The Sopranos Season Two, Episode by Episode Review

EDITOR'S NOTE: IF YOU DON"T CARE ABOUT MY RAMBLING PERSONAL STORY BELOW, SKIP TO THE FONT CHANGE AND CLEARLY MARKED EPISODE 1 REVIEW A FEW PARAGRAPHS DOWN, WHERE THE REVIEWS BEGIN

The Sopranos changed my life. It was the cherry on top of 1999, the greatest year of my life. I was fortunate enough to turn 18 that year, the year human culture and civilization peaked, the greatest year in cinema, one of the greatest years in music, and the year The Sopranos, perhaps the greatest television show ever made, premiered. I was fortunate enough to have a schoolfriend, Robbie, who had HBO, and who thought I should be introduced to the show. He recorded the series for me week to week from nearly the beginning in 1999. In 2000, in the busy months leading up to our high school graduation, he did the same again. However, this time, I fell behind. I think that back in 2000, I had realized that because Robbie was leaving (he had decided to go to college in his native state of Kansas, far away from my beloved Louisiana), I wasn't going to have a direct line to The Sopranos anymore...so I preemptively stopped watching it to spare myself the pain of losing it when he was gone (I mean, I was sad he was leaving too...). Thankfully, TV on DVD soon became a huge market, and these episodes were available on disc barely a year after they aired. As soon as they were, I rented them from Blockbuster...and The Sopranos obsession began anew...

Now, for the first time in over 20 years, and for its 25th anniversary, I'll be running the second season of The Sopranos throughout the rest of 2025, and will post a quick review of every individual episode on this very post. Each new review will appear here on the first day of each month (two in November and December). I can't wait to watch and talk about these episodes. 

Lord above, things ain't been the same since The Sopranos walked into town... 

EPISODE 1 -- "Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist's Office..."
Written by: Jason Cahill; Directed by: Allen Coulter

Originally Aired: 1/16/2000

Season Two opens up with a montage revealing the new, post-Y2K Sopranos normal. Tony seems happy and has sex with his mistress. Christopher pays someone to take the stockbroker license exam for him, then heads up the crew's new boiler room scam. Paulie and Silvio do their thing (in Paulie's case, one of the Bada Bing's strippers). Dr. Melfi, ousted from her office due to the violence against Tony by Livia and Junior, hosts clients in a hotel room. Livia, after a suspicious, stroke-like event, undergoes physical therapy at a hospital. Junior is still in prison. This new normal is immediately upended, though. Tony's best friend and crew member,  Big Pussy Bonpensiero, suddenly appears in Tony's driveway after having been missing for months. The two go down to Tony's basement and have a volatile argument, as Pussy tries to convince Tony that he's been down in Puerto Rico, getting his ailing back worked on and falling in love. Tony is furious that Pussy was gone for so long without contacting him, but Pussy is angry that the crew suspected him of being a rat, when the accusation came from a known dirty cop, and another rat was found. Tony eventually lets Pussy back in, and the crew even give Pussy the money they've collected for him as they did his routes while he was away, but Tony is clearly skeptical about his close friend's innocence. Pussy isn't the only unexpected visitor, though. Tony's hippie older sister, Janice, has suddenly arrived home from her hippie adventures out west. Tony knows this means he's in for paying Janice's bills, debts, and needed repairs, as well as whatever other river of hippie foolishness down which she's decided to sail. However, Janice ends up causing even more stress than Tony envisioned, as she's angry that Tony is selling Livia's old house, and steals the FOR SALE sign from the yard. Janice also doesn't fully understand the reason Tony refuses to associate with their mother in any way (Unbeknownst to Janice, Livia attempted to have Tony whacked in the previous season). A visit from Tony's younger sister, Barbara, the one member of the family who seems to have made a clean break from Jersey and "this thing of ours" can't even help. It must be said that Aida Turturro, who joins the full time cast permanently in this episode as Janice, does an excellent job of making Janice profoundly irritating, the kind of person that doesn't necessarily seem to have ill intentions, but whose actions always cause illness. In this case, Tony receives a visit from his old friend, the panic attack, as he starts to black out and crashes his car yet again. Tony's wife, Carmela, does an excellent job of both proposing the cure for Tony's issues and missing the point completely. Carmela is right that Tony needs Dr. Melfi, who is refusing to associate with Tony ever again (one of Melfi's patients, who couldn't meet at the new hotel office, committed suicide, and Melfi blames Tony). However, Carmela willfully ignores the reasons for Tony's malaise--for instance, she complains it's been forever since they've had sex, but that's because Tony's mistress is already meeting his needs, not because he's stressed (Carmela can both smell the mistress on Tony's clothes AND is awake when Tony comes home late every night); also, Tony is stressed because he is a mob boss involved in a Carmela-benefitting illicit criminal enterprise, where death and prison are always lurking around the corner, not just because life has brought changes. Still...life goes on. Tony has a gossiping capo, Phillip Parisi, whacked. Christopher predictably messes up his new boiler room job and Tony has to scold him. Tony's crew is still making money. In "Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist's Office..."'s final scene, Tony comes home from lunch to find Carmela in the kitchen. The camera focuses on a more than usually made up Carmela, as she moves around the kitchen. Carmela's body is objectified in a way that the audience can both see that she is desirable and that Tony finds her desirable. However, when Carmela offers to warm up some leftovers, a grateful Tony takes them, then sits at the kitchen table in silence as Carmela sits across from him and begins to open the mail...and suddenly, Carmela no longer feels like an object of desire...but Tony's surrogate mother.

