Season Five: Cold Cuts

I just finished watching this episode (I do not get HBO so the DVD collection is the first time I ever watch the new episodes) and I did not understand the ending. After a soccer mom battle between Janice and some other woman, Janice took anger management classes to cope with her problem. She has come to terms with this problem (or as so it seems; not watching the last few episodes of the season) and her family seems content with it. Tony is over their house and along with Bobby, they are having dinner. Tony is making it very open that he is appempting to upset Janice by revealing to Bobby's children at the table about her past. He continues to prode Janice with digs to get her angered and at the end, is screaming obscenities at him and appempting to stab him with a fork or knife. He seems like that his mission (which was complete) was to upset Janice and break her out of her ability to manage her anger. You can tell by Tony's reaction to the telemarketing incident and the following events that he is not at ease with Janices ability to accept and control her emotions. Maybe he is resentful or even jealous of this act. My question to you is that why was Tony so aggravated at Janice and the end of this episode?

I likened it to "misery loving company." For once, Janice seems to be at relative peace, and I think Tony, in some perverse methodology, wanted to see how far he could go before she would crack. He could've been deciding whether it was an authentic change, but in reality, he did it (imho) because he's a sick fuck.

Tony resented Janice's want to change. Change from her Soprano hot-headedness. He hates Janice's bad temper, as it got him in the news, but at the same time, he couldn't cope with her being a calm person of rationale and logic. I think Janice is much more (naturally irrational than Tony, and that means Tony can at least live in comfort knowing that he is (by means of dignity) superior to Janice.

In making her crack in this episode's finale, he brought her crashing back down to Earth. He couldn't take Janice being happy in herself by falseness. He wanted to bring her back to Sopranoness.

And I agree with Double J that Tony is a "sick fuck," but one which we cannot help but pity in his inevitable downward spiral into self-induced depression and a paranoid, Freudian mess.

Mick