Tony Soprano and the Jungian Death Mother

Understanding television's greatest antihero

The Sopranos is known for being “about a mafia boss” and depicts the topics you’d expect—violence, sex, power. But it was also a show about mental life—psychology, therapy, the unconscious, and dreams.

In the opening scene of the show, we are introduced to Tony in his first therapy session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi.

Many spoilers ahead.

Here, I’ll explore the most complex character in the history of television. Tony Soprano can be understood through two key scenes that took place in the final season: First, his decision to murder Christopher, one of his sons (his nephew, but essentially a surrogate son Tony was grooming to lead his crew) by suffocation. Second, his decision to rescue his other son, A.J., from suicide by suffocation.

James Gandolfini, as Tony Soprano, was the greatest portrayal of any character in any medium. Tony Soprano is the quintessential TV anti-hero. He revolutionized what was possible to portray on television.

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When the first season of The Sopranos aired in 1999, it marked a shift in the quality of television that has persisted to this day. Still, none have quite matched it.

A while back, Matthew Yglesias tweeted, “After The Sopranos and The Wire came out everyone was like ‘TV is good now, it’s a real medium for genuine high art’ but then nobody actually went out and made comparably good shows again.”

Naturally, people responded with comments about Breaking Bad, The Shield, and Mad Men. All excellent shows. But none are as good as The Sopranos. After the finale of Mad Men, showrunner Matthew Weiner was interviewed on the New York Public Library Podcast. The interviewer said Mad Men might be better than The Sopranos and Weiner immediately shot down this suggestion. Mad Men is a great show, and a spiritual descendent of The Sopranos. But it’s not as great.

The reason The Sopranos stands above the rest is the complexity of its main character that showrunner David Chase unflinchingly exhibited.

In an interview with Jordan Peterson, the real-life former mafia captain Michael Franzese stated:

“Let's put it this way: Had my father never introduced me to that life, I would have never gone down the criminal path. That's not who I was.”

Franzese goes on to say that despite abiding by the code of the mafia, he was often haunted by his conscience when he carried out his criminal endeavors. He would ask himself, who was the 'real' him: the part of himself carrying out the criminal acts or the part of himself who felt uncomfortable doing so?

Actions, in my view, are more indicative of a person than their feelings or words. Nevertheless, if you are obeying the explicit code of your criminal organization, why would you feel uncomfortable at all?

The Sopranos heavily implies that the reason Tony has his panic attacks is due to his troubled conscience. A key reason he stopped having panic attacks was that he used his sessions with Dr. Melfi as an avenue to relieve the stress and guilt he experienced from his violent actions.

The show goes to great lengths to demonstrate that Tony’s lifestyle and disposition are due in large part to his upbringing and the culture that he was exposed to. We even get the impression that Tony detests what he has become and what he has to do.

Tony’s criminal activities are heavily implied to be the cause of his symptoms. But for legal reasons, he can never discuss them with Dr. Melfi. At best, he can tiptoe around his actions, or speak in euphemisms. This presents barriers for the effectiveness of his treatment.

In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud described precisely this complication:

“One hardly comes across a single patient who does not make an attempt at reserving some region or other for himself so as to prevent the treatment from having access to it.”

He then provides an example from a patient:

“A man, whom I can only describe of the highest intelligence, kept silence in this way for weeks on end about an intimate love-affair, and, when he was called to account…defended himself with the argument that he thought his particular story was his private business. Analytic therapy does not, of course, recognize any such right of asylum.”

Freud then supplies an illuminating analogy:

“Suppose that in a town like Vienna, the experiment was made of treating a square such as the Hohe market or a church like St. Stephen’s, as places where no arrests might be made, and suppose we then wanted to catch a particular criminal. We could be quite sure of finding him in the sanctuary.”

In the case of Tony, you could say that the very thing causing him so much pain is the one thing he can not discuss with Dr. Melfi.

In another example, Freud wrote:

“I once decided to allow a man, on whose efficiency much depended in the external world, the right to make an exception of this kind because he was bound under oath of office not to make communications about certain things to another person. He, it is true, was satisfied with the outcome; but I was not. I determined not to repeat an attempt under such conditions.”

This is the situation between Tony and Dr. Melfi. Gradually, Tony grows to enjoy their sessions so much that he describes them as “an oasis in my week.” In contrast, Dr. Melfi grows increasingly suspicious that Tony is using therapy to ease his conscience, to subdue his symptoms rather than examine their underlying cause. Eventually, in the penultimate episode of the series, she terminates therapy with Tony.

