Television Review: Join the Club (The Sopranos, S6X02, 2006)

Join the Club (S06E02)

Airdate: March 19th 2006

Written by: David Chase
Directed by: David Nutter

Running Time: 54 minutes

As The Sopranos ventured into its sixth and likely final season, David Chase and his creative team faced the daunting task of innovating within a narrative framework already lauded for its audacity. With most thematic avenues explored, the series turned inward, probing existential questions through a surreal, dream-laden episode titled Join the Club. While the instalment showcases Chase’s willingness to dismantle conventions, it also underscores the challenges of originality in a show nearing its conclusion. A bold experiment in metaphysical storytelling, the episode oscillates between hypnotic introspection and derivative overreach, its ambitions both elevated and constrained by the weight of the series’ legacy.

Chase’s script draws deliberate parallels to Season 2’s From Where to Eternity, in which Christopher Moltisanti’s near-death experience plunged him into a hallucinatory reckoning with Catholic guilt and infernal imagery. Yet where Christopher’s visions thrived on visceral horror—demonic visitations and spectral reckonings—Tony’s coma-induced journey embraces existential ambiguity. Shot by his dementia-addled Uncle Junior, Tony (James Gandolfini) languishes in a medically induced limbo, his survival uncertain and potential brain damage looming. The shift from Chris’s fiery damnation to Tony’s disquieting drift reflects the series’ maturation, trading literal hellfire for the subtler torment of identity erosion and existential void.

Tony’s incapacitation fractures the Soprano household, revealing the brittle dynamics beneath its veneer of cohesion. Carmela (Edie Falco), ever the pragmatist, clings to performative optimism, murmuring hollow reassurances to her comatose husband. Janice (Aida Turturro), predictably, weaponises grief into operatic melodrama, her theatrics underscoring a lifetime of emotional manipulation. Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) retreats into detached intellectualism, reciting Jacques Prévert’s Pater Noster—a gesture as pretentious as it is poignant, her borrowed verses masking an inability to confront raw emotion. AJ (Robert Iler), meanwhile, oscillates between adolescent bravado (“I’ll fuckin’ kill Junior!”) and abject failure, casually revealing his college expulsion. These reactions, while thematically coherent, edge toward caricature, their emotional beats diluted by the episode’s conceptual ambitions.

Tony’s absence destabilises the DiMeo crime family, exposing the absurdity of its power structures. Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) stumbles into reluctant leadership, his passivity clashing with Paulie Walnuts’ (Tony Sirico) naked ambition and Vito Spatafore’s (Joseph R. Gannascoli) opportunism. The ensuing power struggle peaks at Eugene Pontecorvo’s funeral, where solemnity collides with farce and Uncle Junior’s denials are met with weary contempt. These sequences, while darkly comic, lack the visceral stakes of earlier seasons, their tension undercut by a pervasive sense of inevitability.

The episode’s centrepiece is Tony’s extended coma-dream, wherein he inhabits the life of alternative Anthony Soprano—a milquetoast optics salesman adrift in Costa Mesa, California. Stripped of his Jersey accent and mobster swagger, Gandolfini delivers a masterclass in subdued pathos, his every gesture radiating the bewilderment of a man unmoored from identity. A misplaced briefcase, a case of mistaken identity, and a Kafkaesque descent into credit card fraud culminate in a diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s—a metaphor as unsubtle as it is effective. Alternative Tony’s world, a sunlit purgatory of hotel lobbies and banal small talk, mirrors Tony’s subconscious dread of irrelevance and cognitive decay.

Even in this alternate reality, Tony’s flaws persist: an aborted affair with a saleswoman hints at latent infidelity, while his manipulation of credit cards by Kevin Finnerty – a man whose briefcase he mistakenly took - echoes his criminal instincts. The staircase fall and subsequent medical revelation—that his mind, like his moral compass, is fracturing—serve as blunt yet potent symbols of his inescapable decline.

Unlike From Where to Eternity, which relayed Christopher’s hell through dialogue and implication, Join the Club renders Tony’s psyche in vivid, if glacial, detail. This narrative choice fascinates and frustrates in equal measure. The alternative Tony sequences, while thematically rich, languish in their mundanity, their pacing at odds with the series’ typically razor-sharp momentum. Conversely, the real-world hospital scenes—Carmela’s vigil, AJ’s floundering—feel truncated, their emotional potential squandered in service of the episode’s conceptual framework. The result is a tonal dissonance: the dream fascinates, but the “reality” withers into a bottle episode of missed opportunities.

For all its ambition, Join the Club is hobbled by its inadvertent resonance with the BBC’s Life on Mars, which premiered months earlier. Both narratives hinge on protagonists displaced into alternate realities—Tony’s corporate limbo echoing Sam Tyler’s time-slipped odyssey to 1973. While Chase’s execution is tonally distinct (devoid of retro glamour or existential whimsy), the premise’s overlap—identity dislocation, bureaucratic purgatory—proves distracting. For a series renowned for originality, this uncanny parallel registers as a rare creative misstep.

Join the Club epitomises the sixth season’s ethos: a work of art increasingly preoccupied with its own dissolution. Gandolfini’s performance as Finnerty is a tour de force, a haunting study in vulnerability that ranks among his finest work. Yet the episode’s conceptual gambits—the purgatorial allegory, the family’s fractured reactions—lack the visceral impact that defined The Sopranos at its zenith. Chase’s script, while intellectually rigorous, prioritises metaphor over momentum, leaving viewers to ponder whether the experiment justifies its indulgences. In the end, the episode mirrors Tony’s coma-dream: a fleeting, half-remembered reverie that fascinates but never fully coheres—a fitting, if flawed, reflection of a series grappling with its own mortality.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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