Television Review: Second Coming (The Sopranos, S6X19, 2007)

Second Coming (S06E19)

Airdate: May 20th 2007

Written by: Terence Winter
Directed by: Tim Van Patten

Running Time: 53 minutes

In the twilight of The Sopranos’ sixth season, creator David Chase embarked on a scorched-earth campaign to dismantle any lingering affection for his characters, methodically severing narrative threads that might sustain hope for renewal. The episode Second Coming epitomises this destructive impulse, functioning as a grim manifesto for the series’ refusal to grant its characters—or its audience—the solace of redemption. Much like Tony Soprano’s chilling indifference to the death of his protégé Christopher Moltisanti in the preceding episode, Chase engineers a narrative landscape where despair is not merely inevitable but almost merciful. By hollowing out his protagonists’ arcs, rendering their struggles futile and their growth illusory, he ensures that the prospect of a seventh season feels not just unnecessary but perversely unwelcome. The viewer, confronted with the suffocating weight of the Sopranos’ moral entropy, is left to wonder if annihilation might be a kindness.

The episode’s titular reference to W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming—a 1919 poem born of the Great War disillusionment and Spanish Flu pandemic trauma—finds its bleakest analogue in AJ Soprano’s psychological unravelling. Having spent years cloistered in the insularity of his family’s wealth, AJ’s tentative foray into intellectual engagement—reading philosophy, engaging with global crises—becomes a catalyst for self-destruction. The headlines that consume him (terrorism, environmental collapse, the Iraq War) are not mere background noise but existential indictments, amplifying his sense of impotence. Yeats’ vision of a world where “the centre cannot hold” metastasises in AJ’s mind, transforming curiosity into nihilism. His suicide attempt, however, is undercut by privilege: his inexperience with genuine hardship renders the act inept, requiring Tony’s intervention. The aftermath—institutionalisation in a psychiatric facility—mirrors Uncle Junior’s fate, suggesting a hereditary cycle of mental collapse. AJ’s “recovery” is framed not as triumph but as a grim inheritance, his future as uncertain and fraught as the uncle whose name he shares.

Parallel to AJ’s personal implosion, the simmering feud between the DiMeo and Lupertazzi families escalates into open conflict, though its origins are laughably banal. A dispute over asbestos dumping—a fitting metaphor for the mob’s toxic legacy—ignites not through strategic ambition but via a drunken slight. Salvatore “Coco” Cogliano (Armen Garo) harasses Meadow Soprano in the restaurant during her dinner date and provokes Tony into a brutish overreaction. The beating of Coco, while superficially cathartic, serves as the spark for a conflagration long overdue. Phil Leotardo’s rejection of Little Carmine’s peace overtures—a humiliation dressed as diplomacy—signals the point of no return. Chase frames this escalation as both inevitable and absurd, a collision of ego and circumstance that mirrors the senselessness of AJ’s despair. The mob war, like the Soprano family itself, is destined to consume itself in a feedback loop of violence and pride.

Meadow, once the series’ most compelling emblem of potential escape, completes her tragic assimilation into the family’s moral quagmire. Her abandonment of a medical career—a path symbolising healing and autonomy—for law, a profession steeped in compromise, is a masterstroke of narrative betrayal. Her relationship with Patrick Parisi (Daniel Sauli), son of mobster Patsy Parisi, seals her fate, intertwining her future with the very world she once sought to critique. Chase underscores this capitulation through subtle visual cues: Meadow’s transition from collegiate activism to sleek professionalism mirrors Carmela’s earlier surrender to material comfort. Her idealism, once a flicker of hope, is extinguished not by external forces but by the gravitational pull of Soprano entitlement.

The episode’s most devastating blow lands in the unraveling of Dr. Jennifer Melfi, the series’ ethical lodestar. Her decade-long attempt to therapise Tony into self-awareness is revealed as a farce through a crushing meta-commentary. A scene with her colleague, Dr. Kupfberger, cites a study asserting that sociopaths in therapy become “more adept at manipulation”—a revelation that retroactively poisons every session Melfi shared with Tony. The implication is brutal: Melfi’s efforts didn’t just fail—they armed Tony with psychological tools to refine his cruelty. Her arc, a microcosm of the series’ broader futility, suggests that engagement with evil, however well-intentioned, risks complicity.

The episode’s determination to underscore existential pointlessness occasionally veers into heavy-handedness. Tony’s peyote-induced vision in the Nevada desert—a sequence rife with surreal imagery and pseudo-profundity—is reduced to a party anecdote to amuse his underlings. Even Tony’s attempt to invoke previous intimate discussion of near-death-experiences during negotiation with Phil is made public and repurposed as a manipulative tactic in business negotiations. These moments, while thematically consistent, strain credibility, prioritising thematic resonance over narrative cohesion. Chase’s flirtation with the mystical—a motif throughout Season 6—feels less like artistic daring than a desperate bid to intellectualise the show’s descent into darkness.

Second Coming stands as a harrowing capstone to The Sopranos’ exploration of moral decay, its title a bitter joke about the impossibility of renewal. AJ’s failed suicide, Meadow’s ethical surrender, and Melfi’s professional reckoning coalesce into a dirge for the series’ central thesis: that corruption is cyclical, inescapable, and ultimately mundane. The mob war, triggered by a trivial act of sexist bravado, mirrors the show’s broader fixation on the banality of evil—a world where apocalypses, personal and collective, are born of petty grievances and lazy cruelty.

Yet for all its thematic rigour, the episode’s unrelenting bleakness risks alienating the viewer. By denying even the faintest glimmer of hope—AJ’s institutionalisation, Meadow’s assimilation, Melfi’s defeat—Chase and Winter court a nihilism so total it flirts with self-parody. The result is a masterpiece of despair, but one that leaves little room for the humanity that once made the series transcendent. Second Coming is less a story than an epitaph, its closing frames a warning that in the Sopranos’ world—and perhaps our own—the centre cannot hold, because there was never a centre to begin with.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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