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For now, though, let’s return to earlier scenes in the show, when Tony would still feel uncomfortable about his actions.

Consider this scene in which he is about to physically terrorize his former high school classmate, Davey Scatino, for debts owed. Immediately before Tony opens the door to Davey’s office, he audibly sighs. He doesn’t want to do this. It’s an act he has been trained to put on as a leader of a criminal organization.

Tony has learned that if he does not put on a menacing act, he may be taken advantage of later.

Tony’s panic attacks, depression, and verbal slips indicate a longing for a simpler life.

On one occasion, he asks Dr. Melfi, “How come I’m not sellin’ fuckin’ pots in Peru?”

In another session, he muses, “Yeah, sometimes I think about what life might have been like if my father hadn’t got mixed up in the things he got mixed up in. How life would have been different. Maybe I’d be selling patio furniture in San Diego or whatever.”

Despite the slew of anti-hero dramas that have been created since the late nineties, we have yet to see a show portray a protagonist who commits truly repugnant acts on the same level as Tony Soprano.

In season 6 of Mad Men, after Don manipulates Peggy and Ted Chaough in a meeting with a client, Peggy, clearly appalled, tells Don, “You’re a monster.”

In the final season of Breaking Bad, Jesse, in a panic, describes Walter as “the devil.”

No one ever calls Tony a monster or the devil in The Sopranos. They don’t have to.

However sympathetic the viewer might be towards Tony, The Sopranos was the only antihero drama that repeatedly and steadfastly showed him behaving in ways you can’t sympathize or empathize with.

There is one key scene that cemented Tony as unique among other antiheroes.

Tony urges his sister Janice to enter anger management classes. To everyone’s surprise, the classes actually help Janice. She and her husband Bobby invite Tony over for dinner. Tony observes the progress Janice has made. This vexes him. Throughout his therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi, Tony repeatedly states that his depression, his panic attacks, and his temper all stem from being brought up in a dysfunctional household. He doesn’t really believe he can get better, and resents himself for not doing so. So seeing Janice (who grew up in the same circumstances) become more jovial irritates Tony.

He can’t stand the idea of his sister escaping the hell that their parents created for them, so he drags her back down. Tony uses his upbringing to excuse his behavior, and Janice’s self-improvement invalidates those rationalizations. So, he decides to strategically antagonize her. Tony finds ways to bring up the fact that she abandoned her firstborn child until Janice finally explodes with anguish and rage.

Tony walks away, satisfied that he has stunted his sister’s personal progress. The smile on his face resembles the smile his mother, Livia, had when she saw him trip on the stairs.

In a series where we see the protagonist cheat, steal, and murder, this scene between Janice and Tony is an unmatched moment yet to be recreated in any other antihero drama. The vile acts of other antiheroes (and, up until this point, Tony himself) usually had some instrumental purpose. These acts were usually a means of obtaining an advantage over other, more unsavory characters.

Many of Tony’s transgressions can be excused as being part of the mafia code or to Tony’s impulsive and sometimes uncontrollable temper. But in this case, Tony strategically inflicts emotional pain on someone he loves in order to dispel his own feelings of inadequacy and self-hatred.

As we enter the final season, the audience is teased with the possibility that the good within Tony can overcome the evil. After being shot in the stomach by his uncle, Tony undergoes a coma dream in which he assumes the identity of an ordinary man.

After recovering from his injury, Tony comes to an epiphany, telling Dr. Melfi that he will start to cherish each day as a gift. He makes progress as shown in two different situations: first, in his decision not to cheat on Carmela and second, his attempts to negotiate a peaceful resolution with other mafiosos after it is discovered that one of his captains, Vito Spatafore, is gay.

Tony wants to change. But his lifestyle won’t let him. Shortly after his decision to treat each day as a gift, he grows to fear that his underlings will view him as weak after his injury from the shooting.

Tony reinstates his dominance by viciously beating the muscular Perry Annunziata, unprovoked, in full view of his crew.

The viewer gets the sense that Tony wants to change, but he is surrounded by what he calls “jackals,” who are constantly probing him for weakness. Thus, Tony knows that if he changes too much, if he stops being a criminal, he will be crushed.

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How did Tony become who he is?

In any good literary story, nothing is there by accident. Every detail means something. The Sopranos occasionally touches on Tony’s origins.

