids and their beliefs?
Tony: All this shit's for nothing. And if all this shit's for nothing, why do I gotta think about it?
Dr. Melfi: That's the mystery, isn't it? The mystery of God, or whatever you want to call it, of why we're given the questionable gift of knowing that we're gonna die.
Tony: [laughs without humour]
Dr. Melfi: Do you feel like Frankenstein? A thing lacking humanity, lacking human feelings.
[audio ends]
Keith: And that leads into him watching his daughter at the choir, like we said. The daughter who, I don't think she's getting into Berkeley off this, I gotta say.
Dre: Well, that’s what the crystal meths for, Keith.
Art: Yeah, the crystal meth, so she does well on the SATs. The choir is just an extracurricular activity for the—[Keith: Oh—] They don't, they don't make you sing to prove it at the—
Keith: Are these two different Berkeleys? There's two different Berkeleys, huh?
Art: No, this is, this is, this is UC Berkeley.
Sylvi: This is the Berkeley.
Keith: Sorry. There's a, there's a Berklee’s School of Music.
Art: Oh no, this is the University of California, Berkeley, which is like a university.
Keith: Oh, she does reference wanting to get away to the other side.
JACK: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Oh yeah, sorry, this is Berkeley with a Y, not Berklee with 2 Es.
Keith: Not  Es, yes. So in Boston, there's a music school called Berklee, a famous music school called Berklee, Berklee College of Music, um, which is where I assumed she wanted to go because she sang in choir. I was like, I don't know that this is good enough for Berklee.
Sylvi: I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I just assumed that the Berklee—until now, I also assumed that the Berklee School of Music was just part of Berkeley in California. So we're both learning.
Keith: Yeah, we both know. Yeah, you knew two Berkeleys, but thought they were the same. I knew one Berkeley.
Art: Wait until you hear Tony Soprano talk about Berkeley.
Sylvi: Oh man.
Art: Oh my God.
Keith: Does he watch?
Art: We're not even gonna be able to record that episode, I don't think.
Keith: Why not?
Art: He's, he's gonna have some colorful things to say.
Keith: Okay.
Art: About the people who live in that part of the country.
Keith: Okay. Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, but I get a—I get to say all the funny Italian words for gay people. So they're like, [Art: Yeah, but you don't get to say all the funny—] I don't get to say all the other ones. No, there's no—there's a lot of other ones I don't get to say, but there's like one I get to say. I think I'm pretty sure he's, he's homophobic as well as racist when he's talking about that stuff.
Art: Oh, he's definitely homophobic. Yeah.
Sylvi: Anyway, now that we've had our little slur teaser for later on, Um, I really love another scene of Melfi trying to get Tony to look at what he does to make his living and not—and seemingly, at the very least, not getting through to him again. Uh, this one's left a little more ambiguous than the sad clown conversation we talked about in the previous episode.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: But, um, again, really good. Like, she is not giving up on this yet, which, you know, good for her.
Keith: Good for her slash it is her job. She was—She came recommended by his neighbor slash doctor.
Sylvi: Yeah, Dr. Cusamano.
Keith: Dr. Cusamano. Do we get to see Dr. Cusamano at some point? Does he become a guy?
Art: Oh yeah. I don't even think we're that far away.
Dre: That's exciting.
Sylvi: Yeah, there's some good stuff between Tony and Dr. Cusamano. Um, we get like—there's some interest—This show, uh, what I like about this show is that it, it, uh, it kind of takes a holistic view to everything. Like, it's not just the bringing in the like, race and gender and, and, and, uh, that sort of shit that's going on, but also, uh, there's a lot of class in, in the show. I mean, we can talk about that with the Bucco storyline in a little bit.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Um, but I think Dr. Cusamano is like a pretty major part of that, at least in one episode I'm thinking of that I remember really enjoying.
Keith: Yeah. You know, I do have one more thing to play about what we were just talking about.
Sylvi: Please do. Yeah, I want to make sure we hit all your buttons.
Keith: So this is actually a precursor conversation also about Jackie. You know, he's still dealing with Jackie emotionally at the end of this episode, but this is where, you know, the denial, anger, acceptance. The last, the Frankenstein, is a little bit more towards acceptance, but this is still—We're still deeply in anger here.
[audio from The Sopranos starts]
Tony: Tufts Medical School. You're a doctor. What do you think about Jackie?
Dr. Melfi: I'd have to know more about his condition.
Tony: I told you about his condition. He's got cancer.
Dr. Melfi: What kind of cancer?
Tony: It's in the intestines. There was a tumor and they, uh, they took it out. It's recurred.
Dr. Melfi: But you said he might go home. They're not operating?
Tony: Well, it's next to something vital.
Dr. Melfi: I see.
Tony: You see?
Dr. Melfi: From what you're telling me, it doesn't sound very good.
Tony: From what I'm telling you. Well, what the fuck do I know? I'm not a doctor.
Dr. Melfi: You're angry. Who with?
Tony: Let me tell you something. This man has had chemo every day for three fucking weeks, and he still has every last hair on his head. Every last hair on his head, and he's got a beautiful head of hair. So don't tell me about how it sounds, 'cause you don't know him, and you don't know me, and you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Dr. Melfi: What's happening is we're getting closer to you confronting your true feelings about what's really going on here.
Tony: Wait a minute, wait a minute. I just told you my true feelings. So why don't you tell me what's really going on?
Dr. Melfi: The tree in the painting rotted out, you said? There's nothing in that picture to indicate that.
Tony: The fucking painting. I knew that was a fucking scam. I knew that painting was a fucking scam.
Dr. Melfi: You remember your dream? The ducks? It took on another meaning. What happens to a tree that's rotted out?
Tony: Trees, ducks. What the fuck are you, Ranger Rick? I'll tell you, some job you shrinks got. You think everybody's lying to you while you're pulling scams on them. Fuck you.
[sound of Tony storming out and slamming the door]
[audio ends]
Keith: Great. 
Sylvi: You think everybody's lying to you while you're pulling scams on them, Tony? Damn, I wonder who that could be.
Art: I'm not a—I'm not a therapist or a doctor, but I don't think Melfi should have speculated on the prognosis for Jackie there. That didn't seem like it was—
Keith: She might be an MD.
Sylvi: She does have a medical degree. Yeah, like they both—there's a shot in the next episode that says, uh, Jennifer Melfi, MD, on her door. And then I believe the Tufts diploma is in medical science as well.
Art: Yeah, I just—I, I'm just not sure you're supposed to talk about people who aren't your patients in that context.
[sound of something falling]
Keith: Uh-oh.
Sylvi: Oh, what's up?
Keith: Uh, we're good, we're good. Hold on. Uh, let me save. I—my main recording, I dropped something on the keyboard and I stopped the recording just a second ago.
Sylvi: Uh, you got the backup going though, right?
Keith: Yeah, I've got the backup, which is actually what I use. I actually use the backup recording.
Sylvi: Yeah, because you're gonna be at the same quality on that regardless because you're the local.
Keith: Yeah, right. Yep. I—that happened. I interrupted somebody by—with that. I don't know, remember what was happening. I've lost track. MD speculating about the cancer?
Sylvi: Yeah, it seems like a little bit of a weird move to speculate about someone who isn't her patient. But, like, I always just kind of was like, well, the way Tony's acting about this feels pretty clear that things are not going well for Jackie.
Keith: Maybe. I don't know the rules about it, but he did ask.
Sylvi: That's also a good point.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Um, I know—[Keith: Dre, how would you handle this?] How would you handle this?
Dre: Uh, I mean, you know, you can never practice outside of your scope of competence, but I don't think that's what she did. Um, yeah, I think, I think it's fine. I think it's fine.
Keith: Um, by the way, shout out Tufts, shout out Provincetown. She's all over Massachusetts. This is a fucking Massachusetts girl.
Sylvi: Keith's new favorite character.
Keith: Um, going over—she's going to galleries in Provincetown. What the hell? She's going to P-Town?
Art: Keith's new favorite character, Massachusetts. 
Keith: Don’t tell—Don't fucking tell—Look, I just learned about Tony Soprano's homophobia. Don't tell him she was at P-Town. That place is gay as hell.
[Dre and Sylvi laugh loudly]
Sylvi: Oh, beautiful, beautiful.
Keith: Famously, famously, really, really, really—
Sylvi: Title for the episode, that town is gay as hell.
Keith: It’s—They put—you know what's funny about Massachusetts? They put the gay guys and they put the lesbians on two different sides.
Sylvi: That's not that funny. That happens a lot.
Keith: Because the lesbians are in Hadley, which is the total opposite end of Massachusetts. Crazy, right?
Sylvi: That's, that's really funny.
Keith: Shout out to Hadley. We love it.
Sylvi: Yeah. I'm also just thinking about the image of The Sopranos of—It's Silvio and Tony rolling dice and it says what lesbians get up to, uh, when they hang out. And then it's what straight girls get up to and it's like a 3-way kiss in the other one. It's really good. All-timer image. Um, did we want to—do we want to—are there any other stuff with the Melfi scenes that we wanted to talk about for this episode while we're here? Um, I—we did get a little sidetracked, so I'm trying to get us back on the rails a bit. Um, it—no, or are we good?
Keith: Um, I'm good. Northampton too, not just Hadley.
Sylvi: The Massachusetts Minute is over.
Art: We have sort of merged two storylines here in our discussion. [Sylvi: A little bit.] We're sort of on the Jackie stuff and we're sort of on the hotel stuff. Unless we wanna declare ourselves just done with the hotel stuff.
Sylvi: The hotel stuff, I think—
Art: In which case, we have not talked enough about Silvio and Paulie just in general.
Sylvi: We should talk about—
Keith: No Big Pussy in this episode.
Sylvi: Nope.
Art: No, no.
Keith: A little bit in the next episode, but still not very much.
Art: You know, not everyone can be in every episode.
Keith: It's true. It's true. I just like, you know, I saw episode 2 and I was like, okay, Paulie Walnuts and Big Pussy, they're hanging out, they're cracking skulls. But now it's Silvio and Paulie. But it makes sense because I guess Teittleman is Silvio's friend.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: So he's sort of in on it from the start and is the guy who brought the job to Tony. The—I do feel like we kind of talked about, like, all of the big stuff that happens with the hotel.
Sylvi: It's a pretty straightforward, like, plotline for the most part.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, there is one scene that I think we should talk about, which is the final confrontation between Tony, Silvio, uh, and Paulie with, with, um, Ariel, when he tells the story about how the, like, it was the Masada, I think, was the story he told—He talked about where it was like the Romans were at the gates and they—
Keith: Oh, that was great.
Sylvi: They chose death instead of, uh, instead of surrender. And then he's like, where are the Romans now? And Tony says one of my favorite lines in this entire season of, you're looking at him, asshole. And it's him in like a wifebeater and like a robe next to Silvio and Paulie. And I mean, like, it's, it's so characterful, that line, 'cause it's like, yeah, that is how they see themselves.
Keith: And it's also kind of an ambiguous reality of, like, on the one hand, the Romans are still beating the shit out of you. And so we actually—you're saying, we're the Romans now. They're fucking—they have their foot on your throat. But on the other hand, like, Tony's a dumb goon. So, you know, is that a brag? Is it a brag to be like, we're the Romans, and it's like, you're just some guy that sort of controls sort of North Jersey?
Art: As opposed to being the guy who he's gonna threaten to cut off his penis in 5 minutes. I mean, it's—
Keith: That's crazy.
Art: I don't think we've said out loud yet, as Tony calls Hesh, it's like, I don't know what to do. And he's like—
Keith: Hesh very quickly goes, why don't you cut off his penis?
Dre: Finish his bris.
Keith: Finish his bris. Yeah.
JACK: Yeah.
Keith: Um, which is great.
Art: He might not be willing to live if you cut off his penis.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: He doesn't say it like that, but you know.
Sylvi: Yeah, Hesh is very brutal. Hesh is like, uh, they, they do a good job reminding you that he is a hardened criminal as well.
Keith: Yeah, because he seems so—he's very affable, he's very friendly, he kind of seems like he has a good head on his shoulders, but also he's like, a practical problem-solving guy in a field where that means that sometimes you go like like, well, look, if he doesn't want to die, then maybe you can cut off his penis.
Sylvi: I think—I don't know if I brought this up or not, but, uh, there's, there's a guy, there's like a real guy that Hesh is partially based on. Uh, I think I did mention this last time where they described as like he would have been a boss in the, in the mob if he wasn't Jewish.
Keith: You did mention that.
Sylvi: And this is one of those moments where that really comes through with Hesh, I think, where it's like, oh yeah, he does have the mind for this stuff and he's able to be the like, friendly face for it too.
Keith: By the way, they show his—well, they don't show his house, but they show his bedroom.
Sylvi: Oh, he's loving—living good.
Keith: Yeah, I think maybe the best-case scenario is to be a guy that would be a boss but isn't, because being in the mafia seems like dangerous business and also maybe not so nice a lot of the time. I would love to not be like, as connected to the rest of these guys as Tony Soprano is.
Sylvi: God, yeah, I would love to—I would love to be a trusted outsider.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Uh, that, that'll definitely never backfire for anybody involved ever.
Keith: That's a good point. [Sylvi laughs loudly] But also, how often does it backfire for people that are, that are, uh, insiders?
Sylvi: I mean, hey, look at Brendan.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, Hesh is still looking good compared to Brendan and will be even if someone shoots him in a few years. He's old.
Sylvi: He's old.
Keith: He made it to old. If he dies, he made it to old. So.
Sylvi: Man, he made it to the beach. 
Keith: I sometimes—I wish I had given up before I made it to The Beach.
Sylvi: Brother, we can't undo what we've already done.
Keith: Um, uh, do we have more to talk about with—I know that we have more to talk about with Jackie, but what is it that we have to talk about with Jackie?
Sylvi: I—So it's kind of tricky because I—The thing with Jackie is I kind of want to, like, talk about it in relation to—There's two, like, key friendships in this episode for Tony. The other one's Artie, and they're both kind of, like, in bad places. Um, Jackie, like, literally, like, is dying. Like, you can see it, that he's dying.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, but Artie is, like, really struggling right now because of Tony, and, like—
Keith: And Tony feels bad.
Sylvi: Tony clearly feels guilty about it, like, he—But also feels like—Is like inconvenienced by that guilt, is something that I think comes through in the performance.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Is like, he's like, annoyed that he feels bad about this, and even more so, he feels annoyed that he can't tell Artie why it happened.
