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For two months now, I have been eating, sleeping, and breathing The Sopranos. Two months of colonizing our living room television. Two months of blasting the theme song in my car. Two months of murder, therapy, affairs, omertà, attempted matricide, and gabagool. Two whole months of binge rewatching culminating in one glorious bit, the promised land of prestige TV. This week, I reached The Episode Of The Sopranos In Which Christopher Kills A Dog.

Read on for an extended ode to one of the best episodes of The Sopranos, perhaps television as a whole, and two poetry recommendations to boot.

Spoiler Alert: The dog dies.

An Ode To The Episode of The Sopranos In Which Christopher Kills A Dog

Michael Imperioli is having a moment. The 56-year-old actor, best known for portraying mafioso Christopher Moltisanti onThe Sopranos, is in the midst of an unexpected, late-career renaissance. He smolders in Season 2 ofThe White Lotus. He moonlights in indie-rock music videos. Architectural Digest just toured his fabulous apartment. Publications are speculating that he could bag his first Emmy nomination since 2007, but when I see his face there’s only one thing on my mind. Of all the scenes in all the performances of Imperioli’s decades-long career, I am haunted by just one moment. I cannot stop thinking about The Episode Of The Sopranos In Which Christopher Kills A Dog.

Exactly two minutes and thirty-seven seconds into the runtime of The Episode Of The Sopranos In Which Christopher Kills A Dog, also known as S4 E10 “The Strong, Silent Type,” Christopher Moltisanti gets high, collapses onto his couch, and accidentally suffocates his fiancé’s dog. A dog that seems to have been introduced to the series solely to die by Chris’s hand. Every episode of The Sopranos has a Wikipedia page and in that Wikipedia page they list the characters that are killed in said episode. No humans were killed in the duration of The Episode Of The Sopranos In Which Christopher Kills A Dog. Its “in memoriam” eulogizes one character and one character alone: Adriana’s dog, Cosette.

Side Note: Love that someone listed Carmela’s haircut as a production note.

You may be wondering why you should care about this particular episode of The Sopranos. It’s a fair question. “The Strong, Silent Type” is an objectively morbid 53 minutes of television in which the seasons-long escalation of Christopher Moltisanti’s substance abuse reaches its breaking point. He is violent to his fiancé, family, and friends. His crew organizes an intervention, forcing him into rehab under threat of death. But these tense moments are interspersed with darkly funny scenes — Easter eggs that can be traced back to a single source, a fact that, combined with Chris’s negligence, makes this whole dog situation spiral out of control. When viewing The Sopranos, one must never forget that Anthony John “Tony” Soprano loves animals.

This is the very first thing we learn about Tony in the pilot episode of what is arguably the best television show of all time. I repeat, the man LOVES animals. He passes out when a flock of ducks flees his pool. He screams at a woman he widowed, then gently pets her dog. In Season 4, he develops a deep emotional attachment to a racehorse named “Pie-O-My”. Tony beats mafia captain Ralphie Cifaretto to death for allegedly killing the horse. An execution he resisted carrying out when Ralphie murdered a Bada Bing dancer, slept with Tony’s sister, floated having Tony whacked, and actually whacked his own widowed girlfriend’s son. But horse slaughter? Horse slaughter is an offense punishable by death. Tony shares these feelings with Dr. Melfi, who delivers a bizarre, almost comical revelation: Tony Soprano cares more about violence against animals than he does about violence against people.

ISO the one person who said the dog doesn’t die, aka my soulmate.

“The Strong, Silent Type,” then, is concerned not just with Christopher’s breakdown, but with what his breakdown suggests about the interiority of the characters around him. The camera cuts from his canine homicide to a close-up of Tony opening a package at the Bada Bing: a painting he commissioned of himself standing proudly next to his now-deceased horse. He is moved to tears. At the intervention — the “Christophervention,” if you will — Adriana shares that the drugs have given Chris erectile disfunction. Carmela caught him high at Livia Soprano’s wake. Silvio saw him passed out in a toilet and Paulie just kinda hates him. But when Tony finds out Christopher killed that dog, all bets are off…

Tony: You killed little Cosette? I ought to suffocate you, you little prick!

Tony: Still, this thing with the dog, how could you not see it on the chair!?