In a session with Dr. Melfi, Tony suggests his criminal behavior is “all genetical,” citing his father’s criminality. Dr. Melfi replies that genetic propensities are not destiny. In a later episode, Tony, trying to resist taking responsibility for his son’s behavior, says “It's in his blood, this miserable fuckin' existence. My rotten, fuckin' putrid genes have infected my kid's soul.” Dr. Melfi explains that “when you blame your genes, you’re really blaming yourself, and that’s what we should be talking about.”

Ever since re-watching the series during the lockdown, a lingering question has remained in my mind: Why did Dr. Melfi refer Carmela to see Dr. Krakower? Dr. Krakower was Dr. Melfi’s mentor. And he is absolutely adamant in his discussion with Carmela that she should “Take the children, what’s left of them,” and leave Tony.

Surely Dr. Melfi must have known how her mentor would react to Carmela’s description of her marriage to Tony.

In yet another plot line that challenges the idea that behavior and decisions are “all genetical,” Tony’s nephew (surrogate son) Christopher Moltisanti falls into a drug addiction in the middle seasons. Christopher himself is a member of Tony’s crew, his uncle’s protege, with ambitions to become a made guy (which he eventually becomes in season 3).

Christopher invokes rumors of his father’s supposed drug addiction to exonerate himself. At one point Chris even says that his father “wasn't much more than a fuckin' junkie” to Tony. Tony idolized Dickie Moltisanti, and hearing his son speak of him this way clearly impacted Tony.

However, we learn in the prequel film The Many Saints of Newark that Dickie was not a drug addict. We never see him do any drugs at all. In the end, Dickie is killed while carrying some pills in his jacket pocket, prescription medication he had retrieved for Tony’s mother at Tony’s request.

There are undertones of Greek tragedy here. In Many Saints, young Tony asks his father figure (Dickie) to retrieve medicine to help his mother. Dickie does this, and is killed with the pills in his pocket. For this reason, Dickie is known to the family as a drug addict, and this message is transmitted to his son. Christopher grows up believing this information about his father, uses it as a crutch to get addicted himself. His drug habit is the flaw that leads his own father figure, Tony, to eventually murder him. Tony’s desire to help his mother set in motion a series of events that eventually led to him murdering his own surrogate son.

Tony’s suffocation of his nephew (surrogate son) is generally viewed as the culmination of Tony’s increasing monstrosity throughout the series. In a dream sequence, Tony is unapologetic about this murder, indicating just how far gone Tony became in by the final season of the series.

Tony makes choices in both Many Saints and The Sopranos that are at odds with an “all genetical” explanation for his behavior.

Tony is shown to be a bright teenager (IQ 136 on a Stanford-Binet test) and a talented athlete. His decision to be a criminal was a choice. And his decision to keep his son Anthony Junior away from a life of crime was also a choice.

Weight (another “genetical” trait) waxed and waned depending on the level of stress in Tony’s life. As a little boy in Many Saints, when Livia (his mother) and Johnny Boy (his father) are around, Tony is chubby. Then Johnny Boy goes away to prison. Upon his release, seventeen-year-old Tony is seen as tall and slim. His sister, Janice, is also slender. One interpretation of this is that having a criminal father around increased the level of stress in the home, leading to overeating. When he was removed, the kids became normal sized. Later, when they are both adults, both Tony and his sister Janice are overweight. They grow increasingly large throughout the series, as their lives become more entangled in crime. Their sister Barbara, the only Soprano sibling who managed to escape any connection with the Mafia, is the only one of the three who is not fat.

The story seems to take the (correct) position that behavioral traits are only partly genetic and have a lot to do with what’s called “human phenotypic plasticity” — the innate ability for our genes to express differently under different circumstances.

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Livia Soprano and The Death Mother

Tony: “Everything is black; it’s all a big nothing.”

Carmela: “What is?”

Tony: “Life.”

Carmela: “That is your mother speaking.”

In Many Saints, teenage Tony carries a pamphlet for a prescription medication he hopes to acquire for his mentally unwell mother. On the cover of the pamphlet is an angelic blonde woman. Tony seems to long for his mother to become the woman on the pamphlet.

The Sopranos is a series about psychiatry, dreams, and the role of family in shaping our lives.

According to Jungian analysis, the Great Mother archetype symbolizes creativity, birth, fertility, sexual union and nurturing. She is a creative force that gives rise not only to life, but to art and ideas.

Along with this positive mother archetype, though, is her malevolent twin.

In her fascinating integration of evolutionary psychology and Jungian analysis, Marion Woodman developed the archetype of the Death Mother.

There are two components to the Death Mother archetype.