Keith: Yeah, that's interesting because I—This is not—This isn't disagreeing. This is just like a slightly different—Like, the timeline on it for me is that like, he feels bad, he feels bad, he feels bad, and then by the time that it really starts to come through how annoyed that feeling bad is making him, um, it's like he's got all of this other stuff that he's dealing with, and Artie is like, someone that it seemed like he felt like, kind of okay exploding on.
Sylvi: Yeah, I mean, it's—
Dre: I agree with that, totally.
Sylvi: It's, it's like... It's like a release valve for him in a lot of ways.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: And like, also sort of like, um, someone that he doesn't have to be as hard on because he's not in the, like, the, the mob lifestyle in the same way. Like, if this was like a mob guy he had to, he had to like blow up at, he'd probably have to do some actual violence. But instead we get this, the, the like, like, conversation in the kitchen and like, a conversation in the garage earlier where, um, he's talking about how the insurance and like, uh, being like, maybe I should just become a plumber instead. Um, but like, yeah, I like, I like the sort of gradually wear—The gradual wearing down of Tony's patience with it.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Because you see, even when he's like feeling—Even when he's behaving and feeling like a more like, reasonable person, he's still like, he's still got that sort of like, anger to him, no matter what.
Keith: And nothing illustrates this better than when he yells at Artie, and so Artie gets pissed and like, throws a piece of prosciutto at his face.
Sylvi: Great scene.
Keith: And, uh, as an audience, I felt like, oh my God, what the fuck is Tony gonna do? Like, is he gonna be pissed? Is he gonna be violent? Is he gonna attack his friend? And then he doesn't. He throws food back at Artie, and you still kind of don't really know… Is that it? Like, you know, is that all it's gonna be? And then not only is that not all it's gonna be, actually, it's going to, like, totally swing the other way, where it's now we're laughing and having a good time together, throwing food at each other. And it's, like, cute and sweet instead of scary and like, oh, Artie maybe just, like, really fucked up.
Sylvi: It's, it's like a really key moment, I think, for their relationship too, because it's like, oh, this is the person that Tony can behave like this with, is Artie, is this like one friend he has where he can be like, he can be juvenile in the way that he clearly always wants to be.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvi: Like, me comparing him to a 14-year-old is like very, uh, intentional given that the guy that he, uh, can get along best with is the guy he grew up with.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Like, he, he is younger than Silvio and Paulie and he's older than Chris. The only people that are like his peers are really Big Pussy and, um, and like, in the mob it's just him, and then with—and Jackie, I guess. Um, and then Artie outside of it is like the only person from his generation for the most part. Yeah, he's the only guy like, the Big Pussy thing.
Keith: He, uh, Artie doesn't treat Tony like he's in the mafia.
Sylvi: Yeah, he treats him like he's his old pal Tony, right?
Keith: Which is because his—Uh, uh, what's his wife's name? Carmine?
Sylvi: Charmaine.
Keith: Charmaine. Charmaine has to keep reminding him, hey, Tony's in the mafia. And it's like, um, in episode 1 or 2, like, she has to make the case for that. We know that he is in the mafia. Like, we don't just feel like he could be. Which makes me think that maybe Artie doesn't like even keep it in his mind that that is actually what Tony does. And really is the only guy in his life that Tony like, can be not in the mafia with, by being treated like he's not. He can be that. And there's only seemingly one other person in his life that doesn't know he's in the mafia. And by the episode—The end of episode 4, that's no longer true.
Sylvi: That—Yeah, yeah.
Keith: Which is his son. Um...
Art: I think it's another really good bit of acting, um, that James Gandolfini does. He gets hit by the prosciutto, and he, like—You see him, like, get mad. There's, like—And we've seen Tony get mad on the show, and we've seen bad things happen when Tony gets mad on the show. But, like, instead, you see him get mad and respond in this, like, very childish way. And I think that that's a very nice bit of work they're doing here to show us how Tony acts with people that he feels he can be playful with.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: The thing that this is also connected to is the side thing with Carmella and Charmaine. Uh, which there—It's—There's really only like two or three beats here.
Sylvi: Um, I love this plotline.
Keith: It's really good because, uh, like it kind of illustrates something about Carmella that hadn't really been explored in the first couple episodes, um, which is like she spends a lot of time being a rich wife of Tony Soprano, um, put—Doing fundraisers that he finds annoying and like directing, um, uh, like cleaners and like house—Like employees of the house. Um, because, uh, the, the, the first scene with them is like she can't find anything nice to say about their new house, and so she compliments its coziness, which is the most backhanded thing that a rich person could say about your house possible. [Sylvi: Oh my god—] Like, I find it charming how small your place is.
Sylvi: Yeah, I was talking about that with my partner while we watched this, where he was like, yeah, every time someone came to our house and wanted to say something about it without directly insulting us, they'd say it was cozy. Yeah, and it just—you always knew what they meant.
Keith: It's, it's even worse. The next one would be home-y. That's like the—That's like one, one thought process better than cozy. Maybe one worse would be lived-in.
Sylvi: Ohhhh.
Keith: This place is so lived-in.
Sylvi: Where does rustic rank?
Keith: Rustic is higher because rustic can be big but made of wood. 
Sylvi: Okay.
Keith: And like, you know, you get some knotted wood and all of a sudden this this place that might otherwise be a mansion is now rustic. Um, uh, but the—So like, she's like, feeling bad for them because she also doesn't know that Tony blew up their restaurant. Uh, so she's like, I should hire them to like, cater this place. And as she's kind of going through the catering stuff as friends with Charmaine, she—the, the camera does this great thing when she beckons her cleaning lady over, where it's just like, like, uh [Sylvi: it's the like, open hand.] Open hand. Yes, totally. It's almost like a fisheye lens.
Sylvi: All of her fingers.
Keith: Oh yeah, we talked a little bit about the super wide camera angles in the first episode where they're getting really close to Tony and kind of like, making him look kind of seasick and distorted, uh, when he's being anxious. And now this is like a kind of impressionistic version of that where Carmella is feeling kind of unreal in this, like, how do I fit into this place? And like, I'm watching my friend like, do this insane thing, which is like, summon the help.
Sylvi: It's also like—Before we move on from this shot specifically, there's some really fun stuff done with like, focus, like, in this episode. Like the camera—Like it starts with Carmella being fully visible and then it just focuses on the hand when it gets put out.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah, there's a shot after that I'll talk about when we finish going through this that I, I think is like, really, really fucking good.
Keith: I have a button for this.
Sylvi: Oh, wonderful.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Charmaine: Okay, so with this budget we can do two waiters for the test hors d'oeuvres, two for the champagne.
Carmella: Oh, it's such a load off. You're helping, Mainey. This whole party has me at 6s and 7s.
Charmaine: Pediatric hospital is such a worthy cause.
Carmella: Oh no. Ona! There's fingerprints all over the breakfront. I want this place to sparkle. She's usually very good. From Poland.
[audio ends]
Keith: I mean, it's just a horrible way to talk to and about someone.
Sylvi: It's, it's—I mean, it's not talking about them like they're a person, right?
Keith: Right. It's dehumanizing. This is a show dog.
Sylvi: I mean, literally like a show dog, by the—When she talks about her being Polish, it's like, oh yeah, she did—It's this breed. It's—Yeah, it's not good.
Keith: It's not good. Um, the, the—yeah, and this is like so off-putting. Like, I don't think we've seen Carmella be off-putting yet. [Sylvi: Uh, she is definitely—] Is getting an AK from a closet off-putting. Um, it was—
Sylvi: No, I think it was kind of funny. The closest we get is her religious stuff, right? 
Keith: The religious stuff is off-putting.
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah, but like, not to this extent. And like it's never been directed at anyone other than like Tony, for example.
Keith: This is not being a good Catholic.
Sylvi: No, that's crazy that the mob wife is not, uh, is not a good Catholic. Um, that's wild. I'm shocked, personally speaking.
Keith:  Um, the, the—this resolves in—On the night of the fundraiser, you know, she's like trying to get—It's tough because she does love their food, and she does think that Artie and Charmaine are talented. And she did feel like the food became the star of the show. And you see her telling people, try the food, try this, try that. But then she summons Charmaine over in the same way, with the same hand.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: And it immediately—Like, I noticed the hand in the first one. I was like, oh, that's a cool thing that they just did with the hand. And when they brought it back, I was like, oh, perfect. I'm great—This is great. I'm so glad that they did this thing with the hand. And now you've, you've like turned Charmaine into Ona from Poland. And like, every thought that you had about how rude that was to do to your house cleaner, now you're like, oh, she did this like, to her friend? Like, that's so terrible. And like, the backdrop of this is the food fight. Like as this is happening basically, Tony and Artie are like in the other room kind of, throwing food at each other. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that's the timeline. Or it was the argument about the money stuff between—
Sylvi: Wait, so what are we trying to lay out here? Sorry. We're trying to lay out the argument about the money. 
Keith: There's one piece that we didn't talk about, which is that Charmaine and Artie have an argument about what's the difference?
Sylvi: That's before. 
Keith: Okay.
Sylvi: That's before it. That's when they're getting ready for it, because she says the legendary line, you're squeezing the quail too much.
Keith: Right. Which is super funny.
Sylvi: Which is really funny.
Keith: Yeah. Okay, 'cause she's dressed—when she comes by and she sees Artie and Tony food fighting, she's smiling in the background, and she's in the party clothes still. So I do think that these scenes follow each other in time.
Sylvi: So, yeah, the food fight—That shot you're talking about where she's looking at them in the food fight, do you see Charmaine out of focus in the background?
Keith: I do, yes.
Sylvi: That's the shot I was talking about, and I love it.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvi: I love her being, like, present, but not, um, not accounted for in the same way that the camera accounts for, uh, Tony, Artie, and Carmella.
Keith: Totally. And this, this scene, this shot, like, I think almost directly follows the calling Charmaine over.
Sylvi: Oh, yes, it does. It does. Yeah.
Keith: Okay. That's what I was saying before.
Sylvi: Okay, sorry. I thought you were talking about the conversation that Carmela and Charmaine have after the party. 
Keith: No, no, no.
Sylvi: What I like about the argument between Artie and Charmaine is that Artie is like the entire time being like, oh, we might as well be cleaning their toilets. Like, he is on, on track with the like, I feel like, I feel like I am being, um—I feel like we're being used, or like that we're being—We're less than because we're working for, for, um, our—People that are supposed to be our friends.
Keith: It's an interesting thing.
Sylvi: Charmaine is the one who, like, pushes back on it until she's actually in it.
Keith: Until she's in the situation.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: It didn't—It felt like, we're taking legitimate money for our actual services. And he was like, Tony's my friend. He shouldn't be hiring me to cater. He should be giving me a loan. And, like, they both think that the other one is morally compromised.
Art: Yeah. It is wild for a chef to think of a catering job as equivalent to cleaning someone's toilets.
Sylvi: Yeah. It's wild.
Art: Unless it's like, unless you're like very far down the like, well, all work is the same. So if I'm working, I might as well be cleaning toilets. It's a real, like, if you don't think cleaning toilets is good and you think what you do is cleaning toilets, I don't know that you picked the right career.
Keith: I felt that it was more like, we’re—I'm like servicing my—who should be my friend.
Art: Sure.
Keith: I don't—I do think plumbers were catching a stray here because later on he's like, I might as well be a plumber. He's clearly got a fixation on this like, fear of being—Of like having a trade instead of being a chef, which is a trade. 
Art: Yeah. I've never hosted a charity dinner for the children's hospital, and none of my friends are caterers, so I don't really know the dynamics here, but I don't think that you're doing someone a disservice by hiring them to do the thing they do. If any of my friends were like, I'm putting together an actual play podcast, would you like money to be on it? I guess an actual play, I'd say no, because I'm sort of using all my energy for that right now. But like any other thing, you know, if you want to come talk about Dexter on this podcast for money? I wouldn't think it was an offensive question.
Keith: I think that it would—I think it's—I can imagine owning a restaurant and feeling like a catering gig was being reduced to something?
Sylvi: Yeah, especially because the way he talks about it, which was like Vesuvio was finally becoming very successful. Right? Like, it was really starting to take off, and that's kind of the thing he keeps repeating in the first couple episodes. It was like, why did this have to happen now? It was finally starting to catch on.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, so I think that also has something to do with how—why he's reacting so strongly, is it's like, it feels like you, you were about to summit the mountaintop and then you got kicked off instead.
Keith: I'm thinking about the, the biggest experience that I have with catering, which is watching the television show Party Down. And I'm like, yeah, if I was Artie, I wouldn't want to be doing that either.
Sylvi: You want to party up.
Keith: I want to party up, not party down. Yeah, it's a good show.
Sylvi: I—you've been recommending it for a very long time, and I will get to it eventually.
Art: It is a good show.
Keith: It's really good. Even the new season, even the years-later sequel season was really good, which is really hard to do. Um, anything else about this thread that, uh, we're missing? Um, before we move on?
Sylvi: Did we talk about the Charmaine and Carmella conversation? Because that’s a pretty big one.
Keith: Oh, um, no, we didn't. I was remembering you referencing it, but that was just from the intro, I think.
Sylvi: Yeah, we should, we should definitely cover that.
Keith: This is crazy.
Sylvi: You don't have a button for that, do you?
Keith: No.
Sylvi: That's OK.
Keith: Uh, let me just double-check that I don't. Um…
Sylvi: Or also just any buttons that would apply to this, 'cause I wanna make sure we're hitting—you go through the trouble to get them.
Art: Just mash the buttons.
Sylvi: Yeah, pretend you're Tony playing Mario Kart.
[laughter]
Keith: He didn't even have the hand on the controller in a way that it would allow him to press the buttons. No, I don't have—I don't have a button for this.
Sylvi: No worries. The—I'm gonna give the gist then instead of a direct quote because I don't have really the direct quote. But Charmaine tells the story about how there was a summer when they were younger, which also, again, like Charmaine, Artie, Tony, and Carmella all growing up together is like a thing we're reminded of here, which, um, you know, again, I brought up earlier, but I like pointing at—I like pointing at things that back me up. Um, they, uh, talks about how, uh, Carmella and Tony were on the outs for a summer and her family was up at the shore, I think is what she says—Uh, Carmella's family. And Charmaine and Tony started dating for that summer, and I believe the way she puts it is, long story short, Tony and I—Tony and I had sex, but I decided it wasn't for me and we broke up. Which is the most like, I am putting this in a way that will—I know will hurt you the most.
