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I got the sense that Phil's wife was pressuring him to kill Vito. So, Phil's resolve might not have been as strong as we'd been led to believe.
And Cherie, regarding your previous points. I would definitely agree that Tony is a bad guy, but the problem I've got with the past couple of episodes is that we got no real resolution on the "Everyday is a gift" business, everything just reverted to the status quo. From a real life point of view, I suppose that's accurate, but from a dramatic point of view, I felt like we needed a bit more acknowledgement of what happened, the Melfi scene was the only place that it was really addressed. And I found it odd that Carmela basically told him to cheat on her. In some respects, I'm finding the turn of events tough because of exactly the reasons you said, that they make us so sympathetic to him then hit us with his nastiness. But at the same time, I thought the new territory was more interesting, of having Tony separated from this world.
I think there's certainly something in the timing of having Vito return to Jersey at the same time that Tony gives up on trying to change. They both recognized the problems with their world, tried to leave, but found that it wasn't doable without a lot of work, and for these guys, that's the one thing they're not prepared to do.
I feel sort of hypocritical saying that the show's too dark, spends too much time wallowing in this depression, because I love the similarly themed season six of Buffy or season three of Six Feet Under. Watching Buffy, I wanted the characters to be bad, precisely because they were always so good. Here, because they always do bad things, you want them to do better, and are disappointed when they inevitably fail to. Witness Adrianna's death last year, where I was really hoping that she would leave with Christopher, but knew that it wasn't possible.
That's what makes the show so tough to watch, it's frustrating to watch these people continually fail, and it seems like those brief moments of light, the chance for escape, only make it worse when they fail. |
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