Recap / The Sopranos S 4 E 4 The Weight

"It's different for women, body image and self-esteem. I'll tell you though: I never had a problem with Ginny's weight: to me she's beautiful. "Rubenesque." That woman is my life. To think she's being mocked..."

— John Sacrimoni

Since learning from Paulie Walnuts that Ralph Cifaretto made a crude fat joke about his obese but beloved wife Ginny, Johnny Sack has been struggling to contain his rage. At a bar with his subordinate Joey Peeps, he sees Donny K, a member of Ralph's crew, laughing about something with a friend. Johnny finally explodes with rage, beating Donny savagely and urinating on him. He returns home to Ginny and gently reassures her when she fusses over the blood stain on his jacket. When Tony learns of the situation he promptly visits Johnny and learns the cause for the attack, lying and denying his presence at the dinner where Ralph told the joke. Johnny wants Ralph to pay for the offense with violent retribution, but Tony defends his biggest earner.

Carmela, still worried about the family's financial security, attempts to set up a contingency plan with her cousin Brian Cammarata, a financial planner. Tony, still insistent that Carmela and the kids will be vaguely "taken care of", is disinterested. Feeling alienated from Tony, Carmela starts to find romantic chemistry with Furio Giunta, who is moving into a new home. Carmela visits his house to discuss zoning regulations so he could build a small place on the property for his parents to stay and brings AJ with her. Though AJ's presence prevents the situation from becoming inappropriate, Carmela is entranced by Furio's stories of Italy.

Johnny goes to his boss, Carmine Lupertazzi, requesting permission to go ahead with a hit on Ralph in retribution for the insult to Ginny. Carmine rejects murder as a solution, because Ralph is integral to the highly lucrative Esplanade construction project, and offers to tax Ralph instead, but Johnny insists on violence. Attempting to de-escalate the situation, Carmine arranges for a sit-down with Tony, Ralph, and Junior, but Johnny walks out, refusing to be in the same room as Ralph. At another sit-down with Ralph absent, Tony suggests that he would be willing to hand Ralph over to Johnny if Johnny reveals who leaked information about the joke to him, but Johnny refuses this as well. Later, Tony advises that Ralph make a personal phone call to Johnny reiterating the lie that he never told the joke. However, during the call, Ralph goes off script and offers the compromise of an apology if that's what it takes, and Johnny quickly bristles, shouts at Ralph, and hangs up. Realizing Ralph's life is in danger, Tony angrily orders him to lay low in Florida.

Meadow sees an information booth about the South Bronx Law Center, coincidentally run by Dr. Kupferberg's daughter Saskia, who encourages Meadow to get involved and help minorities and the underprivileged. While Tony briefly jokes about Meadow's involvement with helping an Iranian immigrant, the tension between them over his racism seems to have thawed. Dr. Melfi discusses issues with her son Jason in therapy with Dr. Kupferberg, who attributes Jason's lack of drive in school and alienation from his father to feelings of helplessness after Melfi's rape. Later, Kupferberg visits Saskia at Columbia, coincidentally at the same time Tony visits Meadow. Kupferberg probes Saskia for information about Melfi's son Jason in light of his recent troubles, but learns very little except that he is the "stereotypical psychiatrist's kid". As Tony and Kupferberg leave the college simultaneously, they have a run-in in the parking garage where Kupferberg crowds Tony in his car and Tony gets slightly confrontational. During the next session with Melfi, Kupferberg references the encounter (oblivious that the man in the parking garage was Melfi's infamous patient) and relates it to the rape, offering support for Melfi to ease her lingering self-blame for the rape by saying that a parking garage is not an inherently dangerous location.

As the situation between Johnny and Ralph remains at an impasse, Tony gets an unexpected call from Carmine, who, through impressively dense doublespeak, gives him the go-ahead to have Johnny killed in order to preserve the Esplanade. Tony, though remorseful because Johnny is an old friend of his, sets the hit in motion. Speaking to Junior, he learns of a group of brutal veteran hit men in Boston called the Atwell Avenue Boys, who could whack Johnny while he's in town visiting his father. Silvio and Christopher visit the Atwell Avenue Boys, requesting a relatively quick murder despite the Boys' penchant for torture and gruesome violence.

Johnny Sack, meanwhile, sanctions a hit on Ralph through Joey Peeps, having located him in Florida. A hitman tracks Ralph, targeting him the same day Johnny sets out for Boston. Shortly after leaving his house for the ill-fated trip, Johnny realizes he forgot a sweater and returns home. He finds Ginny in the basement eating from a hidden stash of junk food and candy and realizes she's been cheating on her diet. Johnny loses his temper at her, but quickly reconciles, reminding her that he doesn't care about her weight. Seeing the pointlessness of the whole situation with Ralph, he then calls off the Florida hit moments before Ralph steps onto an elevator next to his would-be killer. Johnny visits Tony, finally offering to peacefully put the drama over the joke behind them, and the hit in Boston is called off as well.