Keith: It's a crazy way to say you don't have to pity me because I don't have your money, because I could have had your money, but I didn't like your husband's dick.
Sylvi: It's wild. It's because like, that's like, it's not just because she didn't like his dick, but it makes it sound like it's, it's just because of his dick.
Keith: Yeah. It was so bad, I turned this all down.
Art: It's not a nice thing to say about someone's dick, that’s for sure.
Keith: It's not.
Sylvi: A lot of not nice things happening to dicks in this episode.
Keith: And in, and in some previous episodes, according to Tony's dreams.
Art: Oh yeah.
Keith: Stolen by birds, seabirds.
Sylvi: God. Yeah, you know what, penises are very important to The Sopranos. Um, should we—I can't—We—The Meadow stuff is so simple that I don't know if we really need to talk about it too much.
Art: Well, the Meadow stuff and the, and the Brendan Christopher stuff are sort of—
Sylvi: They're very interlinked.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, I think like, the main thrust of it is just, uh, the stuff about, uh, Meadow being super excited to get away from her family. She like, still is on her I hate being a Soprano shit that we saw in the first couple episodes. Is there anything else we missed from that? Brendan's a creep. Brendan—
Keith: Oh yeah, he's like a mega creep.
Sylvi: He slept with underage girls. Yeah, I'm glad Mikey got his ass. Mm-hmm.
Dre: Yeah, I think this is what should happen to people who are adults that want to have sex with underage people.
Keith: Yeah, and they're also like way—The most—you don't ever want to be the most okay person in a room that's trying to give 16-year-olds crystal meth either.
[Dre laughter]
Sylvi: Yeah, that's fair. 
Dre: Also true.
Keith: Yeah. At least Christopher was doing it in some sort of misguided, helpful way.
Sylvi: That scene is really funny to me in a lot of ways. There's, uh, Brendan doing his bullshit on the pull-up bar. Uh, I think that like—
Dre: Doing a fucking like uneven bars routine over there.
Sylvi: Yeah, he's a very like, short-lived character, but Anthony Dasando, who plays him, does a really funny job in this episode of like, being like, yeah, this is, this is a, uh, a total scumbag who is also probably always on coke or some kind of upper when you see him, uh, and he is the slimiest dude ever. His delivery of like, kids can't protect them, uh, or like something like that, um, uh—
Keith: He says, uh, kids, you think you can protect them, but you can't. 
Sylvi: That's it, that's it. And he says this while he's like doing his weird like, fully rotating bar routine thing.
Keith: This is also just after hitting on a 16-year-old girl, which is not exactly protecting her.
Sylvi: Exactly. He—It is, it is. Oh, what a shithead. What a shithead.
Keith: And then, by the way, I—We talked about that, that Meadow was high while doing the choir thing. She says the meth was for her friend and like, I'm—I don't know how true that that is, but it could be. It could be true that only Hunter is doing the meth.
Art: No, it's definitely not true. They both talk about how they need the meth.
Sylvi: They talk about it on the phone early on too.
Keith: Well, she says that she needs it.
Sylvi: But like, didn't you save any for us?
Keith: Oh yeah, for us is true. Yeah, but they, they make Hunter seem much less responsible because Meadow is like, grossed out and annoyed by um, uh, Brendan and even Christopher a little bit. Um, but, uh, Meadow—there's a lot—not Meadow, uh, Hunter, there's a line where you hear her go, did Brendan get the poem I wrote him? In the background.
Sylvi: That's in the next episode, and that's crazy. He did not, by the way.
Keith: He did not get it yet. Yeah, it arrived late.
Sylvi: Yeah, unless it was—Unless it was etched into a bullet, he did not get it.
Keith: But can you imagine having that encounter with that guy and then like writing a poem for him? That's insane. Also, you're high on, on meth while you do it.
Sylvi: Yeah, if I was, if I was a methed-out teenager, maybe.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, I was about to say, no, when you reminded me that they're high on meth, that does make sense.
Sylvi: I didn't get my, I didn't get my Adderall or my ADHD med prescription until later in life, so I only, I only got to be like this when I was an adult, which meant less poetry. Is there—I'm trying to think. I feel like we've touched pretty much everything in this episode. The montage at the end, I guess, would be a good place to cap things off. Right? Or do we really—are there any specifics we need to get into outside of what happens to Brendan and Chris?
Art: I really love—Chris comes over to give her the meth, and he walks in the front door, Carmella's back is turned, and he thinks he's being very slick and walks up the stairs. And we just see Carmella notice immediately. Just like, he doesn't work at all.
Keith: Um, sorry, what, what is the scene?
Sylvi: He's coming to give, uh, Meadow the crystal. Um, he, uh, he is like, sort of like skulks into the house thinking that Carmella hasn't seen him, but she has.
Keith: Yeah. Um, and good cover from Meadow because I would assume that Carmella wouldn't assume that he was there to sell her crystal meth.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: But it would still not be in Christopher's best interest to not have a good excuse why he was in her daughter's room.
Sylvi: Exactly.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: And Meadow is a very good liar.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: You also, you also know that she takes the crystal meth because she's like doing She's simulating being on crystal meth at the concert. She's like licking her gums in the middle of singing.
Keith: Oh, she is? I didn't even notice that.
Sylvi: I didn't notice that. That's a really good touch.
Art: That's not how people act. [Sylvi laughter] I mean, if you lick your gums a lot, you're still people, but it's, it's a thing that people that are tweaking do. I don't do crystal meth.
Keith: Why not? It's sick.
Art: It's important, I think, for me to say that. 
Sylvi: My I don't do crystal meth t-shirt is also raising a lot of questions. I took off the last one and I changed, but now everyone's really confused about this one too. Weird.
Art: Yeah, I should start shopping at a different store, I think.
Sylvi: Yeah, man. The, the, the Declarative Statement T-Shirt Company is really—They—It's hard to deal with some of the stuff they're putting out.
Art: My I'm a loyal customer at the Declarative Statement T-Shirt Company is—anyway.
Keith: They shoot Brendan through the eye. It's a good scene.
Sylvi: Yes, Mikey shoots him. Mikey shoots him. He says, hi Jack, bye Jack, after shooting him, which is like, oh, you dork.
Keith: And then Junior was in the fucking apartment. If I was sending someone out to do a hit, I wouldn't also be at the scene of the crime.
Art: Yeah, I think that's a good idea.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Because it defeats the purpose of having someone else do it. 
Art: I—It's like they really wanted you to know that Junior did it, and it's like, yeah, I don't I'm, I'm watching the show, guys.
Dre: I know who this guy works for.
Keith: Um, uh, yeah, they shoot him in the bathtub and then we don't find—they don't find him until the next episode. Uh, and it's, it's been a while. It's been a little bit. Uh, any last thoughts?
Art: Uh, Christopher thinks he's being—Christopher gets mock executed and he thinks it's because Tony found out about the crystal.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvi: And, um, he begs for his life. There's a really funny moment where, uh, he says, I know you speak English, and one of the guys goes, no, we don't. I thought it was really good. I thought that was really good. Um, and, uh, while the choir's singing, he like pulls the trigger. Chris is like—Chris has this like—there's this really good like tight close-up on, uh, Michael Imperioli's eyes during this bit, like closing and then reopening. Um, and then we do get another one of the mobsters after they drop him going, pee-yew! 'Cause Chris pooped himself.
Keith: Oh. [laughter]
Sylvi: Um, and then he's just laying there writhing on the ground because his neck is all jacked up.
Keith: This is the best looking scene in the episode.
Sylvi: It looks really good.
Keith: It's gorgeous.
Sylvi: It's shot—Like, it's shot—It's all shot at night. It's, um, uh, he gets like jumped outside of this, uh, uh, actually outside of an ice cream truck. Like, he just bought something at an ice cream truck when he gets jumped. Um, so there's a lot of this like, uh, like faint ambient light at the beginning of it, and then when they go down to—Are they on like docks or something?
Keith: They're on a dock, yeah. They're at a pier or something. Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, do you just have—it's like everything's sort of like wet and like—
Keith: This might be a jetty.
Sylvi: Oh, it's a jetty. Making regretty on the jetty. Oh, I wish I didn't poop my pants.
Keith: He's making regretty on—oh no, wait, is it a berth? Maybe it's a—or is it a wharf? I couldn't tell you.
Sylvi: I don't know, man. I haven't watched Star Trek.
Dre: I was gonna guess a jetty, honestly. That sounds right.
Sylvi: But yeah, I really like how all this looks. I think that like, they—This episode in general has a lot of like quietly good-looking scenes, and then at the end they, they really go for it with this, with this mock execution scene.
Keith: I've seen movies where they act like they're gonna shoot someone in the head and then it clicks and there's nothing. And every time that I see something, I think about how that would be the worst thing in the world to go through. Like, it would just be so bad to have someone act like they're gonna shoot you in the head and then you hear a click and then instead of dying, you're just there. That sounds so awful. I mean, extremely traumatizing. I'm sure Christopher's fine.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: I bet he keeps being fine for a bunch of seasons of TV.
Art: I bet he's super fine in the next episode.
Keith: I bet he's fine. Yeah, I bet we come back and he's fine.
Dre: Completely unscathed. No injuries. Nothing.
Sylvi: Do you want to take 5 and then get into the next episode then? Or is there anything we missed that you want to beat on?
Art: I would like to raise one thing.
Sylvi: Please do.
Art: Just because I think it's a, it's a thing to keep an eye on as time goes on, which is that, like, how old do people think Christopher—how old do you think Christopher is? How old do you think Brendan is? And—
Keith: Um, 23?
Sylvi: Oh, I think older than that, personally.
Dre: 25, 26 for Christopher?
Keith: Well, he's gonna be old enough—he's gonna be young enough for Tony to love him like a son, but he also has to be old enough to look like how he looks.
Art: Sure.
Keith: And so if you asked me, guess how old that actor is, I would have said that he's older than 23. But if I'm guessing how old the character is, I would say he's got to be like 23 because—
Art: What do you think the age difference is between Michael Imperioli and James Gandolfini?
Sylvi: Oh, I think I know that. I'm abstaining because I think I know that.
Keith: I think it's like, I bet it's 7 years.
Dre: 10, 15 years.
Art: It's 5 years.
Keith: Ooh, I was very close because I knew, I know that James Gandolfini was like 36 during the filming of the pilot. And so he's gotta be 36, 37 here.
Art: And I, and, and the show eventually does like completely nail it down. But it's one of those things where these two characters are so much closer in age than the—
Keith: Than the actors.
Art: The show. Yeah. Than the—No, I think the show eventually will nail it down at they're 8 years apart.
Sylvi: Yeah. 
Art: The way that Tony treats Christopher… [Sylvi: Almost insulting.] It's so bizarre.
Keith: It's almost—yeah, it's kind of crazy actually. He treats him like an apprentice, which—
Art: Yeah, like, I mean, 8 years is, is a lot when you're a kid, right?
Keith: Right. If you're in the mafia and you're 25 because your dad was in the mafia and you've got a little buddy that's 17 and he's your little toady guy, that makes sense. But if then 12 years later, you're still treating him like that. It's kind of crazy. It really feels like there's 15 years between them, which is why I guess—
Art: And for what it's worth, the actor who plays Brendan is one year older than Michael Imperioli.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: So they're like both—These actors are both in their early 30s, early to mid-30s when this is happening.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: And I just think that like, they're not playing it like—They're not playing it like Christopher is twice as old as Meadow.
Sylvi: No, it, it, he feels like, um, like an older sibling with like a significant age gap, but not like—
Keith: Yeah.
Art: Although I guess if he's 8 years younger than Tony and Meadow's 16, that means he's 8 years older than Meadow. But like, that's not the same. Like, that gap doesn't feel the same, right? It doesn't feel like Christopher is—
Keith: I stand by—
Art: Meadow’s Tony, you know?
Keith: I stand by 23. That seems like about how he's acting. He acts like—
Art: Sure.
Keith: He acts like he's James Gandolfini's 23-year-old mafia apprentice.
Art: And then in the prequel, they fuck it all up, but we'll get to that when we get to that.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvi: Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm pretty sure Many Saints of Newark makes this super, super fucking messy.
Art: Yeah, I mean, again, we'll get to it when we get to it, but David Chase said he did not rewatch the show before making Many Saints of Newark, and it shows.
Sylvi: It shows.
Keith: Damn.
Sylvi: All right.
Keith: I would rewatch it.
Art: Yeah. He doesn't watch television.
Keith: That's fine, but it's part—It should be—He should consider it part of his job, I think, in this one case.
Art: I think he figured they're gonna pay him anyway.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: That—There's a lot we'll talk about when we get there, if we get there. The movie sucks.
Sylvi: Oh, Art, I'm so glad that we're on the same page. I think that movie's ass.
Art: But it might be, it might be part of the project.
Sylvi: It is definitely part of the project.
Keith: Yeah, maybe it's a bonus.
Art: It feels like shitty to waste a bonus on it.
Sylvi: Maybe we'll talk about this off the air. Yeah.
Episode 4 [01:30:59]
Keith: Yeah. Sylvi, do you want to hit us with the recap for part 2?
Sylvi: I would love to. So the second episode is titled Meadowlands, and it—This gives us our first on-screen dream sequence of the series. We've had one described, but we haven't seen one. Uh, this is something I'm gonna leave for after the recap. I have a little like, list of all the images in it, but, uh, trying to do that right now would just—I'd write more about it than I would the rest of the episode. Thesis statement, though, is that Tony is very paranoid, and that paranoia is made worse later in the day when he sees Silvio in the same medical complex that Dr. Melfi works out of. Trying to make himself feel a little bit more secure in things, he asks a detective who owes him money—I believe his name is Vic—Vic… Makazian. ...to follow her and make sure, you know, make sure he can trust her, I guess, is kind of the implied reason why he's doing this. But we never really get like, a real explanation from Tony. All this really ends up accomplishing is having Melfi have a date ruined. Said date gets his ass kicked when they're pulled over.
Keith: And when you say date ruined, you mean that he is ruined as a person?
Sylvi: He is ruined, yes. And then he gets his—They get pulled over, he gets his ass kicked by Vic, who is is pretty clearly drunk, um, and then afterwards is sort of like a shell of a man.