The first is rooted firmly in an evolutionary framework.

Drawing on work from the primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, the idea is that being a mother has, throughout evolutionary history, not inevitably been linked to unconditional love. Rather, evolution has selected for some level of strategy regarding how much a mother invests in an infant. Throughout human evolution, a variety of factors have been involved in a mother’s decision to supply care. These factors include the number of other babies and children to care for, the adequacy of available resources, the amount of available social support, the health of the infant in question, the mother’s current physical and mental state, and so on.

A world of limited resources forged a dynamic emotional system in mothers. This gave rise to a repertoire of possible behaviors in response to the arrival of a new infant.

In short, our ancestors had to make some difficult choices. Today, in the developed world, child mortality is all but negligible.

In the U.S., fewer than 1 percent of infants born die before their fifteenth birthday. In contrast, in traditional subsistence societies, between 30 and 60 percent of those born do not survive to age fifteen.

Historically, high child mortality rates have had a powerful impact on evolutionary trade-offs involved in mothering. At times, mothers had to withdraw commitment and care from a particular child.

Interestingly, the biological anthropologist Daniela Sieff has documented how, in many cultures, disabled or ailing infants and children are deemed to be “spirit children.” Parents or other adults administer fatal poison to them.

Such children are seen to be possessed by malevolent spirits who masquerade as humans to bring harm, disease, and death. Often, members of the community are relieved when the child is poisoned, because a source of misfortune has been removed from the family and community.

From Daniela Sieff:

Sieff interviewed the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, who outlined the evolutionary logic of folk beliefs of fairies, elves, goblins, and changelings:

The challenge of caring for two nursing infants at the same time is why, in some traditional subsistence societies, twins are seen as a bad omen. Often, in nomadic and small-scale communities, one or both twins are abandoned. Myths arose to deal with limited resources and matters of survival.

Humans have historically had to make tough choices about how to direct attention, care, and other resources. They often withheld them if such resources were limited. Especially from sickly infants.

Humans developed myths and stories about these children being the offspring of elves, goblins, and so on. Perhaps to avoid confronting the reality of what they were actually doing—leaving an innocent baby to die.

So that’s the evolutionary aspect of the Death Mother. From this perspective, the Death Mother takes the view of the mother, who must make difficult decisions and perform cost benefit analysis to determine whether a child should receive care and if so, how much.

The Jungian component is this: all children have evolved internal mechanisms designed to be acutely aware of how much care they are receiving from their mothers. The Death Mother is the archetype of a mother who, from the perspective of the child, does not care about them, and in some cases, may even want them dead.

The evolutionary aspect of the Death Mother concept takes the view of the mother, and adopts her perspective of living in a world of limited resources, in a reality in which tough decisions must be made for herself and her loved ones.

The Jungian aspect of the Death Mother takes the perspective of the naive and helpless child, who could potentially be neglected or abandoned, living in a reality in which its existence depends on the attention and care of the mother.

From a 2019 paper by Daniela F. Sieff:

“The Death Mother archetype symbolizes a woman whose feelings or behavior threaten the life of her child. It is an alarming image. Indeed, we are so disturbed by the idea that a mother might be a threat to her child that Western culture has exiled the Death Mother to the shadows of consciousness.”

She goes on to say that the archetypal Death Mother is a symbol of mothers whose behavior or feelings threaten the lives of their children.

Likewise, the Jungian analyst Marion Woodman suggests:

“Death Mother’s energy is most destructive when it comes from somebody we love and trust, and who is supposed to love us. This is what happened in the original trauma; we trusted our beloved mother, but suddenly realized that we were not acceptable to her. We realized that our mother wished that we, or some part of us, was dead.”

Tony’s mother, Livia Soprano, is a personification of the Jungian Death Mother.

In one of the most iconic lines of the series, Livia tells her grandson Anthony Junior:

“The world is a jungle, and if you want my advice Anthony, don't expect happiness. You won't get it. People let you down and I'm not naming any names but in the end you die in your own arms.”

In a flashback, Tony recalls memories of his mother threatening to smother him and his sisters with a pillow, and shouting that she would poke Tony’s eye out with a fork (perhaps in keeping with the show’s implicit Oedipal undertones).

Woodman:

“Worse than being unseen is growing up with a parent who wishes that we, or some part of us, did not exist. The energy manifest by such a parent is symbolized by the archetype of the ‘Death Mother’. It is a deadening energy which permeates both psyche and body, turning us to stone…our vitality drains away and we find ourselves yearning for the oblivion of death.”

