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Worst Episode?
#627694
01/03/12 04:11 PM
01/03/12 04:11 PM
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Joined: Dec 2011
Posts: 215
ukwiseguy
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What was your least favorite Sopranos episode and why?
I can't really think of any that were terrible, the dream episode was abit boring but other than that i enjoyed most.
Underworld UK"The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled, Was Convincing The World He Didn't Exist"
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: ukwiseguy]
#627781
01/04/12 03:01 AM
01/04/12 03:01 AM
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 1,171 pittsburgh pa
phatmatress
Underboss
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 1,171
pittsburgh pa
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The FBI-tapping episode (Season 3) When Season 3 premiered, it was like Pedro Martinez taking the mound on opening day in 2001 against the Baltimore Orioles. How do you follow up two of the greatest seasons ever? Well, this episode, the first of the season, was like Pedro wiping his brow, facing down the batter, shaking off a sign… and throwing a ping-pong ball underhand.
Starting with a takeoff on the Peter Gunn/Spyhunter theme song, nearly the entire episode was concerned with the FBI’s sometimes ham-fisted attempts to bug The Sopranos household. While the whole thing went on way too long, the episode is interesting for showing the lengths the FBI is forced to go to get evidence on a known criminal, and also for adding an undertone of suspense into Tony’s criminal dealings at the house (an idea that was cut off at the knees when Meadow borrowed the bugged desklight for her dorm room, which illustrates one of my pet theories: Tony isn’t a brilliant criminal, he’s just ridiculously lucky. To be addressed in a future post…).
This ep also deserves points for cojones. It gave many of us our first hint that David Chase couldn’t give a flying crap what us fans think or expect. He’s got us by the balls and he knows it.
I hate Dicknoses!!!!!!
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: ukwiseguy]
#627782
01/04/12 03:02 AM
01/04/12 03:02 AM
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 1,171 pittsburgh pa
phatmatress
Underboss
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Underboss
Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 1,171
pittsburgh pa
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“Christopher” (season 4, episode 3) In which everybody celebrates Columbus Day and Iron Eyes Cody is secretly Italian Every show has to have a “worst” episode, one that sits at the bottom of a subjective, personal ranking of that show’s many adventures. What’s different about “Christopher,” the worst, clumsiest hour The Sopranos would ever produce, is that it’s not just the worst episode. It’s the worst episode by SEVERAL DEGREES. The show had not been this bad before, and it would not get this bad again. (Obviously, I haven’t been through the rest of the series again, so I could be eating these words by the time we get back through all of this again, but “Christopher” is almost worse than I remembered it being, which rarely happens to me. Removed from the context under which it was produced—a context where The Sopranos was frequently attacked by anti-Italian-American defamation groups—the episode just seems weird, like all of the characters in the show had written columns for the “My Turn” feature in Newsweek and were reading them to each other. It’s not like the episode is without merit. There are plenty of interesting plot developments, and there are some very good scenes, with the final scene, in particular, being a strong example of the show undercutting itself in a humorous fashion. And the storyline about Ralphie deciding to dump Rosalie so he could be with Janice is well done, particularly at the end when Janice no longer wants anything to do with him. (OK, I could have lived without having to see the two of them do their weird sex play thing again, but that’s not really a demerit against the episode.) It’s just that the rest of the episode is so bulky, so unlike The Sopranos, which is usually pretty lean and witty. This is a show where nobody really says what they’re feeling, and that’s a strength. Here’s an episode where everybody says what they’re feeling all of the time, and that’s why it doesn’t work. The basic idea is this: It’s coming on Columbus Day; they’re putting on parades. Silvio reads about an anti-parade protest by a group of Native Americans who want to take issue with celebration of a man whose arrival precipitated several centuries worth of struggle and genocide for their people. Silvio, taking this to be a slur against Italians, decides he doesn’t like it and goes to an earlier demonstration where a Columbus effigy is going to be burned. He and some of the other guys take the effigy down, and then a scuffle breaks out (precipitated by the demonstrators, after Sil takes down their effigy). Several people are injured, and it lands both groups in hot water, with Tony visibly upset with everyone for getting involved in something so stupid, to the point where they could have gone to jail for something relatively innocuous in the grand scheme of their crimes. Meanwhile, everyone decides to make things right with the