Keith: Yeah, I can't believe this mobbed-up police lieutenant has a few screws loose.
Sylvi: I know, right? This guy with crazy gambling debts that just—He keeps seeming to be digging deeper and deeper. Uh, meanwhile, Christopher is fresh out of the hospital sporting a neck brace this entire episode, and after confronting Meadow about whether or not she told her dad about the meth, realizes that Junior and Mikey are the ones behind Brendan's death. Uh, he's, um, he's pissed off, looking for revenge. But when he tells Tony, Tony instead handles it for him because Mikey is a made guy. He beats the shit out of Mikey and does some backyard wrestling style staple gun action to him, uh, and makes tensions between Junior and Tony even worse. Tony confronts his uncle about what he did to Brendan and Chrissy, but the conversation quickly devolves to the point where Junior warns Tony to, quote, come heavy the next time he wants to talk, or don't come at all. The rising tension in the family is just getting worse with Jackie's deteriorating condition, leaving a power vacuum up at the top of the DiMeo family. Some other capos in the family meet with Tony, making it clear that they support him to be the boss of Jersey instead of Junior. But Tony's reluctant to accept the job, with the attention from law enforcement getting even worse after he'd accept it. This all comes to a head when Tony has another panic attack while in the kitchen. Not one where he loses consciousness, but still pretty bad. And he tells Carmella he's debating quitting therapy. She threatens him with divorce, and after he has another session where he gets some advice from Melfi about how to deal with elderly family members, he decides to stay. Now, worth mentioning that this advice is supposed to be for dealing with his mother, but Tony is not going to use it that way. Tony puts—Shortly after this, actually, Jackie passes away, and Tony puts that advice from Melfi into action, a little differently than she'd expect. The arrangement that he makes is this: Junior gets to be the boss of the family, but unbeknownst to him, he would be functionally a figurehead, a lightning rod for the FBI attention, while Tony remains the real Don and power in New Jersey. This is something that's sort of signed off on by a lot of the—We get like a dinner scene where this isn't specifically signed off on, but you get the impression that all these guys are fully behind Tony.
Keith: Yeah, there's a line where Junior's like, you would do this? And Tony says, I do. And he's like, and the other captains like are—It can't—Like, will sign off? Or like, you, you, or you can, you can speak for them? And he's like, I can.
Sylvi: Yeah. Which, you know, that's the, that's the real, the real power right there.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, the—this episode also gives us our first AJ storyline, our first proper one. He sends some classic “your mom” pages. Is that—That's the singular form of paging someone, I suppose, right? I wrote texts here and then I was like, that's not right. He sends some classic “your mom” pages to another student at school, Nicholas Piacosta. The two of them get into a scuffle, ripping AJ's shirt in the process. AJ tries to get Nicholas, the kid he's been fighting with, to pay for his shirt, but the two of them get into a proper fistfight, and since there's no clear winner, they set a rematch up after school the next day. Unbeknownst to AJ though, Nicholas's dad has a little run-in with Tony, and despite Tony genuinely just trying to be friendly and organize some stuff between them and their kids, Mr. Piacosta thinks he's being threatened. Might have something to do with the big axe Tony's holding the entire scene. The fight is set to take place after school, but instead Nicholas just hands AJ the money, the $40 he asked for for the shirt, making AJ ask questions about who his dad really is for, I guess, the first time in his life, after some friends are like, oh yeah, he's really scared of you, in the aftermath of the fight. Meadow, after AJ asks her why this would have happened, shows AJ a great mob website so he can learn about his family's involvement with them. The episode ends at Jackie's funeral, where the FBI are staking out the ceremony, taking pictures. The rest of the family is paying tribute to Junior. The rest of the crime family specifically, is paying tribute to Junior. And AJ looks on seeing who his dad really is for presumably the first time. Um, yeah, that's my summary. How are we? I probably elided a couple things that we can get into here. Like I said, the dream I've got in a whole separate doc just to keep things, um, keep things a little more streamlined. But we could start there if you guys want. Um, Keith, Dre, any high-level thoughts on this first time as first-time viewers?
Keith: Uh, I said this during the break to Art, but this, uh, the staple gun is my favorite violence so far.
Sylvi: Hell yeah.
Keith: It was really good violence.
Dre: I gotta tell you about a guy named Swerve Strickland, Keith.
Sylvi: Yeah, we—This is how we got Keith into wrestling.
Keith: It's not gonna work.
Sylvi: It's not gonna work. I know it's not gonna work. Um, yeah, it's really good. That whole scene of him beating the shit out of Mikey is really funny.
Keith: Um, uh, you said you want to start with the dream sequence because that's the first thing?
Sylvi: Might as well, unless you guys want to talk about something else. 
Keith: It does—it, it is essentially a prophetic dream.
Sylvi: It's, it's interesting. There's a lot going on here. So I, I did not write this out like as a proper summary. I just kind of wrote out like the sequence, the events that happen, but these are at the very least in order. Dream starts in Melfi's office with Tony very blatantly checking out Melfi as per usual.
Keith: But way more, way more. Immediately I was like, what the fuck is happening? And I was like, oh.
Sylvi: The camera is also doing it too, right? Like, you can kind of assume that he's been doing it himself, but when the camera follows along with it, you're like, this is his POV.
Keith: Um, I saw my sister for Mother's Day yesterday, who is excited that I'm watching The Sopranos because she is a fan. And, uh [Sylvi: Hell yeah.] The first thing that she was talking about was who she called Dr. Milfy.
Sylvi: I mean, you know, it's literally—It’s not wrong.
Keith: It isn’t. So this is—she is with Tony Soprano on this, although she's also in love with Tony Soprano. So this is her taste.
Sylvi: There's a few people who are. He's, he's attractive.
Keith: He's kind of like badass George Costanza.
Sylvi: He's a little bit like badass George Costanza. What if—oh my God, what if George Costanza was epic?
Keith: Um, and I—Look, sometimes George Costanza has it.
Sylvi: I mean, yeah. Dude's a—dude's a marine biologist or whatever.
Art: No, I think that the, the real crime of this—When this show was on is like, everyone treat—Like it felt like people treated Tony as if he were like, utterly unattractive.
Keith: No.
Sylvi: It's crazy.
Art: And it's not true?
Keith: No.
Art: Um, you know, to say nothing of like James Gandolfini is like a professional actor, which is like, they're almost never bad looking.
Sylvi: There's some like, really great shots of him.
Art: He's a handsome man with a good amount of charisma. He's just like a little overweight.
Keith: Uh-huh.
Art: It's, it's, it's wild the way people treat him.
Sylvi: It's basically the whole thing, right? It's just because of his size. It's shitty.
Keith: You can say the same thing about George Costanza.
Art: Don't get me started about how people end up treating—was it season 3? One of the seasons, people are like, oh my God. People really got into that Meadow had gained weight.
Sylvi: Jesus fucking Christ.
Art: As we go on, you'll know that it's—I mean, she probably did, but not like—People were like, oh.
Sylvi: Yeah, her plotline in season—Like, the first thing she talks about in season 1 is, in character, is having an eating disorder. And then everyone who watched the show was like, all right, bet. Yeah, let's make that happen.
Art: The '90s and early 2000s were a really horrible time to be a person with a body.
Sylvi: Yeah. Good things have changed so much though.
Art: It's, it's not like it was.
Keith: It's getting back there. I think it's getting back there.
Sylvi: I was gonna say, it's getting close. Um, all right, so I'm gonna keep going with this dream. Um, a crow caws, and then Tony looks up and sees Hesh walking by the window. He's informed that he has a 3 o'clock appointment. Then Tony leaves the office, and, uh, we see AJ—and Tony actually also sees AJ peering at him through a doorway after he leaves. He goes into the waiting room where he sees Silvio having sex with a stripper while Paulie reads a newspaper that—I don't know if either anybody else noticed it, it's either in Chinese or Japanese. I didn't get a good look at the characters, but it is definitely in like, some kind of kanji, which I thought was like, really a fun way of doing the like, you can't understand written text in your dream. So—But instead of like making a fake newspaper, they just put it in a language Tony wouldn't understand.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Um, Big Pussy is also there reading a paper, uh, Pussy sighting. Um, and then Tony goes back to the office and sees Melfi sitting there with his back to—With her back to him. He goes to confront her, but Jackie is there next to her in his hospital bed talking about thunderstorms and how the smell of rain before it falls. The heart monitor beeps and eventually—The heart monitor beeps, getting quicker, and then eventually flatlines while he he tries to confront dream Melfi, only for her to spin around and reveal his mother with her hair and clothes—With Melfi's hair and clothes, to be specific. And that wakes Tony up next to his, uh, his mistress. That's the dream.
Keith: That's the dream.
Sylvi: What'd you guys think of it?
Keith: Uh, I love a dream in a TV show. Um, I wasn't sure what it was supposed to be like, why is this happening? Um, but I did like how bits of this dream came up in the episode. You know, what did it mean? I don't know. It could—You know, like, it is, I guess, you know, he's thinking about all of this stuff. He's worried about getting caught at a therapist. He's worried about his friend dying. Um, he's worried about his kids. He's worried about the women who he thinks have control over his life. And kind of seeing bits of this dream come up in this episode, I thought was really fun. Most notably how seeing later on, seeing Silvio—In the, in the dream, he doesn't want to be seen by Hesh, because Hesh is there.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, but then it's actually Silvio who he does actually see at the same hospital getting—he's having a dentist appointment like, almost across the hall from Melfi.
Sylvi: Yeah, he literally has to duck into a different office to avoid being seen.
Keith: Yeah, and then we even, even down to, you know, he sees his son seeing him, like staring at him through the thing, and the son is the first person that we see in the episode outside of the dream. But then a big part of this episode is kind of his son seeing him for the first time as a guy who's in organized crime instead of as a guy who's in waste management.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Dre: His dad, a hero who helps to find missing cars.
Keith: Yeah, with normal Uncle Pussy.
Sylvi: Normal Uncle Pussy. What a beautiful phrase. Oh my god.
Keith: Um, good episode. This episode was a little—It was more straightforward. There was—I think it relied on that there's like, big emotions happening, and so there was like, fewer threads. The stories were simpler. Um, and, uh, but I think they got a lot of mileage out of like, having a less complicated episode that leaned on big feelings.
Sylvi: Yeah, I think I'm with you on that. I think that, like, this episode is really focused in on the tension between Junior and Tony, and then the loss of Jackie, and then everything else around it is, like, still, you know, good and, like, interesting. But for the most part, I feel like the episode primarily focuses on those things. Um, and then we get a—like, the AJ stuff is a nice little, like, sort of B-plot to it. Um, but, like, there's no, like, major—Outside of, like, a lot of the—I guess the main thing is a lot of the plots kind of come back to, uh, link back together. Like, the Chris stuff from the first episode ends up coming back and getting linked back to Tony because he talks about how, um, Junior and Mikey were the ones who killed Brendan and, uh, mock-executed him. And like the secret about the, the crystal meth gets like, swept under the rug because he talks to Meadow about it. Like it's all—it's, it's kind of like—There's stuff that, that they do a good job of both continuing the plotlines from the last episode and then working them into the sort of like, dominant narrative going forward, um, that I really enjoy.
Keith: Did you mention this episode also introduces, um, Christopher's girlfriend as a speaking character?
Sylvi: Right, yeah, I spaced on—that was, yeah, last time Adriana and—Adriana, she has a scene in the last episode too, in episode 3, where Adriana is like, you can't let—you have to be the one who sells Meadow crystal meth or else she'll get—I think she says they'll sell her Ajax. Oh yeah, right, yeah, yeah. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of—They're all very racist in that scene, you know.
Keith: Yeah, I didn't even know what the—I could tell that what they were saying was racist, but I didn't even know what they were saying.
Sylvi: Yeah, that's, that's one of the many Italian slurs that they will use in this show.
Keith: Does everybody but me know what it was a slur for?
Sylvi: For Black people.
Keith: Okay. I mean, I'm—
Sylvi: I am, uh, fine just letting you know that, like, because I think Adriana might even mention, like, Black guys or something about the Jefferson Avenue thing. We didn't really get into it because we were talking about Brendan being a pest for that scene.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually even forgot that that scene was in that episode because we didn't talk about Adriana at all. Adriana?
Sylvi: Yeah, my bad. I'm sorry. No, no, no. It's fine. It's fine.
Keith: She's a great character.
Sylvi: She's great. She's so much fun in this episode. She—You can see why they wanted to make her, like, after they met Drea de Matteo, wanted to like, write a role for her because she does a great job performing this. Um, shaking my head to show that I do not agree with anything she is talking about in 2026.
Keith: Damn, but back then you would have. Fuck.
Sylvi: Yeah, I mean, I meant the actress. I meant the actress, Keith. I'm shaking my head. I don't agree with anything the actress is saying in 2026.
Keith: Oh, oh, the actress. Okay, I thought you meant the character who we were just talking about was saying slurs.
Sylvi: No, no, no.
Keith: Damn. You telling me that Italian people are still racist in 2026? Fuck.
Sylvi: I know, right? It's fucking crazy.
Keith: Um, the, uh, I, I linked a picture because after he gets out of the dream, he finds his son playing Mario Kart too late at night, which is extremely relatable. Shout out to AJ. Um, and then he plays, he just sits down and plays Mario Kart with him. Better dad than my dad. Um, and then he picks up the controller in the wrong hand, like a total lunatic. Look at the way he's holding that. I couldn't get over this. He's holding it. He's holding the center, um, prong of the N64 controller in his right hand. So he has no access to any of the buttons. Isn't that bizarre? Isn't that so weird?
Sylvi: He's innovating.
Keith: And then he like, he's like, it's such a funny way that he—to show that he doesn't really know what he's doing because he's also like sort of pointing the controller at the TV like it's a remote that you have to aim with the IR. He's like holding it up at the TV, um, where his son is just holding it normal. Also, his son takes the red controller. Shout out. Also relatable. Give your dad the shitty regular gray one. That's, that's what I would do too, if it ever came up, which it didn't.
Sylvi: Damn. Damn.
Keith: And then, then we go to the hospital and see what has happened to Christopher.
Sylvi: It's so funny. Do you want to describe this?
Keith: Christopher is in—He's got—Let's go from the bottom up.
Sylvi: Okay.