And:

“The energy of the archetypal Death Mother is epitomized in the stare of Medusa. Death Mother’s gaze penetrates both psyche and body, turning us into stone. It kills hope…Somebody may say something that appears to be innocuous, but if Death Mother’s energy underlies that comment, then our physical body is changed. We collapse.”

In a therapy session, Dr. Melfi traced the origins of Tony’s panic attacks to a dormant memory: as a child, Tony secretly witnessed his father chop off a guy’s finger for not paying off his gambling debts. Later, young Tony witnesses his father seduce his mother with the earnings he procured from that violent event. Tony learned that to be worthy of his mother’s love (or, perhaps, any woman’s love), he would have to become a man like his father. Tony has his first panic attack, collapsing in front of his parents.

Marion Woodman:

“Many people who have grown up feeling ‘merely’ unloved find it difficult to understand their own feelings and behavior. This leaves them little choice but to mistakenly deduce that their suffering is rooted in some kind of intrinsic inadequacy of their own. Once such a conviction forms, shame takes hold, whereupon these individuals tend to become imprisoned by the belief that they are victims to their own supposed inadequacy.”

In season 2, Tony tells Dr. Melfi, “I got the world by the balls and can’t stop feeling like a fuckin’ loser.”

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Tony’s Vicarious Patricide

In 2009, an online forum poster called “Fly on Melfi’s Wall” proposed one of the most interesting and comprehensive analyses of Tony Soprano’s psyche. It focuses on the role his father, Johnny Boy Soprano, had on Tony’s life. And how Johnny looms larger in Tony’s unconscious than Tony’s mother Livia ever did.

The post is twenty-two thousand words long, so I’ll just summarize the core ideas.

Throughout The Sopranos, Tony acts as an apologist for his father, because otherwise he would have to acknowledge that he himself has made the wrong choice in his life. To cope with his own choice to become a gangster, Tony had to hold a positive view of his father as a gangster.

Tellingly, though, he tries very hard to not set the same example for his own children.

Tony wants his daughter Meadow to be a pediatrician, at one point telling Dr. Melfi that he wants her to get far away from him and his criminal lifestyle. In one of the more emotionally intense scenes of the show, Tony says to Anthony Junior (who had just tried to commit a serious crime) “It’s not in your nature. You’re a good guy, I’m very grateful.” He also tells his son that “It’s wrong” to commit murder.

Tony tries to believe that his father, the man who led his own son to a life of crime, the man who arranged for his own son (Tony) to commit his first murder at the age of 22, was a great father.

Yet Tony himself does all he can to ensure that his own son A.J. does not follow the same path. This is an indication that Tony experiences deep psychic conflict throughout the series.

In the final season of the show, two events occur:

1. Tony murders his (surrogate) son, Christopher Moltisanti.

2. Tony rescues his son A.J. from a suicide attempt.

The first event, according to the theory of “Tony’s Vicarious Patricide,” was Tony’s unconsciously motivated decision to murder his father(s).

The show contains many clues implying Tony’s implicit rage toward the Soprano patriarchs.

When talking to Melfi about his father, Tony often smiled and described him as a “good guy” that everybody liked.

This is very at odds with what we see in Many Saints. Particularly in two deleted scenes.

In one scene, Livia has nightmares and Johnny Boy violently shakes her to wake her up. Tony tries to help her and is scolded by his father.

In another scene, Johnny mocks Tony for saying “far out” (a common phrase among teenagers in the 1970s). In none of these scenes does Tony bond with or express much admiration for Johnny Boy. Interestingly, in the flashback scenes in The Sopranos, where we take Tony’s perspective, Johnny is shown to be a much more gregarious and fun figure. In contrast, in Many Saints, which is presumably a more objective depiction of Soprano domestic life, Johnny is cold and domineering.

Dr. Melfi notes that Tony’s representation of Johnny as a “tough guy” but also as a “good guy” who loved his kids was very much at odds with the reality of the absentee father (he went away to prison for several years of Tony’s childhood) who would not intervene on his children’s behalf to stop their emotional abuse from their mother.

In an incredible display of acting from James Gandolfini, Tony deflects blame from his father once again and blames his mother for the turmoil he experienced growing up.

As further evidence of Tony’s unconscious rage against Johnny, consider the episode “The Test Dream.”

Many movies and TV shows portray dreams as containing symbols that are intended to convey information to the dreamer. But in Freudian dream analysis, the symbols in dreams are the consequences of your unconscious attempting to hide information from you. Dreams are full of disguised symbols and repressed wishes that are expressed in the dream in a more acceptable form.

