The Sopranos Season 2, Episode 8 - Full Leather Jacket

I didn't write up the previous episode, D-Girl. It's not for any animosity towards that particular episode, which is often maligned, but I just didn't get around to it and then the need to do so floated out of my head.  It's an experiment in the Sopranos universe, that's for sure.

Regardless, let us move past that into Full Leather Jacket, a great exploration of power dynamics in the Sopranos universe.  Carmela wants Meadow to get into Georgetown because she wants her to stay closer to home, so she decides to bully her neighbor and her neighbor's sister into writing a letter of recommendation for her.  What's fascinating is that while she supposedly 'gets her way', I don't recall if we ever see any real evidence for the letter being written.  The great part about the whole exchange is that Carmela knows what she's doing the whole time even as she's being both demanding and overly nice - she's aware of the effect she can have on people as a mobster's wife.

Meanwhile, Richie Aprile's being forced into making his victim's house wheelchair-accessible.  He resents this and tells said victim that if he complains again to Tony Soprano that he will be further harmed.  But he has a present for Tony - a jacket he took off some tough guy 20 years ago.  Richie claims that Tony used to admire the jacket, but Tony appears to have no memory of it.  He later learns that Tony gave the jacket away.  Again, I've seen this episode several times, and what remains ambiguous is whether or not Tony actually liked the jacket back when it was a relevant item, or whether Tony was just sucking up to someone more powerful and older than him in the organization.  We see Tony understand power dynamics so well here - he sends his underlings to tell Richie to build the ramp and he always busts balls with people lower in the organization.

Christopher proposes to Adrianna because 'she loves me and these are her child-bearing years', according to what he tells Matthew and Sean.  He knows that even though he has been garbage to her over the last few weeks that she will take him back, and he's right. 

And lastly we get Matthew and Sean who are cracking safes with Christopher at night and trying to horn their way in on the action in the day.  They get rebuffed by Tony and are forced to kick more upstairs by Furio.  They decide that they have to make a move and that move is to shoot Christopher in a drive-by.  It's a weird choice, but we can only imagine that they decided to do so for very dumb reasons, as these are dumb people.  Christopher survives, Sean does not, and Matthew is on the run. 

Random Observations:

I assume it's a form of code switching but I love how Jeanne Cusamano says 'fuck'.

'I went to Pace College!'

One thing I really love about The Sopranos is how it deconstructs certain mythos - Sean and Matthew say to Christopher that kicking upstairs to Tony Soprano will be an honor, but they also have to kick upstairs to everyone else, including Furio.  Given that the Mafia are a ring of amoral thugs, it's not surprising that the 'rules' are usually broken.

Love Richie telling the Rocco DeMeo story twice in the same exact way.

'Don't leave handprints on the finish!'