protest leader, a man named Del Redclay. Again, not every scene here is a flop. In particular, I like the scene where Ralphie, having decided that the best way to get back at the Native Americans for insulting Christopher Columbus is to tear down an icon of equal stature to Native Americans, which means that he discovers the Italian heritage of Iron Eyes Cody and threatens to go wide with it if the protests don’t scale down. The whole absurdity of this conceit is tremendously amusing, especially the way that Joe Pantoliano plays the moment like he’s a great investigative journalist or something. The moment where Del seems shaken by this knowledge and can’t believe it’s true is, admittedly, a step too far into the farce, but the whole scene plays out like a weird, comic inversion of the show’s usual mob intimidation scenes, a giant poster of Cody standing in for the sorts of threats the mobsters might usually use. And I think what the episode is trying to go for is vaguely well-expressed (except when the show just comes out and says it). The show rarely allows Tony to be unequivocally right, but it seems to agree with him here that it’s fine to be proud of your heritage, but what really matters is who YOU are. The final scene in the car, with Tony returning again to the question of whatever happened to Gary Cooper, takes this tack as its centerpiece. The scene argues that getting too tied up into an identity that extends to a group beyond yourself can be a dangerous thing, a sort of drug that stands in the way of you being in control of your own actions and your own life. Once everything can be seen as a slight, then all you’re doing is looking for slights. Because this is a world of several billion people, slights will come, but it’s usually better to not get too invested in feeling bad about them. Feel proud of who you are, of what you’ve done, and the rest will take care of itself. It’s not a bad life philosophy, particularly coming from Tony, who can be kind of an oaf about these things, and it stands in marked counterpoint to an entire episode made up of people complaining about who’s had it hardest. (I also like that Sil completely forgets it's Columbus Day when they go to the casino, which shows just how serious he really is about this thing.) But the problem is that everything on the way to that scene is so tortured and awkward, as though David Chase and episode writer Michael Imperioli (from a story idea by Imperioli and Maria Laurino) had that final scene in mind and then weren’t quite sure how to get there. The episode, outside of the Ralphie and Janice storyline (and another that we’ll get to), takes the structure of various people airing their grievances on behalf of the groups they represent. Even a mostly disconnected scene of Carmela and her friends—including Bobby’s wife, Karen, now enjoying a loftier status in the life of the mob wives, just as her husband enjoys a loftier status at work—attending a speech recommended by Father Phil mostly just turns into a woman lecturing the group about how Italian-Americans have so much to be proud of and how they should remind the world that they’re about far more than the usual stereotypes, instead embracing things like broccoli rabe and the many millions of Italian-Americans who don’t participate in organized crime. (I do love the way Rosalie silently tells off the woman who turns to look at her accusatorily during this section of the speech.) Hell, even Montel Williams gets in on the act on TV. I certainly know that we have these conversations in America, and I’m sure that Chase and Imperioli are tweaking the idea of Italian-Americans who think their lives have been rough based on the fact that, at least in America, they kind of don’t have a contest when comparing their suffering to African-Americans or Native Americans. (Hell, we even get a scene where Hesh not so subtly reminds us that Jewish people have plenty to complain about if we’re talking on a global scale.) And the scene where Furio complains about tensions between northern and southern Italy is even a nice little reminder about how this problem is not specific to this country and is more of a generalized human thing, where we tend to mistreat people from other groups. But I don’t know that the episode had to be so talky about this central idea. It’s a needlessly bulky episode, where people don’t just have exchanges of dialogue but, instead, tend to make gigantic speeches. Granted, a lot of these speeches come from characters the regulars are listening to, but that doesn’t make things any better. There’s a place for discussion of the awful ways Native Americans were treated after Columbus arrived in North America; I’m not sure that an episode of The Sopranos is that place. The show, of course, was battling perceptions of it as a series that glorified Italian-American involvement in the mob or created a perception that all Italian-Americans were in the mob. As any show becomes more popular, it will inevitably attract some form of controversy, and that was the controversy for this show. “Christopher” was widely seen as a response to that controversy, a suggestion that those who were worried about these sorts of things were taking them too seriously and should just lighten up already. Was it? I have no idea, but the timing certainly makes a compelling case for that argument. The problem is that the episode