I started watching the Sopranos after receiving the first two seasons on DVD for Christmas my senior year of college. My roommate, Logan, and I were hooked immediately, and we soon dragged our friend Jen in as well. At that time, Season Four had just come out on DVD, so we had a lot of catching up to do. Progressing through the episodes together became a sort of ritual for us as we fed off of each other’s excitement to see what would happen next.
After graduating, we all ended up in the Boston area for different reasons. I got together with Jen and Logan, who are now dating, occasionally to watch some new episodes from Part One of Season Six, but mostly we’ve been watching independently. However, last night we all met up at Jen’s to watch the premiere of Season Six Part Two.
This was really the beginning of the end for the show, which has just seven episodes to go before the season finale. In a fitting parallel, Jen and Logan are also about to move to New York. I’ll be in Boston for at least another year, and though geographically we’ll be close enough, I don’t know how much we’ll really see each other. Jen is starting graduate school in like Bio-Chemistry or something absurdly hard and intense like that, and Logan is going to be a first year associate at a law firm.
Jen has extended me basically an open invitation to join them at her place every Sunday for new Sopranos episodes, which certainly would be a nice and nostalgic way to enjoy the last of our time in the same city.
However, I’m kind of torn because Sunday is also an important day for someone looking to play tournament poker seriously on the internet. All of the major online poker sites have one or more large ($200+) buy-in tournament that attracts thousands of players who really have no business playing in such expensive games. The result is all of the best tournament players on the internet flock to these tournaments for the opportunity to feed on the hundreds of fish who are in way over their heads.
Still, given that the fist outnumber us 100:1, it is difficult for any particular good player to have a big finish in any particular tournament on any particular day. So although my expected value (the average amount of money I could expect to win on any given Sunday were I to play on a statistically significant number of them) for spending a few hours at the tables on Sunday evening is probably around $2000, the most likely result on any given Sunday is that I will end up stuck $1000 or more and possibly grumpy. Compared to that, spending the evening enjoying great company and great TV, both of which are on their way out, is a pretty tempting proposition.
But this was supposed to be about the Sopranos. I found the first episode, entitled “Soprano Home Movies,” to be pretty good, although it didn’t do much to advance the plots that were left hanging at the end of Part One, such as Christopher’s heroin addiction or rising tensions with the New York crew. Instead, the focus was on conflict between Tony, his sister Janice, his wife Carmela, and Janice’s husband Bobby.
The conflict was well executed, and there were some good interactions particularly between Carmela and Janice and between Tony and Bobby. The thing is that Janice is such an unlikeable character, so blatantly petty, conniving, rude, and irresponsible, that it is hard for me either to take her seriously or to enjoy any episode in which she plays a central role. This does create an interesting dynamic for Tony, who feels familial and possibly affectionate obligations towards his sister but also cannot stand being around her or keep himself from teasing and provoking her. But still, I feel like Janice stands out as an excessive caricature amidst what are generally well-rounded and three-dimensional characters.
On the other hand, I thought last night’s episode gave us a more balanced and nuanced Bobby than we’ve sometimes gotten. In seasons four and five, when he was acting as Uncle Junior’s personal assistant, he was portrayed as almost saintly in his goodness and innocence, which made Junior’s and Tony’s mistreatment of him feel like cheap shots at the viewer’s sympathy. In the first half of season six, I felt like there was a sudden overcompensation for this where we saw for the first time an excessively petty and bumbling Bobby. So it was good to see him as a pretty believable, realistic, and human character in last night’s episode.