I bet we never see that lake again. The weekend there didn't seem like the springboard to a chummy friendship between the Sopranos and Bacalas. Of course they will still move in the same circles, and Tony and Janice are brother and sister, but no more getaway weekends, I bet.

We didn't see much of Chris other than Tony hanging up on him when Chris called him to wish a belated happy birthday. Tony didn't seem to appreciate the belated part. I think Chris is still working on that horrible sounding movie. (How did he describe it? "Saw" meets "Goodfellas"? LOL).

I did see Tony taking a long look at the boat but didn't understand the significance. Why would he go across the lake? Is there any reason he would even know what is over there? Maybe you meant it metaphorically, i.e. crossing over to the other side.

Somehow I don't think Tony is going to die and I don't think he is going to go to prison. Which leaves what? I guess I'll have to keep watching to find out ;-)

No Meadow, no AJ, no disappointment. Unlike Kevin and an alarming number of guys on the Sopranos chat boards I don't consider Meadow the hottest woman on the planet. I do not get that at all.

Did you watch the second season of "Rome"? I gave up after a couple of episodes. For all the money they spent on it I don't think it ever really lived up to the standard of the best HBO series. "Deadwood", OTOH, I loved. Was disappointed that it was cancelled (although I think there are supposed to be a couple more wrap-up episodes sometime this year). You have to be intrigued by a show set in the old west in which the characters speak in iambic pentameter.

I don't know that I agree TV is better than the movies. You're right that on TV you can explore longer story arcs than you can easily do in a movie. "The Sopranos", for instance, will wind up with 75-80 episodes. There are no 80 hour movies. OTOH there have been a lot of terrific movies (not to mention bad TV shows) that are full of story, dialogue, foreshadowing, and subtlety. Thankfully we don't have to choose one or the other.

What is BSG? That probably shows you how much network TV I watch.


>Beane I think you've got it! In the last episode we'll see ducks on that lake.
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>There will be resonance in Carmela's life from the story about his father shooting through the beehive hairdo.
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>Bobby said, "You Sopranos always take it too far"
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>Christopher has a different agenda.
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>When Tony was sitting on the dock, did you see him looking at the boat?
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>He's going across that lake at some point.
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>AJ and Meadow ... ?
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>Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome, The Sheild, Rescue Me, BSG ( and of course, Buffy ) - so many good examples as to why TV is better than movies ever were or ever could be. A writer's medium with room for story and dialogue and foreshadowing and subtlety. Characters have time to change...
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>>>Was it me....or did tonight's new Sopranos episode really suck???
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>>>Wow....I actually watched Bobby "The Calzone with legs" Baccalieri get to shoot a gun...riveting stuff.
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>>>This show is getting to be as lame as 30-something was....
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>>Picking right up where you left off last season, I see ;-) Why are you still watching, anyway?
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>>FWIW I thought it was a solid episode. EVERY season starts off with an episode or two that set the stage for the remainder of the season. The signs are always there even if they don't make complete sense until later. You could almost sense the storm clouds forming over that idyllic lake. (A cliche I was glad they chose not to employ). Tony is a guy who suppresses so much of what he's really feeling. When it comes out it tends to come out as violence or exhibits of power.
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>>I laughed out loud at the short scene where Tony and Bobby were out in the woods, Tony shooting up trees with an automatic weapon Bobby gave him for his birthday. Just off the hook on weapons charges and his birthday present from one of his crew is a machine gun! LOL The irony seems lost on both of them. Tony fires off round after round with the joy of a little kid.
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>>It wasn't by accident that there was so much emphasis on old family history. It's all coming to a head for Tony. Another nice small scene, near the end of the episode: Tony sitting down on the dock by himself. "Look at him," Janice says. "He's doing that sitting in a chair thing again." "Oh, come on," Bobby says, "that's what people do, they sit in chairs." But she's right. She knows Tony is stewing and that usually isn't good.
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>>And Janice! She is Livia's daughter, that's for sure. She knows exactly where to stick the knife in. She just does it with words rather than guns and bullets. For a long time I couldn't stand her character. She's physically unattractive, often obnoxious, often spacy. For quite a while I reacted to her like most Sopranos fans do, I suppose -- ugh! get her off the screen! go away! But credit to Aida Turturro. There are a lot of terrific actors on this show and I think she holds her own with any of them. She is not afraid to play an unlikeable character. The way she clomped back and forth between the kitchen counter and the refrigerator when she and Carm were putting away the dinner leftovers could have been part of a master class on acting without dialogue.
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>>I thought the Monopoly scene was a minor Sopranos classic. The four of them got drunker and drunker, the words got sharper and sharper, and you just knew something was going to blow. And it did.
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>>You say big deal, Bobby Bacala finally got to shoot someone. I interpreted that so differently. In the earlier scene out on the lake Tony asked him if he had ever capped anyone (paraphrased, I forget the exact words) and Bobby said no, I've done lots of things but never that. He didn't make it overt -- another thing I love about this show, we are seldom told things in no uncertain terms -- but my sense was he was fine with that. When Tony later told him to "take care of" the situation with the two guys they met in the bar, Bobby sure didn't look happy about it but he said yes. The good soldier. He found the guy and shot him to death. And looked like he had seen a vision of his own death, at least spiritually. I immediately thought of Christopher's line a couple of seasons ago. "That's the man I'm going to Hell for. Tony Soprano."
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>>The little kids, including the ones in the closing scene, were definitely not there by accident. Bobby Bacala coming back after his first execution and scooping up his daughter and holding her tight. The juxtaposition of corruption and innocence is at the show's core.
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>>And we still don't know how it's going to wind up. I will be happy with just about any ending (in Chase we trust) as long as they don't try to tie everything up in a nice little bow. That would undermine everything "The Sopranos" has spent seven seasons exploring, i.e. that life is messy and murky.
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>>Only eight more episodes. It's going to be a sad day when we come to the end of them. Sure, it will live on in reruns and DVDs, but we will have lost the anticipation of watching a new episode for the first time and wondering what's going to happen this time.