felt clunky at the time and now just feels weird, divorced from the arguments of that earlier period. When’s the last time you heard someone complain about how The Sopranos suggests all Italian-Americans are in the mob anyway? It’s an odd storyline, told oddly, particularly since it has little to no bearing on much that comes later. Other storylines, however, are much better. I’ve already mentioned the story of Ralphie’s pathetic attempts to improve his love life by ditching Rosalie for Janice (who appears to enjoy treating him like a prostitute). It’s one of the few times in the series so far where it’s possible to feel something like sympathy for Ralphie, whose inability to stop climbing the ladder at work has a tendency to infect the rest of his life. Does he really care for Janice or Rosalie? It’s kind of impossible to tell (though the fact that he constantly cheats on Rosalie and seems to mostly think of Janice as a passing thing is a good indication that he doesn’t have much feeling for them either way), but it’s hard to watch him try to make Janice his girl when she’s just seen how devoted Bobby was to his wife and realizes that there’s a different way of having a relationship. So she pushes him down the stairs, and he swears his revenge. There are a bunch of other small plots—like, say, Paulie telling Johnny Sack about the crack Ralphie made about his wife or Ralphie deciding to buy a racehorse or Junior’s trial beginning—that seem promising as things that will have a bearing on what comes later, particularly in regards to Paulie’s attempts to drive a wedge between New York and New Jersey for whatever reason. (It’s a bit hard to read Paulie’s long game at this point, particularly when he only appears in a few minutes of every episode. Tony Sirico was suffering after back surgery and needed the reduced workload.) But they’re all shoved into the midst of the much less competent A-story, and that makes them seem less organic than they might and more like the show saying, “See these? These plot points will be important later on.” The one other story that seems to be the exception to this is the death of Karen. For a character we just met two episodes ago, who only appeared in these two episodes, her death is surprisingly heartfelt. Bobby, who’s never taken a comare, weeps openly at her casket in a display of outsized emotion rarely seen among the men of Sopranos-land. And the scene where he’s stuck in a traffic jam and complains to his son about the task his wife calls in to him (through his kid) is rather predictable—as you just know that the accident holding everything back is going to involve Karen, the very person he’s complaining about—but still packs a punch. Up until now, Bobby’s been hapless comic relief. In this episode, the show goes out of its way to show that he’s got some depth to him, just like everybody else on Tony’s crew. The storyline is raw and deeply felt and real, which stands in marked contrast to most everything else that goes on in the episode. It’s rare for The Sopranos to lose sight of the sorts of things that made it so good in the first place, but “Christopher” does early and often. It’s the nadir of the series, and it’s amazing a show this good could produce an episode this poor.
Last edited by phatmatress; 01/04/12 03:03 AM.
I hate Dicknoses!!!!!!
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: ukwiseguy]
#627959
01/05/12 11:12 AM
01/05/12 11:12 AM
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Joined: Dec 2011
Posts: 215
ukwiseguy
OP
Made Member
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OP
Made Member
Joined: Dec 2011
Posts: 215
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Yeah the Columbus Day episode was also one of the weakest out of the whole series in my opinion.
Guess we should also have a favorite episode thread if we don't already have one. So many good episodes though lol.
Underworld UK"The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled, Was Convincing The World He Didn't Exist"
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: phatmatress]
#629177
01/12/12 09:37 PM
01/12/12 09:37 PM
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Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 12,543 Gateshead, UK
Capo de La Cosa Nostra
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Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 12,543
Gateshead, UK
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“Christopher” (season 4, episode 3) In which everybody celebrates Columbus Day and Iron Eyes Cody is secretly Italian Every show has to have a “worst” episode, one that sits at the bottom of a subjective, personal ranking of that show’s many adventures. What’s different about “Christopher,” the worst, clumsiest hour The Sopranos would ever produce, is that it’s not just the worst episode. It’s the worst episode by SEVERAL DEGREES. The show had not been this bad before, and it would not get this bad again. (Obviously, I haven’t been through the rest of the series again, so I could be eating these words by the time we get back through all of this again, but “Christopher” is almost worse than I remembered it being, which rarely happens to me. Removed from the context under which it was produced—a context where The Sopranos was frequently attacked by anti-Italian-American defamation groups—the episode just seems weird, like all of