Counselor: You’re getting emotional, Tony.

Tony: That’s ‘cause I know what it’s like to lose a pet!!!

That’s ‘cause I know what it’s like to lose a pet!, delivered by a belligerent, gesticulating Tony Soprano, is objectively one of the funniest things I have ever heard. Tony is less upset about Chris’s drug use than he is about him killing that dog. The camera cuts rapidly from one character to another. Grievance. Reaction. Tony yelling about the dog. Grievance. Reaction. Tony yelling about the dog. The scene is a self-contained tragicomedy. Everyone is uncomfortable and no one can leave. The fiasco ends in a full scale brawl.

TEOTSIWCKAD is Michael Imperioli at his best. He balances the severity of Christopher’s anger and addictions against his insecure, often bumbling demeanor. The episode is the culmination of a transformative character arc for Chris, a series of events that begins with him murdering the man he believes to have killed his father then careening toward rock bottom. Tony leans hard on him as a potential successor while Adriana, entrapped by FBI agents, pulls away. Jealous of his promotion, Paulie and Silvio ice him out. The pressure mounts and he lands, humiliated, at the head of this haphazard circle of chairs. Imperioli as Christopher has always been great, but in Season 4 he kicks it up a notch, acting out even the most ludicrous consequences of his character’s actions with nuance. It’s an impressive performance on its own, but even better as a harbinger of what the next two season’s have in store for our buddy Chris.

Ultimately, The Episode Of The Sopranos In Which Christopher Kills A Dog is equally distressing and laughable. The inciting incident — The Killing of a Sacred Dog — is a window to deep questions of morality, obligation, and self destruction. It is also disturbingly funny. Adriana spots a dog in a car next to her and begins to cry. Paulie saves Tony’s horse painting and hangs it on his living room wall. What an absurd stroke of brilliance it is that out of all of Christopher’s many sins, his Come-to-Jesus moment is the one in which he smothers a dog. The man kills a grand total of 17 people by the series’ end, but this is the scene that dogs Imperioli to this day.

As the Zoomers, many of whom were in the womb when The Sopranos first aired, flood the internet with Christopher Moltisanti fancams and memes, it is only fitting that we honor this underrated moment in television history. They say all dogs go to heaven, but this episode bought Christopher Moltisanti a one way ticket to hell.

From the (Poetry) Bookshelf

The Colossus and Other Poems, by Sylvia Plath

I love to hunt for a mirror in the pages of a book. I’m a monster about reading poetry, by which I mean I gravitate toward collected works. (It’s not enough to have some of the poems. I’m greedy! I want them all!) But this week I was feeling blue and pulled Plath’s first collection of poems off my bookshelf. I had read many of the poems other places, but it felt a different kind of meaningful to read them in this order. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about artistic depictions of matrilineal intergenerational trauma and was struck by this one poem, “All the Dead Dears,” that I hadn’t read before. Some lines:

“From the mercury-backed glass / Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother / Reach hag hands to haul me in”

“All the long gone darlings: they / Get back, though, soon”

“Any touch, taste, tang’s / Fit for those outlaws to ride home on”

*chills*

A Boy in the City, by S. Yarberry

Reading a good poem on paper is all well and fine, but there’s nothing quite like watching a poem move through the body of the person speaking it. I saw Yarberry read from A Boy in the City this fall and was so blown away that I felt the experience would be incomplete if I didn’t finish the book. In this very physical collection of poems, bodies are buildings and songs and puzzle pieces, rising and falling, joining together and splitting apart:

“There is so much shape between us. / We become another shape. We bend / in and out of being. Etcetera of hair, / brush-brown. Alternate apertures. / Where? Red and red. A drawn face / haunts like a mobile. Dawn sprouts / a violet field."

Yarberry’s voice others the present, shielding it from us (or us from it?) like a museum display case. Their subjects are modern but timeless, contemporary yet ornate. Each poem is a little sculpture, housed in glass.

Odds and Ends

The Episode Of The Sopranos Where Christopher Kills A Dog is not to be confused with The Episode Of The L Word Where Jenny Kills A Dog, though they exist in the same cinematic universe.

Made some bagels and some pasta — 12/10 would recommend!

See ya later alligator.

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