The Sopranos

I love "The Sopranos," although in writing about it I am too often tempted to add the "e". If you were writing about several singers with a high vocal range, you'd have to write "Sopranoes," but the TV show is quite clearly titled "The Sopranos."

They are now in the midst of their final run of episodes, the second half of their bifurcated sixth season.

Johnny Sack is dead. Sack has been an important character in the series, the head of a rival gang in New York (Tony Soprano, of course, presides over ganglife in north Jersey). Sack, in prison, wasted away of cancer. In a neat characteristic plot twist, Sack received some false hope in his final days, because one of the prison hospital's orderlies used to be a doctor. The orderly is in prison, and lost his license, for killing his wife, but hey ... that presumably didn't cause him to forget what he had learned in medical school.

Anyway, when John learns from a real doctor that he has perhaps a month or two to live, he is given some false hope because the orderly looks at his chart and says that he may have a year or more.

If one wants to see a message there, one can see any of several. The delusion may have made John's final days marginally more enjoyable, after all, so you might think of it as an (accidental) kindness.

Or one could inquire into the motives of the orderly wife-murderer in injecting himself into John's confidence in the way he did. My reading of it is that he simply wanted to feel important again -- he is indignant at being a 'mere' orderly.

I'll be watching again this weekend.