the characters in the show had written columns for the “My Turn” feature in Newsweek and were reading them to each other. It’s not like the episode is without merit. There are plenty of interesting plot developments, and there are some very good scenes, with the final scene, in particular, being a strong example of the show undercutting itself in a humorous fashion. And the storyline about Ralphie deciding to dump Rosalie so he could be with Janice is well done, particularly at the end when Janice no longer wants anything to do with him. (OK, I could have lived without having to see the two of them do their weird sex play thing again, but that’s not really a demerit against the episode.) It’s just that the rest of the episode is so bulky, so unlike The Sopranos, which is usually pretty lean and witty. This is a show where nobody really says what they’re feeling, and that’s a strength. Here’s an episode where everybody says what they’re feeling all of the time, and that’s why it doesn’t work. The basic idea is this: It’s coming on Columbus Day; they’re putting on parades. Silvio reads about an anti-parade protest by a group of Native Americans who want to take issue with celebration of a man whose arrival precipitated several centuries worth of struggle and genocide for their people. Silvio, taking this to be a slur against Italians, decides he doesn’t like it and goes to an earlier demonstration where a Columbus effigy is going to be burned. He and some of the other guys take the effigy down, and then a scuffle breaks out (precipitated by the demonstrators, after Sil takes down their effigy). Several people are injured, and it lands both groups in hot water, with Tony visibly upset with everyone for getting involved in something so stupid, to the point where they could have gone to jail for something relatively innocuous in the grand scheme of their crimes. Meanwhile, everyone decides to make things right with the protest leader, a man named Del Redclay. Again, not every scene here is a flop. In particular, I like the scene where Ralphie, having decided that the best way to get back at the Native Americans for insulting Christopher Columbus is to tear down an icon of equal stature to Native Americans, which means that he discovers the Italian heritage of Iron Eyes Cody and threatens to go wide with it if the protests don’t scale down. The whole absurdity of this conceit is tremendously amusing, especially the way that Joe Pantoliano plays the moment like he’s a great investigative journalist or something. The moment where Del seems shaken by this knowledge and can’t believe it’s true is, admittedly, a step too far into the farce, but the whole scene plays out like a weird, comic inversion of the show’s usual mob intimidation scenes, a giant poster of Cody standing in for the sorts of threats the mobsters might usually use. And I think what the episode is trying to go for is vaguely well-expressed (except when the show just comes out and says it). The show rarely allows Tony to be unequivocally right, but it seems to agree with him here that it’s fine to be proud of your heritage, but what really matters is who YOU are. The final scene in the car, with Tony returning again to the question of whatever happened to Gary Cooper, takes this tack as its centerpiece. The scene argues that getting too tied up into an identity that extends to a group beyond yourself can be a dangerous thing, a sort of drug that stands in the way of you being in control of your own actions and your own life. Once everything can be seen as a slight, then all you’re doing is looking for slights. Because this is a world of several billion people, slights will come, but it’s usually better to not get too invested in feeling bad about them. Feel proud of who you are, of what you’ve done, and the rest will take care of itself. It’s not a bad life philosophy, particularly coming from Tony, who can be kind of an oaf about these things, and it stands in marked counterpoint to an entire episode made up of people complaining about who’s had it hardest. (I also like that Sil completely forgets it's Columbus Day when they go to the casino, which shows just how serious he really is about this thing.) But the problem is that everything on the way to that scene is so tortured and awkward, as though David Chase and episode writer Michael Imperioli (from a story idea by Imperioli and Maria Laurino) had that final scene in mind and then weren’t quite sure how to get there. The episode, outside of the Ralphie and Janice storyline (and another that we’ll get to), takes the structure of various people airing their grievances on behalf of the groups they represent. Even a mostly disconnected scene of Carmela and her friends—including Bobby’s wife, Karen, now enjoying a loftier status in the life of the mob wives, just as her husband enjoys a loftier status at work—attending a speech recommended by Father Phil mostly just turns into a woman lecturing the group about how Italian-Americans have so much to be proud of and how they should remind the world that they’re about far more than the usual stereotypes, instead embracing things like broccoli rabe and the many millions of Italian-Americans who don’t participate in organized crime. (I do love the way Rosalie silently tells off the woman who turns to look at her accusatorily during this section of the speech.) Hell, even