Word: mobbing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...episodes, heavy on domestic drama, may frustrate fans of the Mob story lines, and several major characters (Uncle Junior, Dr. Melfi, Paulie Walnuts) are absent or on the sidelines. While there are a couple of nasty whackings, the most physically and emotionally brutal scene is sparked by a drunken game of Monopoly. (Tony, unsurprisingly, palms $500 from the bank and believes in the Free Parking--jackpot rule.) But Tony's personal crises--getting older, trying to break his family's cycle of dysfunction--mirror his business problem: figuring out who will lead the Mob family after him. Consigliere Silvio (Steven...
...broader sense, The Sopranos is about male baby-boomer American leadership in an age of irreconcilable demands and diminished expectations. As a Mob boss and a family man, Tony is caught between what he is and what he imagines himself to be. He cannot muster the stoicism the past demanded of men nor the sensitivity the present does. He whines to his therapist and "goes about in pity" for himself (the quote is from an Ojibwe proverb that Tony reads and that he believes applies only to other people), yet he longs for the days when men were strong...
...crime family is thinking about his legacy. (Fair warning: here's where the spoilers begin.) In the first new episode, Tony, still feeling the effects of having been gut-shot by dementia-addled Uncle Junior, is celebrating his 47th birthday. Later there's a reference to one of his Mob peers, who died at 47. No one connects the dots explicitly, but the parallel is not lost on Tony. "My estimate, historically, 80% of the time, [a Mob boss] ends up in the can," he tells his brother-in-law Bobby (Steven R. Schirripa). "Or in the embalming room"--that...
Could it be curtains for Tony? It's possible. His battered insides are giving him agita, and there's still trouble with the Brooklyn Mob, whose leader can't forget the murder of his brother by Tony's cousin. Death on The Sopranos can be operatic or bathetic; in the first two episodes screened for critics, one mobster dies in a bloody shooting, another ignominiously of cancer. It's also possible, given creator David Chase's distaste for tidy endings and moral lessons, that Tony could stroll off into retirement as others pay the bill for his deeds...
...loss not just for four families. It was a turning point in an already foundering war. An ecstatic mob in the center of a major Iraqi town had torn Americans limb from limb in front of rolling cameras. A series of catastrophic recriminations followed. Muqtada al-Sadr, emboldened by the attack, called for the first Shi'ite uprising against the occupation. U.S. Marines retook Fallujah but flattened parts of the city in the process and set the stage for future cycles of invasion and uprising that have scarred the city--and the country--ever since...