Keith: Knees scraped to shit. Um, khaki-colored linen shorts, looks like. Silly, but fine. Stupid graphic tee. Giant neck brace. Oakley sunglasses or something like that?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Big stupid sunglasses, jackass '90s sunglasses for assholes. And it's so funny. And a duffel bag. Um, hold on, just the pose here is also really good. Um, and, uh, he's mad because, uh, he thinks that his life is in danger and that his girlfriend isn't taking it serious enough.
Sylvi: And how does she reply?
Keith: I can't remember, but she's like, don't be a fucking baby, is basically what—
Sylvi: He's like, oh yeah, Tony Soprano's in disguise. You think Tony Soprano's hiding? And she's like, excuse me, are you Ton—She goes up to someone and is like, excuse me, are you Tony Soprano? Or maybe he's in the garbage. And she leans forward into the garbage can and is like, hello? She's so funny.
Keith: And then, but later on, he follows up on this idea that Tony could be like waiting in the back of the car to shoot him in the head by doing that same thing to Meadow.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Which is really funny.
Sylvi: The fucking Meadow scene is just really funny in general, 'cause he like—They pick her up from high school to sort of—We can just go through the Chris stuff now, I suppose. They pick her up from high school to be like, did you tell your dad that I sold you meth? Like, he's really, really intense about it.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: And she's like, no, are you kidding? He'd kill me. And then he's like gripping her or something, and he's like, stop, you're hurting me. All the while Adriana's trying to drive through this fucking high school parking lot, and it's a—It's total chaos.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: And eventually—
Keith: Well, they're panicking because she, she found Brendan dead.
Sylvi: They found Brendan. They found Brendan dead. That is a really crucial thing I missed.
Keith: Flies buzzing around him.
Sylvi: They found Brendan dead. Um, it's like—It's really funny because Chris is trying to be like a big shot when he first walks in, like talking to Brendan because he thinks he's like in another room. He's like, you should have seen these—it took him two nurses to hold me down, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh shit, my, my buddy's dead. My buddy has been shot in the face. Um, but, uh, the thing I was—sorry, I got really thrown off. The thing I was going to bring up, which is after, uh, he lets go of Meadow in the car and starts apologizing because she like reassures him that, that Tony doesn't know, um, one, he offers to take her to McDonald's and get her one of those Happy Meals you always used to like. And Adriana goes, where are you right now, which is a really funny reply. Um, and then, um, uh, she, uh, Meadow's like, I hate—I hate my life, I hate being a Soprano. And then Chris, in his fucking like faux-enlightened voice, is like, never say you hate life, you never know when you'll lose it, or something like that. And it's so funny.
Keith: What a dramatic baby.
Sylvi: He—his one brain cell is really working overtime.
Dre: He's had a very bad weekend.
Keith: He has had a—He's had—He's been having a bad few weeks, it seems like.
Dre: That's true.
Keith: And that's the only time we know, so maybe he's just always having a few bad weeks.
Art: Maybe he's having a bad life.
Keith: Yeah, he might be having a bad life.
Sylvi: What? In The Sopranos?
Keith: Um, do we want to go to the next scene chronologically, which is the scene with Livia?
Sylvi: Yeah, sure. Oh yeah, this is a great scene. So I didn't include this in the summary just because, like—
Keith: [crosstalk] I have a button for this.
Sylvi: [crosstalk] I wanted to stick to sort of plot-propulsive stuff, but this is like some really good character work when Tony comes to see Livia. So yeah, please hit the button.
Keith: Um, yeah, it was striking to me because the last thing that we saw was her sentencing Brendan to death, uh, protecting Christopher, um, uh, giving Junior the idea to what we—I don't think we talked about, which is, um, having Junior try to claim Christopher as like his new guy? Um, or maybe that happened—
Sylvi: Yeah. That happens in this—That happens, I think, after Tony knows that Brendan's dead, isn't it?
Keith: Um, I can't remember when it happens.
Sylvi: Okay. He does confront Junior, and then Junior tells him that he wants Chris to work for him.
Keith: Yeah. Um, and, uh, and so he goes to visit his mom, uh, at the, uh, at the asylum. Um, at the, the, the retirement community. He's trying to do a nice thing, visit his mom, bring her her favorite dessert. I—It was—I think it was—I decided when she blames him for not coming to see her while he's there to see her that I wanted to include it.
Sylvi: Yes. Great.
[audio from The Sopranos plays]
Tony: Remember that pastry place, Ferrara's? Brought you some macaroons.
Livia: Oh, they're too sweet.
Tony: What are you talking about? They're your favorite. The activities director, uh, Rosie, says they're organizing a trip to the city. Dinner and a show. And you don't want to go?
Livia: I don't like that people here. 
Tony: You don't know the people here.
Livia: In that city, grown men soiling themselves.
Tony: It's not like that anymore, Ma.
Livia: That Giuliani.
Tony: Maybe we should just stick to the field trip.
Livia: Mothers throwing their babies out of skyscraper windows.
Tony: You're always with the babies out the windows.
Keith: Always with the babies out the windows!
Tony: You know, I don't see you trying to mix with the other ladies here or talk to the nice gents I see walking around. You're not making the most of your opportunities.
Livia: What do you care? Out of sight, out of mind.
Tony: We don't think like that. Not me or Carm or the kids.
Livia: I wish the Lord would take me now.
Tony: You know, I come here to get cheered up. You think that's a mistake?
Livia: You're being sarcastic.
Tony: You can't put all your problems on me. This is the most expensive retirement community in New Jersey, and if you wanted to, you could be happy here, but you're just pissing it all down the drain.
Livia: That's beautiful language for your mother.
Tony: You want the macaroons?
Livia: I don't care. Leave some out for the lunatics. 
Tony: Goodbye, ma.
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, extremely important to note here, at the very beginning of that clip when he says she has macaroons, you can watch her be happy about it on her face for about half a second until she remembers to be critical and nasty for no reason.
Sylvi: It's literally like she, she makes like a little like, ah, they're too sweet. And during that noise, like, you, you can see the smile fading off of her. Yeah, it's really good.
Keith: Mm, just the all-time worst character. She's so—I just can't stand her.
Sylvi: She's awful. It’s great.
Keith: It's so good. I love it. It's amazing. And then I also like that when he's kind of sarcastic and mean back to her, and she's like, beautiful language for your mother. She gets a little bit of joy from that too. It goes the other way where she's saying, how can you talk to me? How could you say piss to me? Basically. But also, it's kind of the most pleased with anything that he said she ever is. And I thought that was interesting too.
Sylvi: Yeah, it's like there's a lot of people in the show who you feel like they are, uh, at their happiest when they're grousing at each other.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvi: Like, if you think about all the relationships, a lot of them, like, they—there's like arguments are kind of like a backbone for a lot of them. Um, yeah, which, you know, not necessarily unrealistic, but also like very much evident in the show that like every like—Not just romantic relationships, but a lot of like, familial and like, interpersonal relationships are built on bickering. I mean, look at Paulie Walnuts. That's his whole deal.
Keith: But she tells him to take the things because she doesn't care, the macaroons, and then he does, and then—But she's like, she stops him from taking them all because she—Because she wants them.
Sylvi: Yeah, but she doesn't want him to know that she does.
Keith: Yeah, it's just like—I don't know, it's just pure evil. It's so just like there's—Like, it's—it is—
Art: This and Hitler.
[laughter]
Sylvi: That's—
Keith: I mean, she's sort of like—It's like someone took the cutting off your nose to spite your face, uh, idiom and like turned it into a person. Like, she's literally hurting herself to hurt her son for no reason.
Dre: I'm so fascinated to like, see how much we learn about her and like if she was always this way or like, do we get like stories about like back when Livia was like, happy or not awful?
Keith: We got one.
Dre: I'm really interested. That's true. Yeah. Laughing at when the man fell down the stairs, yeah.
Keith: Her husband. Her husband. Uh, and who knows, you know, maybe it was really genuinely funny, but it's the only thing that, that we had—The only evidence we have of her being happy is that, which is so funny.
Dre: I mean, it can be funny when someone falls down the stairs.
Keith: Totally.
Dre: Let's be very clear.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: But hey, I was laughing when this guy was getting fucking stapled in his chest. That was funny as hell. This guy's getting staple gunned right in his chest. That's hilarious. Look at how hurt he looked. Which is, by the way, the next thing that happens. We see him leaving the hospital, um, and he sees a staple gun and goes like, oh, I know what to do with that.
Sylvi: It's horrible to do that to somebody who's suffering from an illness. Fuckfaceitis is like, really serious.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: And like, just doing that to somebody while they're struggling with that, I think Tony Soprano might be a little problematic.
Dre: The medicine that you have to take for your fuckfaceitis can make your blood like, really thin, and so it's really dangerous to get stapled a lot.
Sylvi: He could have—he could have died. [Dre: Yeah.] He feared for his life.
Art: The blood thinners you take for fuckfaceitis are—
Keith: Um, here, wait, do you want to see—
Dre: It’s so your face can get rearranged and it's got less fuck all over it.
Keith: Do you want to see Mikey displaying symptoms of fuckfaceitis?
Sylvi: I would love that.
Keith: Here, here's one of him. Here's—He's displaying—
Sylvi: Oh no, you can see all the blood. The blood isn't from the being punched in the face. It's from his disease.
Keith: Yeah, it's from his disease. Um, it's, it's really funny because, uh, uh, this is not—This is not the first time that like, Tony has, um, like, heard, uh, about, um, why—Okay, yes, so now I remember what I was gonna say. This is not the first time that that like, Christopher has come to Tony with information and Tony is like, chastising Christopher for whatever his fault in how things are shaking out came about, but then he's immediately gone and like, sought revenge on Christopher's behalf. Uh, it happened in the—One of the first two episodes, I don't remember. But I, but I remember when watching this, when he goes and beats the shit out of Mikey that I was like, oh, he did that thing again where he calls Christopher an idiot and tells him this is all his own fault, but then he goes and does violence for him.
Sylvi: That's, that's his love language.
Keith: His love language is committing violence, acts of violence. Yeah, there we go.
Dre: I mean, you could even kind of like, now that I'm thinking about it, like the scene with his son playing video games is like, it goes from him trying to like, oh, let's talk, to oh, let's play the video game together, to oh well, the only way I know how to connect now is to like, bully you and like, physically stop you from playing the game with me.
Keith: Yeah, his son was beating him, so he like—so he like noogied him into losing, basically.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Gotta make sure my son knows I'm better than him at Mario Kart. Gotta big-time a 13-year-old.
Sylvi: He has—He's teaching him a lesson.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Never take your eyes off the road.
Dre: It's important.
Sylvi: Is that the one, the thing he says is his lesson? I can't remember. Or no, no, it's look out for distractions. That's your lesson.
Keith: Mm-hmm. We couldn't figure out where it was. This is the scene where Junior says, why don't you give me Christopher?
Sylvi: Yes.
Keith: He staple guns Mikey and then he goes inside and then uh, Christopher's like, you got to keep them in line. Do I have a button for this? Yeah, uh, I do. Um, here.
[audio from The Sopranos plays]
Junior: Your boys were warned and still they embarrassed me.
Tony: I run my crew my way. What you did was extreme.
Junior: Now you're my judge? I answer to bigger people than you, my friend.
Tony: Oh, like Jackie? Want to take this to his deathbed?
Junior: That nephew of yours we gave a high colonic, uh, he earns good?
Tony: He's coming up.
Junior: Okay. He works for me now.
Tony: Excuse me?
Junior: Maybe he gives you ajita for a change.
Tony: You got some set of balls, you know that? Absolutely not. 
Junior: I show you my hand and you slap it away.
Tony: What's the matter with you? Why can't we talk like adults anymore, huh?
Junior: Out. Next time you come in, you come heavy or not at all.
[audio ends]
Keith: I love Junior's kind of flip of, uh, hey, why don't I take Christopher from you? As like, I offered you peace and you fucking spat in my face. And it's like, it's such like, a funny gangster thing to do, to be like, I'm giving you an unreasonable offer, and then act all offended when you say no.
Sylvi: Uh-huh.
Keith: Because really he's being a baby. He's being a big baby, which they get into immediately. I wrote he's being a baby in my notes, and then, uh, Melfi eventually goes like, have you considered that your uncle and your mother are being big babies?
Sylvi: Are being—that you need to treat them like—You have children, right? I think it's something she literally says.
Dre: You gotta let them think they're in charge.
Sylvi: Yeah, exactly. Uh, it's, it's great. I love whenever Tony is like, oh, therapy advice—Let me—ooh, this is something I can weaponize.
Art: I'll use the therapy to do better crime.
Keith: And he does.
Sylvi: Why did nobody think of this before?
Keith: Uh, and, and I, I also, I love how this episode is a great example of like how he uses the therapy to do better crimes, but also like—All of the—All of these things, you know, like, they're so—They're—He's in therapy because they're applicable to him, but he's not using them for him. He's using them for, like, vengeance. Because he's—Again, he's trying to quit therapy. He's become paranoid that he's going to get found out for being in therapy. He's paranoid that Melfi is, you know, gonna like, rat him out, that he can't say what he wants to say in the sessions. He's paranoid that—At some point he's dismayed to learn that she has her own psychiatrist. It was like, what, I'm going to a doctor that needs a fucking doctor? And so, you know, we talked about the absolutely psycho cop that he has following her around. And like, he's trying to—He's upset. Actually, the thing that he's upset with is that he wants to know about her life. And she's like, why do you want to know about that? I don't have to tell you anything about my life. So this is why he hires the cop to like, follow her around. And the episode is about her giving him the advice like, you're having these problems with your uncle and your mother. Why don't you let them feel like they're in control even when they're not? And he says, okay, I'll follow that 50% because I'm not going to do anything to my mother. I'm just going to use this on my uncle. But then by the end of the episode, and this may be based in reality, she may have been genuinely flustered by this experience with the cop beating the shit out of her date. But like, she gives him information on her life and it completely relaxes him.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And he's very happy. So it's like she has also used therapy on him, which is—Of course she did. But it's funny that she's like, you know, sometimes you have to give big babies what they want, or what they think they want, in order to make them relax so that you can be in charge of them, uh, and then she literally does that to him on camera in the, in the last bit of the episode. I thought it was great. I thought it was really good.
Sylvi: Yeah, it's some really fantastic work, uh, all around. I'm—I—Every, every interaction between Melfi and Tony is just like, uh, I can hear like a chorus of angels in my head because I enjoy watching it so much.
Keith: It's really good. It's great.