Montel Williams gets in on the act on TV. I certainly know that we have these conversations in America, and I’m sure that Chase and Imperioli are tweaking the idea of Italian-Americans who think their lives have been rough based on the fact that, at least in America, they kind of don’t have a contest when comparing their suffering to African-Americans or Native Americans. (Hell, we even get a scene where Hesh not so subtly reminds us that Jewish people have plenty to complain about if we’re talking on a global scale.) And the scene where Furio complains about tensions between northern and southern Italy is even a nice little reminder about how this problem is not specific to this country and is more of a generalized human thing, where we tend to mistreat people from other groups. But I don’t know that the episode had to be so talky about this central idea. It’s a needlessly bulky episode, where people don’t just have exchanges of dialogue but, instead, tend to make gigantic speeches. Granted, a lot of these speeches come from characters the regulars are listening to, but that doesn’t make things any better. There’s a place for discussion of the awful ways Native Americans were treated after Columbus arrived in North America; I’m not sure that an episode of The Sopranos is that place. The show, of course, was battling perceptions of it as a series that glorified Italian-American involvement in the mob or created a perception that all Italian-Americans were in the mob. As any show becomes more popular, it will inevitably attract some form of controversy, and that was the controversy for this show. “Christopher” was widely seen as a response to that controversy, a suggestion that those who were worried about these sorts of things were taking them too seriously and should just lighten up already. Was it? I have no idea, but the timing certainly makes a compelling case for that argument. The problem is that the episode felt clunky at the time and now just feels weird, divorced from the arguments of that earlier period. When’s the last time you heard someone complain about how The Sopranos suggests all Italian-Americans are in the mob anyway? It’s an odd storyline, told oddly, particularly since it has little to no bearing on much that comes later. Other storylines, however, are much better. I’ve already mentioned the story of Ralphie’s pathetic attempts to improve his love life by ditching Rosalie for Janice (who appears to enjoy treating him like a prostitute). It’s one of the few times in the series so far where it’s possible to feel something like sympathy for Ralphie, whose inability to stop climbing the ladder at work has a tendency to infect the rest of his life. Does he really care for Janice or Rosalie? It’s kind of impossible to tell (though the fact that he constantly cheats on Rosalie and seems to mostly think of Janice as a passing thing is a good indication that he doesn’t have much feeling for them either way), but it’s hard to watch him try to make Janice his girl when she’s just seen how devoted Bobby was to his wife and realizes that there’s a different way of having a relationship. So she pushes him down the stairs, and he swears his revenge. There are a bunch of other small plots—like, say, Paulie telling Johnny Sack about the crack Ralphie made about his wife or Ralphie deciding to buy a racehorse or Junior’s trial beginning—that seem promising as things that will have a bearing on what comes later, particularly in regards to Paulie’s attempts to drive a wedge between New York and New Jersey for whatever reason. (It’s a bit hard to read Paulie’s long game at this point, particularly when he only appears in a few minutes of every episode. Tony Sirico was suffering after back surgery and needed the reduced workload.) But they’re all shoved into the midst of the much less competent A-story, and that makes them seem less organic than they might and more like the show saying, “See these? These plot points will be important later on.” The one other story that seems to be the exception to this is the death of Karen. For a character we just met two episodes ago, who only appeared in these two episodes, her death is surprisingly heartfelt. Bobby, who’s never taken a comare, weeps openly at her casket in a display of outsized emotion rarely seen among the men of Sopranos-land. And the scene where he’s stuck in a traffic jam and complains to his son about the task his wife calls in to him (through his kid) is rather predictable—as you just know that the accident holding everything back is going to involve Karen, the very person he’s complaining about—but still packs a punch. Up until now, Bobby’s been hapless comic relief. In this episode, the show goes out of its way to show that he’s got some depth to him, just like everybody else on Tony’s crew. The storyline is raw and deeply felt and real, which stands in marked contrast to most everything else that goes on in the episode. It’s rare for The Sopranos to lose sight of the sorts of things that made it so good in the first place, but “Christopher” does early and often. It’s the nadir of the series, and it’s amazing a show this good could produce an episode this poor.
This post is plagiarised.
...dot com bold typeface rhetoric. You go clickety click and get your head split. 'The hell you look like on a message board Discussing whether or not the Brother is hardcore?
