Religion & Morality¶
The Irish guys win every hand. Christopher, on hell
The show is saturated in Catholicism and profoundly unconvinced by it. What it offers instead is a moral universe with no visible administration.
Catholicism as accounting¶
Nobody in this world doubts the doctrine. They simply treat it as a ledger.
Carmela gives generously, attends, confesses, and hosts the priest — and the function of all of it is to make the money survivable. Her almost-affair with Father Phil is a search for absolution from a man who will accept a lasagna instead of a change of life.
Paulie is the purest case. Terrified of hell after Christopher's near-death vision, he goes to a church, hands over $50,000, and demands better terms — negotiating his afterlife the way he'd negotiate a construction contract. When the church doesn't deliver the felt reassurance, he's furious, as a customer.
Father Phil takes the meals, the wine, and the attention of unhappy married women, and gives nothing that costs him anything.
The doctrine is real to these people. The obligation is negotiable. That gap is the show's religious subject.
Christopher's hell¶
"From Where to Eternity" (S2E22), written by Michael Imperioli.
Shot and briefly dead, Christopher reports where he went: an Irish bar where it's always St. Patrick's Day, where Mikey Palmice and Big Pussy are, and where the Irish guys win every hand. He carries a message back: three o'clock.
It's the funniest theological scene on television, and it's completely serious. Hell, for these men, is not fire — it's being permanently outranked, in a room, forever, by the ethnic group they lost to in Newark.
Paulie is destroyed by it. Tony dismisses it as a drug reaction and then can't stop thinking about it.
Is anyone ever judged?¶
The show's most important negative answer: no.
There is no karmic accounting anywhere in 86 episodes.
- Adriana, the least culpable person in the series, dies worst.
- Bobby, the most decent, is shot in a train shop.
- Ralph kills a young woman and is killed later, for a horse.
- Melfi refuses to use Tony's power and is worse off.
- Paulie, who has murdered casually for decades, is alive in the sun at the end.
- Tony's fate is withheld, which is the show declining to render a verdict as its final act.
Chase has been explicit that he found the audience appetite for Tony's punishment distasteful — that people had watched for eight years and then wanted absolution for having enjoyed it. The refusal to punish is a moral position about the viewer, not a lapse.
The season six near-death¶
The one genuine transcendent experience the show grants, and what it does with it.
Shot and comatose, Tony spends two episodes as Kevin Finnerty — a man who has lost his identification, can't get home, is being called to a house on a hill, and is pulled back by his daughter's voice.
It's a real religious experience, filmed straight, with no irony.
He wakes up transformed. He tells everyone that every day is a gift. He is gentler, more grateful, more present.
It lasts about four episodes. By "Kennedy and Heidi" he is suffocating his nephew at a crash site and celebrating in Las Vegas.
That's the show's most complete statement on redemption: it is available, it is genuine, and it does not take. See Tony's Arc.
Melfi's version¶
Therapy is the show's alternative confessional, and it fails the same way.
Tony brings his sins to a professional weekly for seven years, receives insight rather than absolution, and converts the insight into vocabulary. Then his therapist concludes she has been helping him get better at it and terminates him.
The parallel is exact. The priest takes the lasagna; the psychiatrist takes the fee; neither can make him different, because neither will require anything of him that he isn't willing to give.
See Therapy & Melfi.
"It's all a big nothing"¶
The counter-doctrine, delivered by Livia to a child at a funeral, and never refuted by the series.
A.J. inherits it and it nearly kills him. Tony hears it and keeps eating.
The show offers religion, therapy, family, and near-death revelation, and finds all four insufficient. What it puts in the last frame instead is a family in a diner, some onion rings passed around like communion, and then nothing at all.