Will the real Tony Soprano please step forward

What to make of this week’s episode of “The Sopranos”? I thought it was an excellent episode, much better than the season premier, which I found to be somewhat disjointed. Sunday’s show featured a David Lynch-esque fantasy in which a comatose Tony imagines he is an ordinary businessman, lost in California when he loses his wallet during a business trip. One of the most entertaining aspects was hearing James Gandolfini pare down the New Jersey accent and jettison the wiseguy dialect.

The alternate Tony storyline was loaded with symbolism and foreboding. The idea of an ordinary life—a typical, humdrum, middle class existence—is an integral part of the mythology of mob drama, including those stories that happen to be true. It is a life that silver-screen and small-screen mobsters alike despise. At the end of “Goodfellas” Henry Hill bemoans having to wait in line like everyone else. On “The Sopranos”, it is his vision of an ordinary life, formed while watching some poor schlub pack his wife and kids into a beat-up car at a gas station, that leads Christopher to betray Adrianna to Tony.

Yet an ordinary life is something to be envied as well. Vito Corleone tells his son that he never wanted to be a pawn of powerful men, but he also admits that he never wanted his son to share his life. Much of “The Sopranos” has revolved around Tony and Carmella trying to keep A.J. out of Tony’s mob world. That’s what makes A.J. pledge of revenge as he stands over Tony’s hospital bed—not unlike the scene in “The Godfather” in which Michael tells his father, “I’m with you now, Pop,”—as ominous as it was laughable. (Laughable, because, while A.J. may share his father’s murderous hate, he has none of his apparent guile and cunning.)

On “The Sopranos”, the ordinary life is represented by Artie Bucco and his wife, Charmaine, which is why I tend to agree with those who think the voice of the alternate Tony Soprano’s wife—never named—was Charmaine’s. Artie and Charmaine represent the lives that the other characters on the show would have had they never entered the Mafia. Think of Artie, trying to turn an honest buck at his restaurant, henpecked by a wife his mobster friends wouldn’t tolerate for two minutes. In an early episode, tired of Carmella’s patronizing, Charmaine reveals that she and Tony once dated, years before, and that “I made my choice, and I’m fine with it.” One can’t help but think that Carmella and her friends secretly resent Charmaine, because they know that despite her lack of creature comforts, she has it better than they do. I mean, can you imagine Artie with a mistress?

At this point it’s worth mentioning that one theory circulating online is that the coma-fantasy Tony, the one who can’t figure out how to leave California, the one diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, is the real Tony Soprano, and that the mob life will be revealed to be a dementia-induced fantasy. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to discount that idea. It just seems too hokey and clichéd, and we seem to have had no forewarning that this is the case. “The Sopranos” has never been predictable, but on the other hand, David Chase has always dropped enough clues to allow us to figure out what is going on.

But there is plenty in the Tony’s mob life that we can see bleeding over into the fantasy. Alzheimer’s and dementia loom large for Tony—indeed, Uncle Junior’s dementia is the reason Tony lies in a coma with an open gunshot wound. And Alzheimer’s is hardly the way a guy like Tony would want to go out. That’s how ordinary men die, not in a hail of bullets. The disease also forms a nice parallel with the permanent brain damage that the doctors have told Carmella likely awaits Tony should he survive. In his dream, Tony tells the emergency room doctor “I’m lost” and indeed, so is the real Tony. Even before he was shot, Tony lorded over an empire in peril, some fault lines apparent, others hidden. What awaits Tony? As he once told Dr. Melfi, there are only two ways out for a guy like him—prison, or the morgue.

And so he lies there, while the bonds that hold both his crime family and his real family together begin to slip. Near the end of the episode, the ordinary Tony looks out his hotel room and sees, as he did at the episode’s opening, the faint glow of California forest fires on the horizon. He picks up the phone, apparently to call his wife, and then lowers the receiver, thinking the better of it. He’ll take refuge a bit longer in this sanctuary, just like the real Tony, who we can imagine would be in no hurry to confront the chaos his absence has unleashed.