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: Capo de La Cosa Nostra]
#629218
01/13/12 01:00 AM
01/13/12 01:00 AM
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 1,171 pittsburgh pa
phatmatress
Underboss
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Underboss
Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 1,171
pittsburgh pa
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“Christopher” (season 4, episode 3) In which everybody celebrates Columbus Day and Iron Eyes Cody is secretly Italian Every show has to have a “worst” episode, one that sits at the bottom of a subjective, personal ranking of that show’s many adventures. What’s different about “Christopher,” the worst, clumsiest hour The Sopranos would ever produce, is that it’s not just the worst episode. It’s the worst episode by SEVERAL DEGREES. The show had not been this bad before, and it would not get this bad again. (Obviously, I haven’t been through the rest of the series again, so I could be eating these words by the time we get back through all of this again, but “Christopher” is almost worse than I remembered it being, which rarely happens to me. Removed from the context under which it was produced—a context where The Sopranos was frequently attacked by anti-Italian-American defamation groups—the episode just seems weird, like all of the characters in the show had written columns for the “My Turn” feature in Newsweek and were reading them to each other. It’s not like the episode is without merit. There are plenty of interesting plot developments, and there are some very good scenes, with the final scene, in particular, being a strong example of the show undercutting itself in a humorous fashion. And the storyline about Ralphie deciding to dump Rosalie so he could be with Janice is well done, particularly at the end when Janice no longer wants anything to do with him. (OK, I could have lived without having to see the two of them do their weird sex play thing again, but that’s not really a demerit against the episode.) It’s just that the rest of the episode is so bulky, so unlike The Sopranos, which is usually pretty lean and witty. This is a show where nobody really says what they’re feeling, and that’s a strength. Here’s an episode where everybody says what they’re feeling all of the time, and that’s why it doesn’t work. The basic idea is this: It’s coming on Columbus Day; they’re putting on parades. Silvio reads about an anti-parade protest by a group of Native Americans who want to take issue with celebration of a man whose arrival precipitated several centuries worth of struggle and genocide for their people. Silvio, taking this to be a slur against Italians, decides he doesn’t like it and goes to an earlier demonstration where a Columbus effigy is going to be burned. He and some of the other guys take the effigy down, and then a scuffle breaks out (precipitated by the demonstrators, after Sil takes down their effigy). Several people are injured, and it lands both groups in hot water, with Tony visibly upset with everyone for getting involved in something so stupid, to the point where they could have gone to jail for something relatively innocuous in the grand scheme of their crimes. Meanwhile, everyone decides to make things right with the protest leader, a man named Del Redclay. Again, not every scene here is a flop. In particular, I like the scene where Ralphie, having decided that the best way to get back at the Native Americans for insulting Christopher Columbus is to tear down an icon of equal stature to Native Americans, which means that he discovers the Italian heritage of Iron Eyes Cody and threatens to go wide with it if the protests don’t scale down. The whole absurdity of this conceit is tremendously amusing, especially the way that Joe Pantoliano plays the moment like he’s a great investigative journalist or something. The moment where Del seems shaken by this knowledge and can’t believe it’s true is, admittedly, a step too far into the farce, but the whole scene plays out like a weird, comic inversion of the show’s usual mob intimidation scenes, a giant poster of Cody standing in for the sorts of threats the mobsters might usually use. And I think what the episode is trying to go for is vaguely well-expressed (except when the show just comes out and says it). The show rarely allows Tony to be unequivocally right, but it seems to agree with him here that it’s fine to be proud of your heritage, but what really matters is who YOU are. The final scene in the car, with Tony returning again to the question of whatever happened to Gary Cooper, takes this tack as its centerpiece. The scene argues that getting too tied up into an identity that extends to a group beyond yourself can be a dangerous thing, a sort of drug that stands in the way of you being in control of your own actions and your own life. Once everything can be seen as a slight, then all you’re doing is looking for slights. Because this is a world of several billion people, slights will come, but it’s usually better to not get too invested in feeling bad about them. Feel proud of who you are, of what you’ve done, and the rest will take care of itself. It’s not a bad life philosophy, particularly coming from Tony, who can be kind of an oaf about these things, and it stands in marked counterpoint to an entire episode made up of people complaining about who’s had it hardest. (I also like that Sil completely forgets it's Columbus Day when they go to the casino, which shows just how serious he really is about this thing.) But the problem is that everything on the way to that scene is so tortured and awkward, as though David Chase and episode writer Michael Imperioli (from a story idea by Imperioli and Maria Laurino) had that final scene in mind and then weren’t quite sure how to get there. The episode, outside of the Ralphie and Janice storyline (and another that we’ll get to), takes the structure of various people airing their grievances on behalf of the groups they represent. Even a mostly disconnected scene of Carmela and her friends—including Bobby’s wife, Karen, now enjoying a loftier status in the life of the mob wives, just as her husband enjoys a loftier status at work—attending a speech recommended by Father Phil mostly just turns into a woman lecturing