Sylvi: This is the juice.
Keith: Speaking of camera stuff, or—Sylvi, earlier you were talking about like, the way that they use focus. There's a very high emotion scene. I'm just gonna say it now 'cause it doesn't really tie into anything. There's a high emotion scene later on when I think that it's when he's complaining about his parents or something, and she like, leans in to like, kind of connect with him. Oh no, it was about—It was when Jackie was, um, like—They were talking about Jackie being sick and she leans—She leans in to like, comfort him and she's like, out of focus. Like, they never really pull focus right onto her face. It just kind of remains out of focus while she's close to him like, talking about his feelings. And I thought that was really good. So I don't forget. I'll forget because it was such a small detail. Um, next time you come heavy or—Next time you come, come heavier, not at all. That's such a good line.
Sylvi: Yeah, the, the sort of like mob war stuff they gesture at, uh, fucking killer, fucking great. Um, especially when it's echoed, like when they, they call back to it later when Tony come—Comes in to sort of like do the deal with Junior and is like, I came heavy, like you said, but I don't want to use it. Uh, and we like, see the, like, lead-up to that of him like tucking the gun into his waistband and going to the same restaurant. And you're not really sure what direction things are going at first. Um, I think it works. It's some really, really good kinetic stuff.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: I love this little luncheonette that is Junior's Satriale's.
Sylvi: Yes. Um, everybody needs a—Needs a restaurant.
Art: Yeah. Everyone needs a place where you can sit and do your crimes all day.
Keith: I need that. I used to have that. I don't have that anymore.
Art: Um, and that one, that, that's a great—It's, it's a good—I don't, it's—I guess it's not a set, it's a location, but it's, it, it looks, yeah. That's the kind of place where guys do crimes all day.
Keith: What about eating lobster in the void? Do you want to go eat lobster in the void?
Art: They're not in the void.
Keith: They're in the void.
Art: They're in the top floor of the Bing.
Keith: No, the void is downstairs.
Sylvi: Downstairs is the strip club.
Keith: Yeah. You go eat lobster in the void. You go downstairs and watch some girls dance.
Art: Giant lobster. I mean, I know that they're the mob, they're like the mafia captains, but like, can you imagine eating a giant lobster at the fucking Bada Bing?
Keith: They gotta get these—
Art: Like, where'd they cook that?
Keith: They got it special. They get the special good stuff for the mobsters.
Dre: Maybe Artie's cooking—
Art: They still gotta cook it  in the Bada Bing kitchen.
Keith: Like, I mean, lobster is not a very difficult prep. 
Dre: It is expensive though.
Art: Sure.
Keith: These are massive fucking lobsters. Massive lobsters.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: To the point where like, I think they're fake.
Keith: They might be fake. These are like, I don't know, 4-pound lobsters or something.
Art: These lobsters the size of your arm, like—[Keith: Lobster the size of your fricking head.] A lobster that if it was going to fight you, you'd be like, oh man, I don't know that I'm going to beat this lobster.
Keith: I love lobster.
Dre: Would you rather fight one Tony Soprano-sized lobster?
Keith: Oh my God, I love lobster.
Dre: Or 20 lobster-sized Tony Sopranos?
Keith: I'm making a vow. Do you want to hear my vow?
Art: Yeah, of course I do.
Keith: There's a place that does fried fish in Providence. If you're in Providence, you should go there. It's called Dune Brothers. There's a shack. Um, there's a—They have a couple other places. Go to the shack that's in Providence. They have lobster rolls. Tomorrow, if it's sunny, I'm going to get a lobster roll from Dune Brothers. They just opened. They just opened like 2 days ago for the season. This is my vow. I vow to you, if I am—If I do not get a lobster roll tomorrow, if it's sunny out, may the Lord strike me down.
Art: God, I thought you were gonna be like, I'm gonna bring up my screencap of this episode and be like, give me a lobster this big.
Dre: But put it on a roll.
Keith: They don't do, they don't do boiled lobster, but they do have lobster rolls. Really good ones. Here's what you do. You go with two people. You go with two people. Here's what you do. You go with two people. You split fish and chips because it's huge. And now if you're an insane person, you can get a whitefish, and they sell dogfish, which is sort of like the dark meat of fish. It's a—It's cape shark, dogfish. It's really good, but it's like dark and greasy fish. So if you're insane, you can get two fried fish, but you only need one. You can split it, but then you each got to get a lobster roll. So make a friend, go to Dune Brothers, get two lobster rolls and cape shark. 
Art: We're really off the rails.
Dre: That's gonna be helpful for people, right?
Sylvi: Super off the rails.
Keith: Holy shit. I'm sorry, I saw the lobster, I couldn't help it.
Sylvi: Yeah, it's fine. Uh, we have something to say about this, like, scene of them talking about what to do with the power vacuum outside of the lobster. Um, because this is, this is sort of when they all start pushing for Tony to take over.
Keith: All the rest of my notes for the whole episode are lobster-based, so no.
Sylvi: All right.
[Keith laughter]
Art: Well, the wild thing about this is that these are all important characters in this scene, and I don't think they name a single one of them.
Keith: I didn't know who any of these guys were, and I didn't know why they're important. They only tell you that they're captains, like, after the scene, in another scene, they reference the captains.
Dre: So where does a captain fall in the mob hierarchy here?
Art: Very high. 
Dre: Is Tony a captain or—?
Keith: Tony's a captain. Yeah.
Dre: Okay.
Art: Okay. A captain runs a crew. It basically goes like the captain is, is, you know, you've got like your, your like exec, your executive level, right? Which is your, your boss and like your consigliere and your underboss kind of level. And then, um, and then you have the captains who each run like a crew and much in Crusader Kings style, the boss will still have like a crew. Like the boss is also a captain, but like, the captains are then like, the next highest level. I would say practically a captain is more powerful than like a consigliere because—
Keith: Because they have their own thing.
Art: They have a bunch of people, like they have, they have people who can shoot people to death.
Keith: And did you learn all this from megamob.com?
Art: I did, yeah.
Keith: Which I believe is the name of the website that—
Art: Also, there were like two things that I really wanted to underline this episode. One, when they're in AJ's school, that is how school looked in 1999. I'm like a couple years older than what AJ is supposed to be, but that's exactly right. That's what school—that's what people looked like then. And also, that is what the internet looked like in 1999, 100%.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, I mean, I believe that. I, I not only do I believe it, I was, I was, I'm younger than you are, but that's how school looked for me.
Dre: Uh, and every school had an unused sport field that they called The Pit where you would go to fight.
Keith: No, that's where actually at my school, The Pit was where you did surgery and stuff.
Sylvi: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvi: And you guys started to like dealt with your trauma.
Keith: Yep.
Sylvi: Over like—
Keith: Trauma and drama.
Sylvi: Like 16 episodes.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. Y'all sort of had PTSD.
Keith: Yep.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Um, and Noah Wyle was there.
Sylvi: Oh.
Art: I don't know enough about the Pitt to contribute to this conversation. 
Sylvi: That would've been weird for him to be hanging around a school when you were in school. 
Keith: He was the gym teacher.
Sylvi: Oh, he's the gym teacher. Okay.
Keith: Wow.
Sylvi: Really fell off after ER.
Keith: Um, uh, I haven't seen The Pitt.
Art: It's hard to, to, to get cast after you are in a long-running production like that.
Keith: That's fair.
Art: Um, everyone be nice to my friend, whoever this is. I've already forgotten his name.
Keith: Noah Wyle. Just, I don't know who he is. Just a ran—Just, I just randomly knew that despite never having seen The Pitt or ER. 
Sylvi: He's the guy on all the posters who looks sad. 
Keith: He's the guy on all the posters. Yeah. Um, uh, what else happens in this, in this show? Uh, in this, in this show instead of the, the, the one that I haven't seen.
Dre: Uh, what about Falling Skies? You seen that one? That's also a Noah Wyle show.
Keith: I have not. I actually have never even heard of that one.
Sylvi: Yeah. I mean, me neither.
Dre: I think it's a weird sci-fi show.
Keith: Um, so for some reason—
Sylvi: I believe that with that name.
Keith: For some reason, Carmella's trying to get $40 out of her son.
Sylvi: Well, she's trying to teach him the value of a dollar, you see.
Keith: Right. Yeah.
Sylvi: Because his grandma got him that shirt, and then he scuffled with Nicholas Piacosta and it got ripped, and now he has to earn it back.
Art: It has been 27 years since this episode aired, and $40 is still a ripoff for that shirt.
Dre: That's a hell of a lot of fucking money for that shirt, man.
Sylvi: For an ugly-ass shirt.
Art: It's fucking hideous.
Sylvi: I do love his reply when she asks about it. It's like, it's a Westport. It's not even cool anymore.
Keith: It's a very, it's a very quick lie that I think doesn't, doesn't fully read for, uh, the mother.
Sylvi: No, but he's trying. And I also—he—this is, I think, our first AJ nu metal shirt scene, by the way. Because he has a fucking Marilyn Manson shirt on.
Dre: Is this an ongoing thing?
Sylvi: Uh, there is like—
Dre: That AJ wears a lot of band shirts.
Sylvi: There is like a whole like Instagram account dedicated to AJ Soprano's nu metal shirts. Um, AJ is very much a child of the time, you know?
Dre: Me too, AJ, me too.
Sylvi: And in season 3, I think there's one in particular that I really remember. Uh, it's a very famous one. I think I might have even linked it before. There's like—there's one of him in a Pantera shirt that I think is really funny.
Dre: You're 14, bro. You don't know anything about Pantera.
Sylvi: So funny.
Keith: Uh, look, why can't you know about Pantera? What, this kid's not supposed to have LimeWire?
Dre: You're right, you're right, you're right.
Keith: Because you know what I was listening to in 1999? Led Zeppelin.
Dre: No, this kid doesn't fucking know about LimeWire because he doesn't know about mafia websites either.
Sylvi: So he doesn't know about it yet. Um, this is a couple years from now.
Dre: Next episode, Meadow is going to show him how to download music.
Art: Yeah, Napster's not going to blow up for another like 18 months, I think. And then LimeWire's slightly after that.
Keith: Yeah, LimeWire's after that. Um, so yeah, maybe he's just a little bit before you would, uh, learn about a band from the '80s. Well, I guess Pantera was in the '90s too.
Sylvi: Yeah, I mean, this kid is definitely watching fucking ECW, and that is Rob Van Dam's entrance theme is a Pantera song.
Art: So I mean, yeah, the, the real thing about this is that if this were a real show, AJ would just be a wrestling promoter by the end of it, right, like—?
Sylvi: Oh my God.
Keith: That's really funny.
Sylvi: David Chase, call me up. I got a great idea for a sequel series.
Keith: It sounds like Art actually had a great idea for a sequel series.
Sylvi: No, I got a great idea for a sequel series. I'm crediting it to my friend.
Art: I can't believe I'm getting cut out of this.
Dre: You just have to pay Sylvi a finder's fee.
Sylvi: It's show business, baby.
Keith: Um, I, I found it really interesting how, um, the trigger for, um, Tony's anxiety in this episode, the, the worst panic attack he's had since starting therapy, uh, was that he could tell that this guy that he knows casually through his son is afraid of him. He goes to the store to try to get them to sell him DDT, and they're like, that's illegal now, I can't sell you that. And he's like, yeah, but you know, can I get some DDT? You have something, you know, in the back?
Sylvi: Yeah, you got some surplus, off-book?
Keith: And then he sees the—in my notes I called him the bully, but he's not really a bully. He's just a guy that is no longer friends with his son that—um, because I just couldn't remember his name.
Art: I think it's arguable that AJ—
Keith: That his son is the bully.
Sylvi: AJ was the instigator is kind of like the thing to remember here. This kid was minding his own business and then AJ was like—
Art: What did he beep him again? 
Keith: He texted him like, your mom jokes or whatever. Yeah. So AJ's the bully. So the victim, the victim is, his dad worked at this store, the like, greenhouse or whatever. And Tony, who isn't talking to his son because he's not an extremely present father, doesn't know that this guy's son and his son are fighting. This guy knows and assumes that Tony knows too. And is like, this guy's gonna beat me up because our son's got in a fight, and also he's holding an axe, and also he's Tony Soprano.
Art: This guy's gonna murder me with an axe.
Keith: This guy's gonna murder me with an axe in broad daylight because he's in the mafia, and that's what they do. 
Dre: And then he's gonna use DDT to melt my bones and no one will know. 
Keith: Um, and, uh, he goes home with his flower shit, and he has a panic attack because he's like, people are fucking afraid of me. Which is, I think, really interesting. There's literally nothing there, you know. He's having other stressors, but it's like they made a point to put this first, I think. I mean, you have to—when you're editing a show, you've got to put it in order on purpose.
Sylvi: And like, I think that is kind of that, like, Tony wants to be both liked and feared, and I think it's kind of like a contradiction at the heart of him.
Keith: He wants to keep his lives separate, like the guy from Trap.
Sylvi: Yeah, oh my God. He's just like Cooper. 
Keith: But less talented at that, at that specific thing.
Dre: Let's say he's not very good at keeping his life separate. So far it's just him introducing both of his lives and then being like, oh, why are things going wrong?
Sylvi: But I bet he could still eat that slice of pie in 5 bites.
Keith: Maybe even 4.
Sylvi: I, you know, I don't know. Yeah.
Dre: I eat faster when I'm stressed.
Sylvi: That's a good point. point. Um, but yeah, I, I really like when, uh, it's once again made super obvious that Tony is just like a fucking writhing mass of insecurities about how people perceive him.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, like, even like—
Keith: Relatable.
Sylvi: It's exactly—it's not like an uncommon thing or an uncommon trait for a character to have, but the, the novelty of giving it to to a man who is in basically in charge of organized crime in New Jersey, uh, and he's also like this, really makes the show work for me. And like, is like one of the reasons why I find it so funny too, is like, you're the guy, you're ordering like, hits on people. You stapled—You stapled a guy earlier.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: And you're mostly just like, oh man, this guy doesn't like me.
Keith: And that's, I think, I mean, that is, I think, what's so much fun about him is that, like, the only difference between me and Tony Soprano is I'm not in organized crime. [Dre: Well…] The only difference is that I'm not, I'm not in organized crime.
Dre: Keith, I gotta say, I think there's another major difference, which is that your main way of dealing with every emotion isn't violence.
