I’m going to have to watch this one again because there was some seriously weird shit going on. I don’t know if I would call this a “dream” episode because Tony is fighting for his life and “living” a false identity.

It’s very interesting that when he starts off the episode, he is in a hotel room. Traditionally, Tony has been relegated to nice hotel rooms when he is distanced from his family by marriage (except, of course, the College episode from the first season when he was traveling with Meadow. And then we get the actual Gandolfini’s voice as Tony loses his accent (along with his wallet and briefcase, where his “life was in that briefcase”). It’s a bit odd thinking about Tony’s life fitting inside a briefcase.

The woman’s voice on the phone, supposedly his wife, was definitely not Carmella’s. It sounded more like a cross between Gloria Turillo and Charmaine Bucco. The kids sounded happy, also an anathema in The Sopranos.

Tony is a patio furniture salesman in this delusion (the best in the business) and this is interesting because in season 2, I believe; he told Melfi in one session that he should have been a patio furniture salesman. He takes things as they come, he doesn’t push–he’s easy going. He’s AJ without Tony’s influence. He even gets smacked in the mouth by a Buddhist monk (now that’s just some funny shit).

As for his name, Kevin Finnity; obviously “infinity” can be drawn from this, but I’m going to have to rack my brain to figure out what “KEV” stands for. I don’t believe those three letters were chosen by accident.

Traditionally, in dream episodes, Tony’s subconscious is trying to tell him who the rat is and who he has to kill in order to keep his power and position. Now, this time, his subconscious turned back on itself and he is his own target. Note the main questions of the episode: “Who am I? Where am I going?” This is the very question that Tony has been dealing with since episode 1 with the ducks. It’s the same question that Holden Caulfield alluded to in Catcher in the Rye when he expressed his desire to be the one who catches the little kids as they fall off the cliff, setting them back down onto safety (or, adversely becomes the one pushing them off).

They say that near-death experiences inherently change someone from the inside out. Perhaps we are seeing this change internally, a small glimpse of Tony’s hell or purgatory where his soul will linger in a lonely hotel where he has lost his identity (and his mind from Alzheimer’s), where there is nothing left but the charred and cold remains of a beast that was all at once consumed by fire.

The real world irony of the situation is that; in his lunacy, Uncle Junior committed the very act that would have ended the show early in the first season and consequently set off a chain reaction that will likely alter Tony’s entire paradigm forthwith in the show.

Next week, I have a feeling that all hell is going to break loose–both inside Tony’s dying mind and outside his hospital bed.

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