the group about how Italian-Americans have so much to be proud of and how they should remind the world that they’re about far more than the usual stereotypes, instead embracing things like broccoli rabe and the many millions of Italian-Americans who don’t participate in organized crime. (I do love the way Rosalie silently tells off the woman who turns to look at her accusatorily during this section of the speech.) Hell, even Montel Williams gets in on the act on TV. I certainly know that we have these conversations in America, and I’m sure that Chase and Imperioli are tweaking the idea of Italian-Americans who think their lives have been rough based on the fact that, at least in America, they kind of don’t have a contest when comparing their suffering to African-Americans or Native Americans. (Hell, we even get a scene where Hesh not so subtly reminds us that Jewish people have plenty to complain about if we’re talking on a global scale.) And the scene where Furio complains about tensions between northern and southern Italy is even a nice little reminder about how this problem is not specific to this country and is more of a generalized human thing, where we tend to mistreat people from other groups. But I don’t know that the episode had to be so talky about this central idea. It’s a needlessly bulky episode, where people don’t just have exchanges of dialogue but, instead, tend to make gigantic speeches. Granted, a lot of these speeches come from characters the regulars are listening to, but that doesn’t make things any better. There’s a place for discussion of the awful ways Native Americans were treated after Columbus arrived in North America; I’m not sure that an episode of The Sopranos is that place. The show, of course, was battling perceptions of it as a series that glorified Italian-American involvement in the mob or created a perception that all Italian-Americans were in the mob. As any show becomes more popular, it will inevitably attract some form of controversy, and that was the controversy for this show. “Christopher” was widely seen as a response to that controversy, a suggestion that those who were worried about these sorts of things were taking them too seriously and should just lighten up already. Was it? I have no idea, but the timing certainly makes a compelling case for that argument. The problem is that the episode felt clunky at the time and now just feels weird, divorced from the arguments of that earlier period. When’s the last time you heard someone complain about how The Sopranos suggests all Italian-Americans are in the mob anyway? It’s an odd storyline, told oddly, particularly since it has little to no bearing on much that comes later. Other storylines, however, are much better. I’ve already mentioned the story of Ralphie’s pathetic attempts to improve his love life by ditching Rosalie for Janice (who appears to enjoy treating him like a prostitute). It’s one of the few times in the series so far where it’s possible to feel something like sympathy for Ralphie, whose inability to stop climbing the ladder at work has a tendency to infect the rest of his life. Does he really care for Janice or Rosalie? It’s kind of impossible to tell (though the fact that he constantly cheats on Rosalie and seems to mostly think of Janice as a passing thing is a good indication that he doesn’t have much feeling for them either way), but it’s hard to watch him try to make Janice his girl when she’s just seen how devoted Bobby was to his wife and realizes that there’s a different way of having a relationship. So she pushes him down the stairs, and he swears his revenge. There are a bunch of other small plots—like, say, Paulie telling Johnny Sack about the crack Ralphie made about his wife or Ralphie deciding to buy a racehorse or Junior’s trial beginning—that seem promising as things that will have a bearing on what comes later, particularly in regards to Paulie’s attempts to drive a wedge between New York and New Jersey for whatever reason. (It’s a bit hard to read Paulie’s long game at this point, particularly when he only appears in a few minutes of every episode. Tony Sirico was suffering after back surgery and needed the reduced workload.) But they’re all shoved into the midst of the much less competent A-story, and that makes them seem less organic than they might and more like the show saying, “See these? These plot points will be important later on.” The one other story that seems to be the exception to this is the death of Karen. For a character we just met two episodes ago, who only appeared in these two episodes, her death is surprisingly heartfelt. Bobby, who’s never taken a comare, weeps openly at her casket in a display of outsized emotion rarely seen among the men of Sopranos-land. And the scene where he’s stuck in a traffic jam and complains to his son about the task his wife calls in to him (through his kid) is rather predictable—as you just know that the accident holding everything back is going to involve Karen, the very person he’s complaining about—but still packs a punch. Up until now, Bobby’s been hapless comic relief. In this episode, the show goes out of its way to show that he’s got some depth to him, just like everybody else on Tony’s crew. The storyline is raw and deeply felt and real, which stands in marked contrast to most everything else that goes on in the episode. It’s rare for The Sopranos to lose sight of the sorts of things that made it so good in the first place, but “Christopher” does early and often. It’s the nadir of the series, and it’s amazing a show this good could produce an episode this poor.
This post is plagiarised. yeah i thought i copied and posted the webaddress in post. it was not intentional. i just wanted to convey a professional opnion on the subject. i did the same one for the other episode. sorry not my intentions.
I hate Dicknoses!!!!!!
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: phatmatress]
#629288
01/13/12 01:08 PM
01/13/12 01:08 PM
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Joined: Dec 2011
Posts: 263 Scotland UK
gemini_killer
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Capo
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lol.. definitely that test dream episode .. was getting pissed off watching that..the rest were great..