EPISODE 2 -- "Do Not Resuscitate"
Written by: Robin Green & Mitchell Burgess and Frank Renzulli; Directed by: Martin Bruestle

Originally Aired: 1/23/2000

Deceit, including self-deception, are at the heart of The Sopranos. Neither one of Tony's families would work without it. Carmela, Meadow, and Anthony, Jr. all know that their patriarch is a mob boss, but they have to live day to day pretending that he is a run of the mill businessman. Tony and his crew engage in violent and duplicitous behavior, and yet act like they are upstanding citizens. New characters and plotlines in Season Two heighten this tension with the the truth, and "Do Not Resuscitate" makes this element of the show as explicit as ever. The episode kicks off with trouble at a construction site. A group of black men, led by the Reverend Herman James, Jr., are picketing the site. The owner of the company, Jack Massarone, is already providing Tony kickbacks in the form of no-show jobs, but Tony insists that if Massarone wants help with the protestors, he needs to pay up. Massarone does, and Tony later sends a goofy crew of mobsters with bats to break up the protests. Meanwhile, Tony finally breaks the ice with his Uncle Junior, visiting him in prison. In one of the episode's more bizarre cases of self-deception, Junior is obsessed with getting Tony to forgive Livia...because Junior has somehow convinced himself that Tony's mother had nothing to do with the previous season's hit attempt on Tony. Despite the fact that Livia not only wanted the hit on Tony, but played Junior like a fiddle in order to have the hit carried out, Junior wants Tony to forgive Livia and blames himself for Tony hating her. Tony saw the smile on Livia's face when she faked having a stroke at the end of the previous season, as Tony accused her of trying to have him killed, and he knows his evil mother without a doubt is the one who tried to orchestrate his demise. She is the villain in Tony's story, as concrete evidence backs up the fact that the infanticide obsessed mother tried to have her own son murdered. Deep down, Junior knows it too, but the old man has convinced himself it isn't the case. There are even FBI recordings, which Tony has heard, that prove Livia consciously manipulated Junior into carrying out the hit on Tony, but the old man won't relent. Even when Junior gets out of prison, is relegated to house arrest, slips and has a violent fall in the shower, refuses an ambulance, and has to humiliatingly have Tony carry him to the car for a ride to the hospital, the hobbled old man is still begging Tony to make peace with his murderous mother. Meanwhile, Tony's newly arrived in Jersey sister, Janice, is also trying to make peace with Livia. Janice still doesn't know that Tony hates Livia because Livia tried to have Tony whacked, but after visiting with Livia a few times, she at least understands and is reminded of how difficult and acidic their mother is. Janice has been frustrating Tony's attempts to sell Livia's house. After Janice plays some old timey music that strikes a chord with Livia, Livia suddenly admits that she has money hidden somewhere in her house. Luckily for Janice, Tony has grown so frustrated with having his mooching sister sharing his house, while also constantly having to hear that sister talk about Livia's house, that he tells Janice that she and Livia can be stuck together at the old matriarch's place. He gives Livia's home to them, finally getting the annoying Janice out of his mobster's fortress of solitude, while also ensuring he no longer needs to worry about his mother's house. Perhaps this move is not so lucky for Janice, though. As much as Janice tells herself that her motives are altruistic, and that she is moving in with her mother to take care of her, the money is the actual motivator...and a moment late in the episode, where Livia whines on and on, and Janice dreams of pushing her down the stairs proves it. Livia also gets her taste of the episode themes through the title, as she hears that Tony and Janice have discussed a "Do Not Resuscitate" plan involving her. Saying "I don't know what you're talking about" when she knows exactly what someone is talking about is an ongoing Livia gag, but this information actually seems to strike a chord in the duplicitous, wicked old woman that she can't pretend not to understand. This episode also acts as the introduction for Bobby Baccalieri, who will become an integral character for most of the rest of The Soprano's run. Bobby, grossly overweight, is known as the "nice" mobster. He has never killed anyone, and that holds true for the majority of the series' run. He is known for his virtues...but he is a mobster. Mostly removed from the action this episode is the returned Pussy, who meets with his FBI handler--as indignant as Pussy acted toward Tony in the previous episode about accusations of being a rat, Pussy is, indeed, a rat. However, no one in the series is as easy or consummate a liar as our sociopathic main character, Tony. Early in the episode, Tony tries to visit Reverend James, Jr.'s home. The Reverend is out, but his elderly father is in. Tony is pleased to find that the old man is a World War II vet. Throughout the series, Tony has shown to have a minor obsession with World War II, and he excitedly asks James, Sr. if he ever watches the History Channel. James, Sr. responds that he does not watch television. At the end of the episode, Tony returns, only to find that James, Sr. has passed away. He gives his condolences to James, Jr....and an envelope with his share of the cash from Massarone. It turns out that Tony and the not so good Reverend were colluding together. The Reverend was only picketing at Tony's secret behest, so that the two men could milk the poor construction owner for more money.  Fake a crisis, and an unknowing Massarone, who is already paying, has to pay up more to make it go away. The ethics of this aren't anything that will keep Tony awake at night. And now that Janice is out of his house, he'll sleep more soundly than ever.

EPISODE 3 -- "Toodle-Fucking-Oo"
Written by: Frank Renzulli; Directed by: Lee Tamahori
Originally Aired: 1/30/2000

Coming Soon...