“You can talk about every day being a gift and stopping to smell the roses, but regular life’s got a way of pickin’ away at it,” Tony explains to Dr. Melfi when the subject of his “new outlook on life” came up this week. Vito’s little secret finally got back to T and his crew, and after Meadow’s fiancé Finn gives them the details of what he saw last season (an unbelievably uncomfortable conversation for Finn, especially when he revealed that Vito was “catching, not pitching” with the construction worker in the car), the truth is undeniable. The question now, of course, is how should the situation be handled?
Paulie makes it clear: Vito’s got to go. Chris thinks it’s hilarious (“When he was always talking about ‘greasin the union, who knew that’s what he meant?”), Gerry thinks it’s a disgrace, but Tony refuses to make any rash decisions. He tells Dr. Melfi that he got a second chance at life, so why shouldn’t Vito? “I suppose something inside me says, ‘God bless, salud…who gives a shit?’” All of which leads to T’s “regular life” comment.
It’s clear that, if Tony had his way, he’d let Vito, one of his best earners, disappear and forget about the whole thing. It’s also clear that it won’t be that easy. Paulie’s not the only one who wants blood, and it gets back to Tony that Vito’s crew won’t take orders from Vito should he return. Even some of the captains would refuse to work with him. “Would you kiss him on the cheek?” Sil asks Tony. That one got Tony thinking, but Sil’s most effective argument was that taking Vito back would give guys like Paulie a reason to “go off the reservation” and start skimping on the kick-ups. Bad news.
This entire situation is noise to this new-age Tony, just like the lid that wouldn’t stop banging against the cabinet when Tony was trying to take in some quiet time by the pool earlier in the episode. He tells Melfi that your house, “the shit you own,” poor decisions, they all drag you down. Now that he’s seeing the world in a whole new light, he’s trying to make some changes, but “regular life” keeps getting in his way.
“Live Free or Die,” the name of this week’s episode, is also the New Hampshire state motto, which is where Vito happens to be hiding out. Away from the problems in Jersey, Vito’s able to let go a little. He has pancakes for breakfast and stops in an antiques store. Maybe he thinks he could be happy there, embracing a whole new life and being honest about who he is. That’s the path Tony wants to walk, living the life he now wants to live. Of course, Vito won’t get that chance – from the looks of it, Phil Leotardo is going to hunt him down – but what about Tony? I find myself following this storyline to the same conclusion I reached a couple weeks ago, with Tony trying to break free and meeting all sorts of resistance. Some may say that T will eventually “snap out of this” and revert to the Tony Soprano we’ve known for years, but is there anything to really snap out of? I don’t know that this is a momentary shift in thinking for Tony – he was honest with Melfi about his feelings on the Vito situation, and he later revealed some pretty heavy stuff to Carmella about his session with Melfi. This looks like someone who’s reshuffling his priorities permanently, not someone who’s temporarily reacting to a traumatic event.
I need to give the producers credit for saying what we all were thinking. When Tony first starts laying out his feelings about homosexuality to Melfi, he talks about how disgusting it is to see “them” holding hands and kissing in public, and then adds, “Every fucking TV show now, they rub your nose in it.” Well this is, of course, HBO, but at least David Chase and his staff are willing to poke some fun at themselves for taking the gay angle.
The Vito storyline pretty much chewed up the entire episode, but there were some further developments with my Chris/terrorists theory. Tony asked if Chris thought his two credit card buddies from the club could possibly be terrorists, a theory Chris shoots down by saying, among other things, “Mohammad and his girlfriend have a dog, a Springer Spaniel.” Oh, good, as long as that’s cleared up. They showed Chris further considering the possibility when Tony went into the other room, and I’m interested to see where they go from here. Does Chris dismiss the idea completely and, as I’ve been predicting, find himself in hot water for supplying terrorists with things like credit card numbers and guns, or does Tony or Chris figure it out before something bad happens? I’m sticking with my theory and still see Chris being offered some sort of deal to flip, but now that the seed has been planted and Tony’s got Chris thinking, I’m not as confident.
Finally, I’m sure most of you picked up on this, but I laughed out loud when Tony, in the process of defending Vito to someone, described him as a “come from behind guy.” What truly made the scene, though, was that the only reaction we saw from anybody came from Sil, sitting in the background, scrunching up his eyebrows and shifting uneasily in his chair. Just one small example of why “The Sopranos” is one of TV’s best, and as a bonus, it’s delivering one of its finest seasons to date.