Keith: Yeah, true. Because I'm not in organized crime. And if anybody asks, you can send them this.
Dre: As proof.
Keith: As proof. Because I—that I'm not.
Dre: If this podcast gets subpoenaed, you can submit that.
Keith: Oh, man. You know who is in organized crime, though, is Christopher.
Sylvi: Yes, very much so. 
Keith: And it's—and in episode 1, his 8-year senior boss makes sure that he knows how to kick someone in the ribs.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And, oh—No, I'm getting ahead of myself because I didn't have a screenshot for this. His wife chews him out after his panic attack. Which is maybe not the ideal time to get yelled at by your wife. Um, but I do have that to play.
Sylvi: Yeah, go for it.
[audio from The Sopranos plays]
Carmella: I know with Jackie sick you're under tremendous pressure, but I feel if the therapy didn't hurt, it wouldn't be helping.
Tony: No, you don't understand.
Carmella: That's why you're in therapy, because I don't understand. I'm telling you, Tony, if you give up now, I'm gonna have to reevaluate things.
Tony: What is that, huh? I got a very sensitive job. I'm not an average Joe on the block. I gotta spell it out for you?
Carmella: It's our marriage, Tony.
Tony: Therapy is too much exposure.
Carmella: Fine, you live with the results then.
Tony: What's that, a threat?
Carmella: No, Tony, it's a rave review.
[audio ends]
Sylvi: Great line.
Keith: Great line.
Sylvi: Um, yeah, I mean, I think she does start trying to be, like, a little gentle with it, and then he says the you don't understand thing and really pushes one of her buttons, which is like—No, I mean, I think, like, she does start saying, like, the therapy's been helping and stuff like that. It's in your clip.
Keith: But the actual first thing that she wants before this clip starts is she wants to know if he's talking to his therapist about their marriage, which is not the first time she's tried to get information about what he's talking about in therapy from him… Which I think is fine, but it's also not like the nicest, most sympathetic thing you can be doing is like, you've been talking about me to your therapist?
Sylvi: Is that kind of—I guess… I took the, I don't understand like, line as her being like, I'm—it's something that she feels is like a failure of hers.
Keith: Yeah, I agree. I also agree with that. Yeah, I think—well, it's just the thing—
Art: A failure of hers but also she's like, mad about it.
Sylvi: Yeah, of course.
Keith: Yeah. Um, yeah, it's just the thing I'm talking about happens before this clip starts, which is she's like—She's trying to—She's trying to—I think she wants to know what he's saying in therapy. I think that that's—And that—And you know, I don't think that he should—I don't think she should be asking about that. Or at least I don't think she should be asking multiple times and also seeming kind of upset to not know.
Dre: What he's saying in therapy to his definitely male therapist, that he has now officially told her is definitely a male therapist.
Keith: Yeah.
Art:  Don't put in the newspaper that his therapist is a woman.
Sylvi: Oh no, another shirt from the declarative statement store. The “my therapist is a man” shirt.
Keith: It's such a funny thing to feel like you have to do.
Art: This is the first thing that I think should be, should be a Media Club Plus merch is a shirt that says “my therapist is a man”. It won't make a fucking lick of sense. To anyone.
Keith: I mean, a lot of our shirts don't make sense to people that don't know what it is well, but I think they're still worth buying. 
Sylvi: This one might make less sense. 
Keith: Well, but you say that, but it is a factual statement, and so you could at least think that you understand it.
Art: Statistically, a factual sentence for, for many people in therapy.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, you could, you could be wearing the Phrygian shirt and you could get the reference, but you could not understand what, what is Palisade, what is Branched Man? Who are these weirdos on the shirt? Um, you'd be confused by the shirt, but if you just had a shirt that said, my therapist is a man, you'd feel like you understood it. You'd be maybe confused why someone would wear that. I think it's worth considering.
Dre: Mm-hm, mm-hm.
Keith: Um, but this is where Christopher beats the shit out of a guy who is no longer paying him money because he thought he was dead. or something. Yeah, this guy, um, this guy who seems very friendly, a really nice-seeming drug dealer.
Dre: Yeah, affable.
Keith: Super affable drug-dealing yo-yoist.
Sylvi: Yo-Yo Mendez, I think, is what he calls him later, which I like that his nickname is just his hobby.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, yeah, so he did—Chris goes to collect from, from Yo-Yo and is told that like he already paid. He paid Junior's guys because they said that they were taking over this route, and Chris, not being informed about this, uh, at first pretends to be like, oh, okay, good, thanks for telling me. And then he beats the shit out of him right after.
Keith: I'm gonna share a screenshot of this scene, which I think is a—It is like a Christ-like icon of suffering. You ready for this? This reminds me of Christ.
Art: Oh my God.
Sylvi: Oh, there is something very—You're not wrong about that.
Keith: He's very Christ-like.
Sylvi: He's kind of giving Saint Sebastian a little bit. Like, he's—it's definitely like—
Dre: Sure.
Keith: Yes, it's—Yeah, sure.
Sylvi: Painting of an old saint after—
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: After going through something terrible.
Keith: Oh, look. Yeah, look at the screen. Look, go to the Patreon to find, uh, Yo-Yo Mendez in his—Looking extremely like an icon of Catholic suffering.
Sylvi: Oh, great shot.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: I'm not—I'm not Catholic, so I can't really comment on this.
Keith: You've not seen a lot of, uh, a lot of Jesus suffering on the cross?
Art: Some. 
Keith: Some, yeah. Googling my—every couple days I Google Jesus suffering on the cross just to get a sense of—
Sylvi: Oh, my God.
Keith: Oh, it's now—hey, it's for the first time ever, it's a lot of AI. There's a lot of AI if you Google Jesus suffering on the cross.
Sylvi: I gotta move us on. So after this, this goes straight into Chris showing up at the hospital, right? No, no, Chris showing up at the hospital while the rest of the guys are in Jackie's room because Jackie's like literally delirious with, with a fever at this point.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Um, and he, he's so mad about this. One, he's like, I, uh—Tells him about how Brendan's been killed, I believe, um, maybe I'm wrong about that, but like talks about the specifics of the execution there because they get into a whole thing about The Godfather special. Yeah, yeah, the Mogreen special, which is like a whole—I love the fucking line Paulie has where he was like, it wasn't, uh, Francis just framed that, the shot like that for, uh, for the shot value, you know, for the shot or something like that. It's like in the most roundabout way ever, but it's just really funny to be like, yeah, he did it because it looks better and not say anything else. Um, but this is when—This is when he tells him, uh, maybe I have the, the timeline mixed up, right? Because then, then after this is the, the Mikey confrontation, and then the Junior—He goes to see Junior and they have the come heavy conversation, right?
Art: Yeah, we've, we've covered that end of the scene. We just didn't cover the middle of the scene.
Sylvi: The middle of it. Okay, cool. Okay. Um, I want to just make sure we're still moving. Um, we—Should we—Do we want to talk about the—We—I guess there's two more major things to talk about before we get to Jackie passing and the funeral.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvi: There's, um, Melfi being harassed by the cop, and then there's the rest of—I guess we did cover AJ’s stuff, so I guess it's just the Melfi stuff to talk about. Yeah.
Keith: And I think we can get through that quick. The cop that Tony Soprano specifically said, don't bother her, just see what she does, is following her date's car for no reason. His partner is like, why are you doing this for no reason? And he makes up a lie about it being the same make and model as a triple homicide. He pulls—I mean, maybe it's not a lie, I don't know, but it seemed like bullshit.
Sylvi: He's a cop, it's a lie.
Keith: It's a lie.
Art: Triple homicides are just not that common.
Keith: Yeah, that's true too. Uh, he pulls him over, he acts like he's drunk even though he's not. Um, he, uh, literally just says he's resisting arrest and starts beating the shit out of him. His partner is like, hey man, stop, or whatever. Um, barely. Uh, but like, yeah, he's like, absolutely beating the shit out of this guy for no reason at all. Uh, Melfi's kind of freaking out about it, but also is like standing up to the cop. They're both like, we're going to sue you, rightfully so. And that's kind of it. It's just like, this guy is absolutely psycho. Shocker that the mobbed-up cop is psycho. He's a cop.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. That is the biggest red flag.
Keith: Yeah, the cop part, yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, this like, whole thing is nuts.
Art: I would say that his partner doesn't—Is a little more—I want to give the partner slightly more credit. He like, pulls him off. He's, he's clearly disturbed by what happens.
Sylvi: He stops him from beating the shit out of the guy, but they do still arrest him.
Keith: I would say disturbed might be an overstatement. He becomes increasingly like—I would say that this is a guy who knows that the longer this goes on, the bigger of a problem it's gonna be for him.
Art: Sure. How about disquieted?
Keith: Disquieted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. He becomes disquieted after a period—An extended period of quiet. And then there's the Jackie stuff?
Sylvi: Yeah, I mean, there's Jackie passing away. They find out at the strip club. Um, oh, you know what? I'm getting mixed up. I was getting mixed up. This was a—this was an—This was when Chris comes in to talk about the, the Yo-Yo Mendez thing.
Keith: He comes in after Jackie dies. Yeah, right.
Art: They find out Jackie dies. The, the, the line reading by that—by the dancer is like, I'll always remember where I was.
Sylvi: Hilarious. She prays.
Keith: She gets—
Sylvi: She hangs her head in prayer.
Art: And, and, um, Jessica noticed this, I didn't, but before, in the establishing shot of that scene, they're like dancing.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: And that the, the, the woman who has the line is doing like five times the work dancing that the other two are.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: It's almost like they, they, they're like, okay, do the dancing. And then when they saw her working hard, like, okay, you get the line.
Sylvi: Oh my God. Good for her. She deserved that.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: They share a hug—And she crushed it too. Uh, the, the, um, but yeah, this is when Chris cut, 'cause, 'cause the whole bit of this scene is that, um… 
Keith: He’s being inappropriate. They're furious with him for like, for doing this at the wrong time.
Sylvi: Okay. Let me just, let me just walk through it. Um, they, they see on the TV, there's a news report about like, reported mob boss, uh, Jackie Aprile has, has passed away, um, after a battle with cancer. Um, everyone gets somber. We have that line from the dancer. Um, they start like drinking to, to, um, Jackie's memory. And then while they're doing this, Chris comes in and is just like, immediately heated. He's talking about how, um, Junior took his, uh, the—His route with Yo-Yo from—Took his route and is taking his protection money from Yo-Yo Mendez. And I think he says some stuff about like strong leadership and shit like that. Uh, and then Tony kind of snaps, and like, that's when he finds out that Jackie just died, and after Tony gets in his face about it. And then that's when Tony goes to confront Junior about, um, to, to do the plan of having Junior be the boss as a lightning rod.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Um, uh, yeah, I think that's the, the, that, that's the walkthrough of what, of what happens here.
Art: It's truly like, I'm not sure Christopher knows how close he came to death in this scene.
Keith: For real. Yeah. And the thing that confused me, and I'm still not 100% sure, is that they ask him if he heard the news and he says yes. So I thought that Christopher did know that Jackie had died and was still like—
Art: This was a misunderstanding.
Sylvi: Yeah. All right, Art, do you want to clarify?
Art: I believe that Christopher thinks they're asking about his problem.
Keith: Right.
Art: Like, have you heard—
Keith: Have you heard about that? That Junior's moving in on our corner?
Art: That Junior's moving in on our corners.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Have you heard that you pooped your pants the other day?
Sylvi: Oh, by the way, we didn't point it out. It's so funny that Livia knows about that and like, gestures at it with the grown men pooping their pants line.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: When her and Tony are talking. That's really funny. But yeah, no, there's like a real like, man, uh, Chris, if you, if you kept yapping a second longer, you would have gotten your fucking shit wrecked.
Keith: Yeah, Tony says, uh, you're lucky that someone I love died today, is what he says.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And then leaves to go confront or not confront, uh, Junior.
Sylvi: Kind of confront it. It, it, I mean, like—
Keith: He goes to trick him. 
Sylvi: I mean, but like the visual language that we get up until the conversation starts is a confrontation, right? Like he is getting ready. It looks like he's getting ready for war when he goes to go see him. And then instead it's this conversation where they're like, really good, really tense conversation being like, our friend Jackie has died. Um, the—I know the Sopranos have been waiting a long time to take the reins. And there's like a little pause. And then Tony says, I think it should be you. And then that's when the tension sort of drifts away for a little bit until Tony afterwards, pulls Junior into a hug and is like, but I can't be seen to have lost face, so I need—I think he names a couple unions, uh, he needs them to pay him. And so like, really what ends up happening is Tony's ending up—Tony is consolidating power by giving it up to Junior here, right? Like, he is getting—
Keith: He's making more money because he's getting more guys under him. And then also, he's—His plan is to actually retain the authority despite, uh, Junior having the title.
Sylvi: Yeah, it's really sick.
Keith: He's got a high—Art mentioned Crusader Kings. He's got a high intrigue score, surprisingly. You didn't—You wouldn't think that Tony Soprano has a high intrigue score, but he does.
Art: Yeah, someone should make a Mafia Crusader Kings. I'm just saying.
Sylvi: Oh my God, that's really good. Oh, there's that one game that I think Paradox even made it, um, or published it. I—What—no, it's It's not, it was fine. It wasn't very good. It ended up feeling more XCOM than Crusader Kings. Empire of Sin is what it was called.
Art: Great title.
Sylvi: Great title.
Art: I don't know anything about it. Nailed it on the title.
Sylvi: It's like a 1920s Prohibition era, like, um, trying to gain control of Chicago game. Um, but I think that the—When I played it, the, um, sort of like grand—Like the, the ground level stuff didn't grab me in the way that I was hoping it would.
Keith: Mixed reviews on—
Art: But you know, like, and, and having the loyalty of the crews, it just feels like a very good follow-up campaign.
Sylvi: Oh, it would kick ass. Um, oh yeah, this game was made by the Romeros. That's really funny. Um, yeah, I don't know. My, my kingdom for a good, uh, a good crime family simulator.
Keith: Just a—Just someone should just make a Sopranos mod for CK3.
Sylvi: I mean, there is a Sopranos video game, but, um, I would much prefer a Sopranos mod for CK3 because that means someone would have to make a map of New Jersey and New York for that game.
Art: You'd have to make it huge, like, the granularity of it to make the game function, like you'd have to have like, truly tiny—Like it would always have to be like block by block.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. It would be, it would be sick though. It would be the greatest video game ever made.
