The Most Disturbing ‘Sopranos’ Scene Yet

So after weeks of David Chase shoving the worst of Tony Soprano in our faces, chipping away the charm to show the dull piggish canny golem beneath, there’s suddenly a scene of him cradling AJ in his lap, in tears, moaning “You’re all right, baby, you’re all right.�

In a series full of brutal murders, AJ’s attempted suicide — complete with cement shoes — managed to be one of the most disturbing scenes yet. For years, the Sopranos son has been dismissed and dismissible, a peripheral bit of comic relief: Meadow was the true Sopranos child, the one with a future. Now AJ has drifted to the center, heartbroken but also largely unchanged, still alternating a passive thuggishness with sensitive Hamlet anxieties. But he’s also Tony’s child: Symbolically, he’s all those vulnerable babies Tony has alluded to this season, the infant in Chris’s car seat, the toddler whose swimming-pool death Tony obsessed about at Janis’s vacation house. And if AJ has been — as one of Tony’s cronies suggested — poisoned by toxins, Tony knows that they’re not just from the asbestos he sent drifting over Jersey.

And what are we to make of Melfi’s therapy session, in which her shrink points out the danger of treating Tony — that she’s just helping him be a better sociopath? (He’s referring to Favorite moment: Silvio reading How to Clean Practically Everything. —Emily Nussbaum