Letters to the Editor
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The Roulette Wheel and Tony's Sociopathy
I find the the roulette wheel very symbolic for Tony's eventual fate and of those around him. The accident with Christopher was a random event. The subsequent killing of Christopher was gruesome and horrifying. Those soulless, ruthless eyes as he is killing Christopher show us the pure evil of Tony that often has been softened by circumstance. We can abide that no longer and Chase is forcing we the viewers to confront our voyeuristic fascination with this psychopath. Tony tossing his cookies is we the viewers tossing ours in disgust and shock.
This is becoming a scary psychological ride.
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I also think
that Tony yelled: I did it!
Tony didn't have to kill Christopher; Christopher had sustained massive internal injuries. He was coughing up copious amounts of blood, his windpipe was severely damanged, his lungs were probably punctured. He would have been dead in ten minutes. Tony has killed enough people to know this. Why did he have to kill Christopher, as opposed to just waiting a few minutes and having him die on his own?
I think Tony is going to try to kill Melfi, and she's the one who takes down Tony. She knows waaaay too much to be allowed to live.
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"I did it" & comfortably numb
I think it's important not to forget that Tony was singing the second verse of "Comfortably Numb" last week as he came downstairs to find A.J. depressed and morose on the couch. Carm offers "comfort food."
Tony's dawning in Las Vegas is both his inner achievement (breaking his losing streak by killing Adriane/Christopher) and his confession of the same - "I did it."
Anyone who has to this point doubted that this program is classic literature worthy of comparison to any other classic needs to re-evaluate.
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"I get it"
After watching the episode twice and backing up to hear that line again, I am certain that Tony yelled, "I get it!" This makes much more sense in context (with all the trippy symbolic references back to the Costa Mesa episodes): Tony is looking for clues and meaning in the meaningless. And anyway, it's the peyote talking; everything seems connected--at the roulette table he says, "It's the same principle as the solar system."
Just what he "gets"--and how that carries into the next three episodes--is anyone's guess.
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No, Tony IS happy -- sort of
Heather completely missed the point of the post-peyote roulette game.
Tony wins and wins then says to himself, “He’s dead.” Tony is telling himself that his luck – all bad this season until then – has changed for the better BECAUSE Chris is gone. It’s a powerful exercise in cognitive dissonance: it’s OK, even justified, that Chris should die since, it’s clear to Tony, that he was jinxing Tony.
In any case, the last several episodes are some of the best in years.
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I'd say the hippies won this round
Look at all the things that couldn't make an impact on Tony Soprano: alcohol, domestic violence, his own family, murder, therapy, getting shot, the possibility of getting caught and going to prison. Nothing could get to the inside of this man's soul.
Then he smokes a little weed and eats peyote and whatever heavy furniture he had moved up against the door to his soul slides away and he walks through the door -- but it's too late to make a difference.
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You should watch again
Ms. Havrilesky, you had a couple of serious misreads. For one, as it has been pointed out in several letters, Tony was laughing in delirious glee when he fell on his back. The big revelation of his peyote trip is that he does not need to feel remorse, he is finally free from the burden of filial obligation, emotionally.
Also, you talk at some length of his being in denial, but I don't see what he is in denial of. He is quite clearly aware that he killed Christopher. He listens to everyone else's grief and does not locate any within himself. It is possible that the whole point of his taking peyote was to search his soul and plumb the very depths in case there was any grief he was missing; and again, with great relief he finds there is nothing there.
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Simplify simplify...
I think Tony saw an opportunity to simplify his life, and he took it. Christopher was like a son to him, but as the father Tony was jealous. He saw Chris cleaning up his life, distancing himself from the mob (physically, emotionally, and metaphorically through Cleaver). Tony dreamed of passing the helm to Chris, foisting the responsibilities and pain onto somebody else. With Chris on the outs, Tony was left all alone with his feelings.
For Tony, Chris represented the part of himself who wanted escape, peace, and understanding. For Chris, Tony represented the familial ball-and-chain of mob life. Both felt conflicted by the part of themselves they saw represented in the other.
By killing Christopher, Tony thought he could simplify his own feelings, ridding himself of the physical reminder of his own desires to lead a different life. Of course, changing the external world to affect the internal is a plan for failure every time, but Tony refuses to learn this. (Or maybe he finally "get's it", though I doubt it.)
I'm surprised people are playing the "Tony is a sociopath" card, as if that would excuse them from identifying with him. I really don't think we're meant to write Tony off as a soulless killing machine, tsk tsking from our comfy couches, our own souls glowing because we can correctly identify the difference between right and wrong when it comes to murder. Tony may make some seriously flawed choices, but the complexity of his intentions go way beyond right and wrong.
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got the ending wrong
I like your analysis, but i think you misinterpreted the ending. It seemed to me that Tony's drugged, superstitious-gambler's revelation after winning big -- "he's dead" -- is euphoric. Even if he is in deep denial. As if his big curse has been lifted (remember, he's been flamboyantly losing these last few weeks) and getting Christopher out of his life is, as he says earlier in the dream with Melfi, a "relief." It is the eruption of the unconscious, what could only be said to Melfi in a dream, and coupled with the gambling subplot and Tony's magical thinking about it lately ...well, I thought it was bone-chilling, but definitely not in the way you say.
That reaction is monstrous, as Tony was monstrous throughout the episode -- cheap and soulless and disgusting. And it was in Vegas, so of course it was, metaphorically speaking, Tony's descent into the underworld. Added to that Tony's cliched peyote-induced sunrise-in-the-desert-with-a-hooker revelation, "I get it," the two statements serve to make Tony seem profoundly cold, clueless, spiritually dead. Despicable, perhaps, so we're neither so sorry nor so surprised to see what awful end awaits him.