Letters to the Editor
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Actually, I think Tony in Las Vegas was more simply just wanting to "get away" ...
Las Vegas, all shiny and new, clean and well-coordinated, is for many people a blank slate place where people feel both free and safe to try on alternative identities. Tony wanted to go there to be alone, but hooked up very quickly with someone who knew what "Tony Soprano" means. I never felt that he actively envied Chris' life which was pretty fucked up. Instead, he envied Chris' youth and his "future" ...
I was musing the other day that Chris represented a new generation who were likely to USE their mob connections as a way to generate capital to largely move OUT of mob life ... making a movie, probably eventually to move to California or Palm Springs or Vegas ... none of this small New Jersey, one-step-above the alley-ways of the lower classes of life. Tony Soprano's mob riches and power may look like "small potatoes" to the MTV generation. The very real downsides of mob life including the competition from other younger, meaner, more international mobs are fairly self-evident.
The mob was/is an attractive alternative to grunt labor and other shit work ... but "hanging with the crew at the Bada Bing" day after day after day does not have the same cache for Chris/Meadow's generation. Similarly no-show jobs are a crappy alternative to a satisfying career ...
Oddly, AJ -- with the prospect of deadend pizzarria management positions ahead -- is not an unlikely next-generation mob candidate, having no other particular talent or drive.
Meadow has visions of a "career" and "independence" and a successful "professional" husband ... I doubt she'd settle for a mob associate, no matter how slick, but ... who knows.