Who’s Your Daddy?

Hard to know what to make of "The Sopranos" episode from Sunday night. Hopes were high on seeing Steve Buscemi's name under the director's credit (the infamous Pine Barrens episode having been shot under his watchful gaze). Yet there was something plodding about the wedding-dominated plot, which like Ginny Sac herself seemed at times to be in danger of going glassy-eyed and passing out after too many anisette-soaked pastries at the reception.

So be it. It's tough to hold an entire season's worth of episodes to the standard set in the past few weeks. The two-part Finnerty installment and its aftermath were high points not just for "The Sopranos" but for television drama in general. An ordinary episode is only to be expected now and then, and "ordinary" for this crew still blows away most everything else. Besides, in a program with arcs as complicated, tangled, and interdependent as those that characterize the best novels, time must be given over to getting the next set of pieces in place.

Still, an Italian-American wedding? We've seen it a lot before, and this depiction shed nothing new on it, except that apparently the price of marrying off little Daniella or Maria has skyrocketed since Epictetus and his betrothed enjoyed the generosity of hundreds of unknown Sicilian and Napolitano relatives on their own blessed day. The writers all but acknowledged the cliche by referencing, to good comedic effect, the sine qua non of Italian American wedding scenes–that in "The Godfather" (aka "One," as Christopher always refers to the first part of the saga).

OK, so maybe viewers never will tire of the bad bands, the tall cakes, the deaf grandmothers, the murder contracts–the whole beggars' banquet thing that for the bulk of the population seems to emblemize the entire Italian-American experience dating from Columbus's sail up the Hudson. "Tony, the rolletine!" might very well be shouted every Saturday afternoon at some reception palace in New Jersey or Long Island, and hearing it come from Carmella's mouth was funny (and it rang true). But so what?

Which could also be said for the same "Daddy's little girl" pap that dominated the first forty-five minutes. Not very surprising, all in all; the incestuous undertones of the father-daughter relationship tend to bubble up to the surface come wedding day, especially when the band helpfully supplies the lyrics.

But then there were those lingering, hungry close-ups of the thugs' biceps toward episode's close: Tony's own homoerotic scope-out, a figurative juxtaposition to the broad slapstick of Vito's turn in leather. Both displace the sexual tension that hovered like a haze over the dearly beloved gathered in the church that day (there's a reason it's compared to a steambath). So T proves he's the big daddy of the salumeria's back room–which is just another way of thinking of a CEO or football captain or platoon leader. Remember the episode that ended with credits rolling to Kasey Chambers's "Captain"?

It's the wrong kind of man who sheds tears on his daugter's wedding day, as the lachrymose Johnny Sac ought to have realized, given his line of work: This episode, in arranging the table for the next couple of courses, showed that he might not have a seat. What's more clear is that for all his quips about mercy fucks and Viagra, that's not just a rolletine in Tony' pocket.