One way unacceptable wishes are expressed in dreams is through what Freud termed “reversal into the opposite.” A couple of simple examples: one might dream of a rabbit hunting a sportsman or of someone of high intelligence appearing to be stupid.

“Reversal into the opposite” explains why, in Tony’s dream, he views Coach Molinaro, his high school football coach, someone who was a good role model in Tony’s life, as a diabolical figure.

The coach says some things that actually or superficially comported with his real identity and with things Tony revealed about him in waking conversations. For example, he tells Tony, “You had brains, leadership skills, all the prerequisites to lead young men onto the field of sport.” Other things he said are the very opposite of what he would have presumably thought or said.

At one point in the dream the coach scolds, “How many times did I tell you to cleave yourself away from those bums you hung with?” (“Cleave” is certainly an interesting word choice for the idea of “separation” here, given the significance of a meat cleaver in Tony’s psyche—Johnny Boy used a cleaver to cut off a man’s finger in front of Tony.)

Then, in a twist, Coach Molinaro says it’s a “damn shame” that Tony is in therapy. He then suggests, “I bet you blame everything on your father.” When Tony corrects him, “No, more my mother,” the coach smiles an ambiguous smile. “Even better,” he replies.

Tony aims a pistol, conspicuously fitted with a big silencer, and pulls the trigger. But his bullets literally disintegrate into shit. At that moment, the coach says, “You’re unprepared. You’ll never shut me up.” This is Tony’s unconscious expression of guilt about the life he has chosen. Even in his dream, though, his rage is displaced away from his father and onto the one good authority figure in his life. Thus, Tony tries to kill the coach and escape from his own self-reproach.

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Tony receives more audience intrigue than just about any other antihero because we got to explore practically every inch of his psyche.

Throughout the show, there was a constant palpable feeling of dread and impending doom. No other TV show (or maybe any other medium) has ever managed to portray this feeling, and this is what makes the show a true work of art.

The Sopranos is often compared with Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad is one of the greatest shows of all time. It is a plot based thriller, with a solid beginning, middle, and end, and twists and turns left and right. But it is not as good as The Sopranos.

If you've seen Breaking Bad once, you already know the plot. Re-watching Breaking Bad will never match the first experience of it.

This isn’t true of The Sopranos.

Due to the way the show and the characters are structured, you can watch it five times over and you will find something novel each time. You will catch new details and second guess the conclusions you formed from previous viewings.

Showrunner David Chase didn't hide any of Tony's flaws even in the very beginning.

In one of the best episodes of season one, “College,” Tony casually endangers his daughter Meadow several times in this episode. He breaks his daughter's trust and lies to her face about what he did. Tony is such a good liar that it seems natural and he turns it back around on her to mention her drinking.

Tony is morally compromised from the very start. Yet he doesn't repulse us, nor make us shun him.

The happiest you ever see Tony Soprano is when he decides to do the right thing.

He and his crew learn that Meadow’s (Tony’s daughter) soccer coach has been sleeping with one of the players. But instead of murdering the coach, they report him and have the police arrest him. Tony later comes home in a joyous and drunken stupor and tells his wife “I didn’t hurt nobody.”

He is so surprised and pleased that he can act against his own nature that he gets drunk to manage his confused feelings.

In one of the more interesting scenes of the show, Meadow (Tony’s daughter) tells Tony that the coach has been sleeping with one of her teammates. Tony asks if she’s sure about this, and suggests maybe the girl is embellishing the story. The easy interpretation is that Tony is being a jerk, or a typical male making excuses for the coach’s lasciviousness, or something like that. Another possibility is that Tony knows that if what Meadow is telling him is true, he will be pressured by his crew to murder the coach. And he doesn’t want to do this.

In the end, he does the right thing, for one of the few times in the entire series.

For most of the show, Tony is depressed and miserable. He refuses, though, to connect those feelings with his moral decisions.

In his sessions with Dr. Melfi, Tony does mental acrobatics to explain why his criminal endeavors are actually not morally repugnant.

Yet when he actually does something good, he recoils. It frightens him, because it undermines the image he has crafted about himself, his origins, his parents, and his decisions.

Tony couldn’t choose the good in himself. But he was still drawn to the good outside of himself. As a “Death Father,” the complexity of Tony’s nature is apparent when he makes the conscious and calculated decision to kill his criminal son (Christopher), and instinctively and impulsively rescues his “good guy” son (Anthony Junior).

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