Letters to the Editor
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I did it
I was in the "I did it" camp, and I don't think it's an accident that many of us were. I feel like one of the major themes of the episode was Tony's unconscious need to confess. Even after his "I've murdered friends before" dream, after which he awoke worried that he'd said it aloud in bed with Carmella, he went into therapy with a watered-down version of that same confession.
He's murdered friends before, but then there was at least someone in his crew in who knew. This act trumped those by a mile. There was not one person he could tell who wouldn't see the act for being exactly as monstrous as it was.
That's why I think his trip on peyote provided him with something else: Remember his fixation on Kelly breast feeding her and Christopher's baby? It reminded me of the hallucination Tony had at the end of season one in which he happened upon an Italian mother nursing her baby. I think his trip provided him with a small moment of symbiosis while his world fell apart around him.
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However This Show Ends, Meadow Will Be The Key
I'm certain of that. She's being held in reserve, like an ace card, and when they play her it's going to be devastating.
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Weeping and laughing
I just saw the closing scene again and watched Tony laugh and weep at the same time. It made me think of the line from Bronte: "I am hard and tough as an India-rubber ball; pervious, though, through a chink or two still...." If Tony were not "pervious" in some small way, open to redemption or the human bond, then his story wouldn't be such a wrenching tragedy. As many others have said, if we view him simply as a sociopath in order to distance him from ourselves, we ignore the element of necessity in this drama. Again and again we see there is no way out of this life; Tony is trapped within a rigid system and is doomed to a hopeless repetition. Vito's fate underpins the overdetermined nature of this kind of life. I see it as a kind of mobsters-R-us allegory. Perhaps the "I get it" is simply Tony facing the bleak fact that there are a very limited number of possible outcomes for him. He is going to die. Maybe he is starting to think about what his legacy will be?
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"Sicilians eat their own"
When I saw Crissy was going to die at Tony’s hand, my first reaction was “mercy killing”. Chrissy was spitting up blood and Tony was showing mercy. But as the scene went on. I became more uncomfortable with that assessment, which was later borne out by the doctor saying he might have made it. Upon reading the reactions in the letters to this article that this could only be a murder, I realized in Tony’s mind, murder could be a mercy killing. If could put words to Tony’s thoughts: “If I don’t kill him now when he confessed he is always going to be junkie like his dad when am I going to do it. It is mercy to kill him now. Chrissy doesn’t get another chance in my world.” The rest of the episode is an exploration of Tony’s thoughts. Tony escapes to Vegas to confront himself which he can only define as escape. His appreciation of the good weed and desire to do peyote with some hot chick making her way through the world with her body in service of her mind, in Tony’s words “stripping her way through college,” Tony becomes a retro-hippy looking for enlightenment through an escape with hallucinogens. But instead of the terrify soul-searching he might have experienced, he receives justification and validation, like some Jersey “Manson,” that killing Chrissy was the first positive step of the rest of his life. “I get it” will lead him on a course of murder and brutality unprecedented in this apparently thoughtful series. To say Tony is a sociopath is to say the obvious. It is the premise of the series.
I predict he will kill Phil, possibly by his own hand. That AJ will use his new chemical romance to become Tony Jr. Carmella will gain an enlightenment of her own and realize the monster that Tony is and that she has become. I see a scene where Carmella confronts Tony about any of the number of his past atrocities. Tony becomes physically abusive and AJ intercedes, killing Tony in defense of his mother. In the process AJ becomes the new boss, even more vicious and abusive than his dad. After all the series is about the familiar Greek mythological themes of fathers eating their sons and sons dismembering their fathers. “Sicilians eat their own,” I don’t remember which Mafia movie that quote came from, but here it applies. (NB. I’m Sicilian so no slight was intended.)
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Family Feud
Sicilian writes:
"I see a scene where Carmella confronts Tony about any of the number of his past atrocities. Tony becomes physically abusive and AJ intercedes, killing Tony in defense of his mother."
I agree that AJ kills his father. He does it to save his family and the world from the insanity that he now understands, after the painful reality of life hits him in the head.
You wrote:
"In the process AJ becomes the new boss, even more vicious and abusive than his dad. After all the series is about the familiar Greek mythological themes of fathers eating their sons and sons dismembering their fathers."
Here I disagree. AJ was sickened when his pals beat the black bicyclist. He was disturbed about pouring acid on the foot of the college dead-beat. He's going to chuck the mob life, but by killing his father, he might throw away his chance for an honest life. To save him, his family, though stunned when AJ kills Tony, will rally around him. Meadow and Carmela will help AJ the way Tony helped Janice after she killed her boyfriend in the house owned by Tony's mother.
The foreshadowing for this event is a total eclipse.