The Sopranos Sessions by Matt Zoller Seitz & Alan Sepinwall

Author:Matt Zoller Seitz & Alan Sepinwall [Seitz, Matt Zoller & Sepinwall, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683355267
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2019-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

“ALL DUE RESPECT”

SEASON 5/EPISODE 13

WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

Glad Tidings

“It’s my mess. All my choices were wrong.” —Tony

“Two Tonys,” the first episode of season five, concluded with Tony Soprano sitting in a patio chair at night, awaiting the return of the black bear, assault rifle locked and loaded. He was the hunter. The bear was his prey.

“All Due Respect,” season five’s last episode, seems to resolve the matter of there being two Tonys, in that Tony murders Tony B in hopes of resolving the feud with New York. But does it really? Not only does Tony wind up as both the hunter and the bear at different stages of the episode—gunning down Tony B with a shotgun before his cousin is even aware he’s there, and later emerging, bear-like, from the trees behind his house—but the episode, and the season, keep circling the idea that the two Tonys are really the same Tony, just manifested in different contexts.

We were told in “Rat Pack” that the two cousins—who were really more like brothers—were indistinguishable growing up, down to the first name, and the season made this manifest. They could’ve had each others’ lives if not for circumstance. Tony’s greatest weakness is his impulsivity, and how his temper often outpaces his rational mind. Tony B is presented as a more extreme example of that, as his death at his cousin’s hands results from three unnecessary outbursts: beating Mr. Kim right when he’s on the verge going legit, agreeing to the Joey Peeps hit after simmering in envy of his cousin, and gunning for the Leotardo brothers because he can’t let Angelo’s murder sit. All these tantrums lead to Tony B lying dead on Uncle Pat’s porch.

The Tonys’ name thing becomes impossible to overlook, too. Our protagonist gets to be just Tony, where this other man—completely new, but treated as a crucial piece of Tony’s origin story, with whom everyone else on the show has a preexisting relationship—has to go by Tony B. He is the Plan B version of Tony, the Tony our Tony almost was, the chaotic not-quite-twin who brings out the “real” Tony’s worst impulses (as Christopher insisted to Adriana back in “Cold Cuts”). It can seem like Tony dreamed him up as a way to see how a darker version of his life would have gone, just as he dreamed about Tony B going after the Leotardos as it was happening, as if he conjured the hit into reality.63

Tony B isn’t a dream, nor Tyler Durden, nor any other literary device. Everybody sees him, everybody knows him, and episodes like “Sentimental Education” and “Marco Polo” lay out the small, messy quality of his life in a way that seems antithetical to dream logic. But there’s something about him—or about any character introduced this late in a series who has such a shared history with longer-established characters—that isn’t quite . . . right. Tony B exists, but it’s almost as if he

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