Last night’s Sopranos offered some indication of how things will be resolved in this, the last season: mercilessly.
A lot of us discovered hope in the gay captain Vito’s exile to New Hampshire. He was being redeemed by his homosexuality to an elysian place far from Jersey where people are nice to one another. Vito had found another life with strapping Johnny-cakes, reinventing himself as a New Age gay Vito—even writing a book. Last night we found out that you can’t reinvent yourself. The confession to Johnny-cakes that he is from New Jersey—in between squeamish-making Brokeback interludes—reattached Vito to the desperate umbilical of his fate, and he was soon running back to the Garden State, and murdering a good man over a traffic bangup on his way.
Nothing good is going to come of this. The mob is not going to accept Vito’s homosexuality, and this latest murder of a lamb will (morally, for the viewer) justify Vito’s inevitable rubbing-out. As a believer in new age-pastoral-selfinvention, I found the story demoralizing. Though it does support my little brother’s theory, that the series can only end one way, in an eye-for-an-eye vendetta, Christopher killing Tony. Everyone on this show has bad karma, and they’re going to pay.