From now on, nothing goes down unless I'm involved. No blackjack no dope deals, no nothing. A nickel bag gets sold in the park, I want in. You guys got fat while everybody starved on the street. Now it's my turn. -Frank White
You say your 72, if they come back and tell me to give you a message - and if you want to defy it ... I assure you that you will never reach 73 - Joey "the clown" Lombardo
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: ukwiseguy]
#629606
01/15/12 08:34 AM
01/15/12 08:34 AM
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Joined: Dec 2011
Posts: 215
ukwiseguy
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Larry and Albert Barese.
The little slippery fuck lol, love when uncle junior says that.
Underworld UK"The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled, Was Convincing The World He Didn't Exist"
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: gemini_killer]
#629626
01/15/12 02:27 PM
01/15/12 02:27 PM
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Joined: Dec 2011
Posts: 215
ukwiseguy
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Woops this was in the wrong thread i meant it for the characters we'd like to see more of.
Still slippery little fucks though lol.
Underworld UK"The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled, Was Convincing The World He Didn't Exist"
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: phatmatress]
#657919
07/30/12 11:28 PM
07/30/12 11:28 PM
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Joined: Jul 2012
Posts: 8
pdevitt
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: Nova24]
#657920
07/30/12 11:28 PM
07/30/12 11:28 PM
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Joined: Jul 2012
Posts: 8
pdevitt
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: NickyScarfo]
#657923
07/30/12 11:30 PM
07/30/12 11:30 PM
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Joined: Jul 2012
Posts: 8
pdevitt
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Associate
Joined: Jul 2012
Posts: 8
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: ukwiseguy]
#661363
08/21/12 03:57 PM
08/21/12 03:57 PM
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Joined: Aug 2012
Posts: 66 New Orleans LA
FrankGaglianoJR
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Whatever episode where tony got shot and was in a coma and i had to watch that whacko's dreams lol
"According to my best recollection,I don't remember." - Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: ukwiseguy]
#661915
08/24/12 07:11 PM
08/24/12 07:11 PM
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Joined: Aug 2012
Posts: 63 Providence, RI
Fat_Ralph
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How about season 6 PT.I the entire season, with the exception of maybe 1 or 2 episodes, just very dull and not entertaining, maybe its just me.........
"NEVER GET HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY"-ELVIS AARON PRESLEY
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: Fat_Ralph]
#662750
08/28/12 02:47 AM
08/28/12 02:47 AM
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Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 1,113
Ted
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That one episode in season 5 where Tony meets his dad's old girlfriend. She just doesn't shut up. Hand she's pretty boring, too. Christopher was kind of bad, too. I think it was the first episode I ever watched. The 3 things that bugged me about that episode was: -How does Silvio (and everyone else) simply forget about the parade? It's all they've been talking about. -Tony's speech at the end was overkill (although the "Gary Cooper was gay?" and "He died. Oh you mean cause he fought all those Indians" lines were hilarious). -Iron Eyes Cody. The episode makes it seem like a big revelation that he wasn't a really a Native American. This has been well known for a long time. But then the show changes it up and says he IS Native American.
"I die outside; I die in jail. It don't matter to me," -John Franzese
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: ukwiseguy]
#688922
01/08/13 03:47 AM
01/08/13 03:47 AM
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Joined: Jan 2013
Posts: 364 Brooklyn
RichieAnimal
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Brooklyn
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The one where tony was washing his money through the Russian. Then Paulie attacks the Russians best friend in life. They think they killed him but his car is missing. No repercussions from trying to kill the guys best friend? Maybe but not likely.
Then when Chris is buying the pastry. He shoots the clerk in the foot. The fat guy in the store is the same guy who becomes a made guy the homo?
But over all the writers of the show are pretty good
Only the unloved hate
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Re: Worst Episode?
[Re: ukwiseguy]
#688925
01/08/13 03:56 AM
01/08/13 03:56 AM
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Joined: Jan 2013
Posts: 364 Brooklyn
RichieAnimal
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Then the soccer one for 2 reasons. I have been coaching soccer since 1970. I have no idea what the coach is talking about in that game none. Tony daughter doesn't look much like a keeper to me.
Then he is screwing one of his players a minor. I am a liberal when it comes to abusing kids. Maybe because my father abused me as a kid by beating the crap out of me every chance he got to make me good.it didn't work.
Tony would of killed him for the fun of it or he might have nailed to coach to 2 by 4s first then he would have killed him.
Only the unloved hate
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