Art: If you're listening to this and you have millions of dollars… 
Keith: Or tens of thousands of hours.
Art: Well, I'm saying pay us the millions of dollars to spend the hours.
Keith: Oh, okay.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Cause we're, we're going to be able to make this. We, uh, all of us with all of our coding experience.
Art and Keith: Well, that's what the tens of millions of dollars are for. 
Art: Hire some coders.
Sylvi: Oh, okay. But after we skim off a lot, right?
Keith: It's The Sopranos video game. Yeah, after you skim off. 
Sylvi: Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. After we, after we earn—after we're labor leaders.
Keith: Um, sorry, it's, it's not called skimming off when you're a producer. It's called getting paid as a producer.
Sylvi: You're right. It's, it's hard work and we need to—We deserve to be compensated for it.
Keith: There you go. Uh, this is a great scene. Their hug and the whisper in the ear about how he's got to get this stuff. It's great. Um, very quick scene of, uh, Melfi, um, trying to have a date with newly shut-in Raymond, who's like, I'm shaking, I can't go outside, I'm afraid of my shadow.
Sylvi: Oh my God. And she is like so—She is so ready to jump his bones.
Keith: So ready. Yes.
Sylvi: Yes, like a really funny bit of her just slowly covering up and like putting her glasses back on throughout this scene as he starts doing like—Like asking her to be his therapist basically while they're dating. Yeah, it's like—[Keith: She had just—] Oh girl, I've been there.
Keith: We saw her take those tits out and then she's like, I gotta put these back in.
Sylvi: I gotta put these back away. Goddamn it.
Dre: Very funny too, because like the conversation they were having before he got his ass kicked by the cop was about him being like, oh, so you need a man who's emotionally sensitive but also is gonna fuck you in the closet too, don't you? Good for a man like me, huh?
Sylvi: And now he's just very small.
Keith: Yeah, because they were talking shit about Niels, like from the last, from the last one. Um, which is very funny.
Sylvi: Shut the fuck up, Nils.
Keith: Shut the fuck up, Nils. Uh, and then, uh, before the funeral there is one more therapy scene which I only want to mention because it's sort of the thesis of the show in a way. Or like, this is like the overarching thing that The Sopranos does with the two halves of the show, the therapy half and the life half, which is, I get a lot—He's like, I'm coming back to therapy. I get a lot of good ideas here... on how to cope.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: He just says it. He just says out loud what, what he does, what he's doing. Um, and then, uh, the funeral, Jackie's funeral, where we see like, uh, Junior is kind of peacocking with his stupid hat.
Sylvi: Oh my God, he looks so goofy. He's cosplaying. [crosstalk] He's cosplaying as a guy from The Godfather.
Keith: [crosstalk] He’s cosplaying as a guy who runs the mafia.
Art: I didn't, I didn't mention this in this, in the last episode, but they changed Junior's glasses between the pilot in the main series.
Sylvi: Even more square.
Art: His show glasses that are just so big. Good work. Good work, costume designer on this show.
Keith: Yeah. Um, and, uh, the other thing that happens in this scene is that, uh, we watch, um, AJ like, looking at people coming up and like, whispering in Tony's ear and like grabbing his arm. And he's like, oh my God, my dad's in the mafia. This is, this is the, this is Meadow’s—I'm sending to the chat. Um, Meadow’s see, I told you our dad was in the mafia face.
Sylvi: It's so funny.
Art: It's really good.
Sylvi: So funny.
Art: And the shot they go from, you can see Tony like blurry in the background. Like they go from the, like the camera transition here is very good.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: They're like, it's like, it's a POV shot from, uh, the—
Sylvi: I found the costume designer for The Sopranos. his name. It's Juliet Polcsa. I'm very sorry if I'm butchering that. Didn't have time to look it up because I found this out while we're recording live. Great job. 
Keith: Great job.
Sylvi: Does the entire show. 
Art: Yeah, shout out. But yeah, this is, this is Junior Soprano dressing up as Don Corleone.
Sylvi: 100%.
Art: I guess as Michael Corleone. Hilariously, Dominic Sheeney was in The Godfather 
Sylvi: Right, I always forget that. 
Art: Yeah, he's Johnny Ola, man.
Keith: I'm gonna have to watch that soon, huh?
Sylvi: At some point.
Art: Um, yeah, I mean, I think, I think we should, especially because the, the—Silvio's Godfather impressions are not going away.
Sylvi: Yeah, that's a good point. 
Keith: Any final thoughts about this? 
Sylvi: One superficial one, one just like about the way this is all filmed. I love—My superficial one, one of my favorite needle drops in this whole series is Look On Down From the Bridge by Mazzy Star, which plays over the credits and is just a very good song. Shout out Mazzy Star.
Keith: Shout out Mazzy Star.
Sylvi: And the album too. Yeah.
Keith: I have actually one more button that I almost forgot about.
Sylvi: Oh, wonderful. Well, let's do the button then.
Keith: Yeah, so it's during the final therapy session, when uh, Melfi is sort of out of sorts, um, over watching her boyfriend, um, get the shit beat out of him and then develop PTSD in real time.
[audio from The Sopranos starts playing]
Tony: Saw my first dead body when I was about 15 maybe. 16.
Dr. Melfi: Oh my God.
Tony: Won't tell you about how he got clipped because it was, uh…
Dr. Melfi: Sorry. 
Tony: You okay?
Dr. Melfi: I was thinking. I'm—I guess I live a sheltered existence.
Tony: How so?
Dr. Melfi: Well, I'm in this room for 10 hours a day. I guess I'm out of touch with the climate of rage in American society. The, the casual violence.
Tony: Your voice is all tight.
Dr. Melfi: This week my friend got beat up. By a policeman, no less.
Tony: Oh yeah?
Sylvi: Tony's body language here is so funny. Just needs to be noted.
Keith: Yeah.
Tony: Wow.
Sylvi: That’s crazy.
Dr. Melfi: I don’t know if he was drunk or what, but he was raving, prime rib, hamburger. It was surreal.
[Sylvi laughs loudly]
Tony: I mean, sounds like this guy was a fucking moron.
Dr. Melfi: My friend's filing a suit against the city. But the worst part of it is, is my relationship with him will never be the same.
Tony: Sorry.
Dr. Melfi: Oh, it wasn't your fault. This is your session. I'm sorry. This is—
Tony: Hey.
Dr. Melfi: Very unprofessional.
Tony: No, it's all right. You had your wits scared out of you.
[audio ends]
Sylvi: Um, there's so much in that clip I want to talk about. Uh, we didn't mention—did we mention that the cop thinks that Melfi is one of Tony's mistresses, and that's why he went on that whole rant about—okay, cool.
Art: I don’t think we said it.
Keith: Oh yeah, yeah, we didn't say it, we didn't say it.
Sylvi: Okay, well, that, that is why he, he said, why are you going out for, for a hamburger when you got prime, prime beef at home? What's it?
Keith: Yeah, prime rib.
Sylvi: Prime beef is not a thing. That's not what it's called. So I just can't think of the words.
Art: Got the prime beef at home.
Keith: You can, you can designate beef as USDA Prime.
Sylvi: Okay, so I'm not like 100% wrong.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, but one thing that I remembered when you played that is the shot that directly precedes—I put a screenshot of it—the shot that directly precedes Tony being like, I saw my first dead body when I was 15, is AJ lying in bed looking at a picture of him and his dad on a fishing trip. Um, and that's just like, mwah, chef's kiss. Yeah, great work, great work on that one. Great juxtaposition. Something that made me really like, real like point at the screen when I was watching it, because it like, it literally is still on screen when he's saying, I saw my first dead body, and then it cuts to him when he starts talking about the specifics.
Keith: By the way, if I had to guess, I would say that this is not going to be the last time that, uh, something that Tony does while doing crime has repercussions on non-crime parts of his life and he has to go, oh, sorry to hear about that. Not to do that. Cause I didn't do that, but sorry to hear about that. Cause this is now—He did it to Artie and then now he's done it to his therapist.
Art: That's an interesting theory you got there.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: What a way to think about things. Oh, I don't know.
Keith: Uh, I think that, I think that's everything. We should talk about that you should rate and review this show?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: On—
Sylvi: No new reviews this week because our last episode is not coming out.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: But here's, here's what I'm gonna do. I have a, I have a review prompt for you all, and maybe people—I hope this isn’t offensive, but in your review include your favorite Italian dish because I'm curious.
Keith: Oh yeah, what's your favorite Italian dish?
Sylvi: Yeah, there's a lot of talk about in this, you know, episodes like, oh my god, can you believe she never had arancini before? Stuff like that. And so that's been in the back of my head.
Art: There's one, there's one quote in my notebook that we did not—
Sylvi: Please.
Art: —cover, which is when Christopher comes into the Bing.
Keith: Uh-huh.
Art: My note here is Christopher is bad at reading the room. This is gonna recur. But he says, I forget what leads into it. I should have put that in the notes, but Silvio's like, always with the scenarios, and it's just a perfect reading. Um, I could see why Steven Van Zandt was the—was one of their must-casts. He's, uh, he's truly incredible in this.
Sylvi: He’s perfect. You cannot picture anybody else doing this role. Um, hopefully they never make a prequel movie. 
Keith: That's really funny.
Art: Oh God.
Sylvi: Yeah, we can talk about it later. Um, but yeah, and then—
Art: I gotta talk to—well, I'll DM you about the stuff I've heard about the prequel.
Sylvi: I've seen it, you know.
Art: Yeah, but do you know, do you know that the—do you know the rejected plot?
Sylvi: No, please tell me about this off air. Um, while I tell everybody what we're watching next time, uh, unless there's other business that I missed. Keith, Dre, anything else you wanted to say before I move on?
Dre: Nope.
Keith: Uh-uh.
Sylvi: Okay, man, I am pointing at my screen the way that Paulie points at people with my index finger and my pinky, and that is how this show is affecting me already. Um, all right, next week we are going to be watching one of my personal favorites, and maybe that's setting us up for failure by mentioning that, but, uh, episode 5, College, um, which was kind of like a—If I'm not wrong, a pretty big turning point, or like not a turning point, but, um, a, a big episode for the show. Like, this one got a lot of praise, um, and a lot of critical—Critical success.
Art: Number 2 on TV Guide's list of the top 100 episodes of television of all time.
Sylvi: Yeah, that sounds right.
Keith: College is?
Art: It's a good one.
Sylvi: College is another one of those that feels like it could have just been a movie, I guess is the way I'll put it. I'm really excited to watch it. And then next, after that, we have Pax Soprana, which is the 6th episode of season 1. And we will once again be covering two episodes. We're gonna keep with that. There's a couple—there's not a ton of new people for us in the first episodes, but in episode 6, there will be someone who's gonna become a major recurring character. So that's something to look forward to as well. I think that about covers us. As usual, please support us over at friendsthetable.net and friendsatthetable.cash for our Patreon. You can also just sign up for the Patreon for free if you want to stay in the loop. We have a newsletter that Janine publishes every week that just, you know, tells you about everything going on with everybody in the, in the, the Friends at the Table sphere, uh, as well as Keith's, uh, screenshot posts. Those are always fully free. You can go look at those even if you're not signed up. Um, you can just pop on into Patreon. Uh, but we've got a lot of good—we've got a lot of good bonus stuff on there. And like we said, we've gonna—we're gonna have some bonuses for this. I mean, we've already been pretty firm about wanting to watch Goodfellas, so we will be watching Goodfellas. Uh, stay tuned. Um, on top of that, like I said, please, please give us a 5-star review. Please mention what your, your favorite Italian dish of any kind is. Uh, um, if you don't, I won't be mad. The 5 stars are the important thing, but like, you know, have a little fun with it. Uh, and then also check out, uh, you know, like I said, Friends af the Table, the main show, and Side Story at sidestory.show, our gaming podcast that is so much fun to listen to and make. I just went back to the Silent Hill F spoiler cast y'all did on that, Keith, with Ali and Jack. That was a really good listen.
Keith: That was a really fun episode.
Sylvi: It's a really fun one, even if you didn't get the chance to finish that game like I did.
Keith: Yeah, we all finished it at least as many times as it would take to talk about all the endings. Not necessarily getting all the endings, but we talked about all of the endings. And so you can finish it one or two times and then go like, I would just prefer to listen to a podcast to get the rest of this. You can do that.
Sylvi: Honestly, not a single miss in that, in that show's run. Not a single—we have never missed with our podcasts ever. Quote me on that. Quote me on that. Never once. Every day. Oh, it's all one take too. We've never had to rerecord anything.
Art: It's not even edited. These are all just raw.
Sylvi: Yep. When Keith says he's gonna cut that out, that's a bit.
Keith: Yep. There's nothing new, but maybe extra for fun.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, all right. I think that's gonna do it. Uh, oh, actually, friendsatthetable.shop. Go check that out too. If you want to get some merch, maybe we'll have that My Therapist Is a Man shirt up at some point. Who knows? Who knows? Maybe. Never say never, right?
[Dre laughs loudly]
Keith: If you ever wanted to invite questions for your weird fucking shirt? Yeah, do you need more strangers asking you about what the fuck your shirt fucking means?
Sylvi: We're gonna—This show is gonna pivot into being just a front for the Definitive Statement T-Shirt Factory.
Keith: Sylvia, I still—I really want to do my three-two cousins shirt idea for—From—
Sylvi: It's pretty good.
Keith: Yeah. All right, what were you gonna say?
Art: I mean, it's sort of free to throw up those—
Keith: It's totally—I agree.
Art: Shirts, like, especially if we don't like design them too much.
Keith: Like, yeah, I want to do the girl pope shirt from the Crusader Kings thing. I want to do three-two cousins shirt. I want to do my therapist is a man shirt.
Sylvi: Okay. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll get, we'll get to work. Maybe, maybe, maybe we can whip some things up. Um, but yeah. Okay. I'm going to say goodbye for now. Thank you all for listening.
Art: Only three and a half hours this time. We're getting there.
Sylvi: You know what? Yeah. Hour and a half quicker, hour and a half quicker than last time.
Art: And we took a little break.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. 
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: We will see you in two weeks' time for the next couple episodes. Until then, forget about it. Forget about it. 
Keith: Forget about what?
Art: Shut the fuck up and play the outro.
Sylvi: Sing us out, Jack.
[“Shame About It (Vocals)” by Jack de Quidt begins playing]