Furio holds a housewarming party, with the whole Soprano clan in attendance. During the party, AJ becomes bored and locks Bobby Baccalieri's son Bobby Jr. in a garage for kicks. Meanwhile, Furio dances with Carmela while an oblivious Tony chats with his men. Later at home, Tony gives Carmela the gift of a new dress, now seeming to appreciate his wife's attractiveness more in light of all the drama with the Sacrimonis. As they begin to have sex, Meadow loudly plays the song Carmela and Furio danced to, and Carmela becomes distracted. After Meadow turns the song off and leaves, it plays again non-diegetically, suggesting that Carmela is fantasizing about Furio while having sex with her husband.

Tropes:

• Ax-Crazy: The Atwell Avenue Boys are effective but sadistic, completely terrifying mercenaries. The de facto leader (Lou) once beat a treacherous mobster and his wife to death with a baseball bat, earning the nickname "DiMaggio". They also once decapitated a man with a hacksaw while he was still alive.
• Badass Old Guy: Johnny Sack is no slouch himself, and even seems to show some skill in boxing by getting the upper hand on Donny with a lightning-fast jab that Donny never sees coming.
• Bait-and-Switch: Johnny Sack's Pet the Dog moment with his wife initially comes across as him pressuring her into losing weight and going ballistic over her sabotaging her diet. But then it turns out that he's upset about her lying to him about the Secret Snack Stash. He doesn't care about her losing weight, and he fully accepts and loves her just as she is, obesity and all.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Tony denies having heard the fat joke, and says he would not have tolerated it in his presence. Viewing the "No Show" episode, Tony probably laughed harder than everybody else.
  • Ralph telling his crew that the whole dildo and pimp roleplay thing was Janice's preference, and he never went for it. It definitely has shades of a BDSM variant on the Armored Closet Gay trope, and is clearly Ralph's attempt to get ahead of any rumors should Janice decide to spill the beans on their bedroom shenanigans.
  • Ralph tries to deny making the fat joke to Johnny Sack. John doesn't buy it for a second.
• Blind Seer: Invoked by Lou, who is blind, when he asks Chris if he's into drugs. Lou was actually just asking if the Soprano family was involved in drug running, something he is fundamentally opposed to.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Literally the only thing that keeps Ralph alive, for now, is that he's a big earner who also happens to be the critical point man for the Esplanade project. Even Tony admits that absent those circumstances, he would gladly feed Ralph to Johnny Sack on a platter.
• Butterfly of Doom: Inverted. Had Johnny Sack not forgotten the sweater he intended to gift to his old man, he would have walked straight into the Death Trap set for him by the Atwell Avenue Boys. He would not have had Ginny as his Morality Pet to persuade him, even if unknowingly, to change course. And that meant Ralph would have gotten whacked too. As bad as things got between New York and New Jersey in subsequent seasons, it defies imagination to ponder how they would have played out had this particular twist not entered the picture. The sequence also ultimately turns Ralph's fat joke at Ginny's expense into a case of In Spite of a Nail, at least for the time being. Relations between New Jersey and New York enter into a period of relative calm for now.
• Cloudcuckoolander: A Darker and Edgier variation. The youngest member of the Atwell Avenue Boys is unnervingly friendly and enthusiastic. Upon meeting Christopher Moltisanti, he remarks that his name is also Chris. Seeing a picture of Johnny Sack at his birthday, he remarks that it's his birthday as well.
• Continuity Nod:
  • This episode deals with the consequences of Ralph's joke about Ginny's weight and Paulie subsequently telling Johnny Sack about it.
  • When Ralph calls Johnny Sack to deny he told the "mole joke," Johnny says that he "should have let Tony chop off [Ralph's] head a year ago."
  • While visiting Meadow's dorm, Tony sees Meadow's graduation picture.
  • Ralph asks, "What? You never made a joke about Ginny Sack?" to the guys. They all respond, "No! Not like that!" In "Employee of the Month" all of them can be seen making even cruder jokes about Ginny. In that episode, Johnny Sack walks in on the guys and is immediately suspicious.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: Lou certainly has these, although most likely a side-effect of his blindness. Doesn't make them any less creepy.
• Cut Himself Shaving: Johnny Sack tries to explain away the blood on his jacket by saying that he tripped on Carmine's steps.
• A Day in the Limelight: This is about the only episode in which Ginny Sack plays an important role in the story.
• Death Glare: The hit man that was to take out Ralph still insists on half-payment after it's been called off. Even so, the way he burns holes into Ralph with his eyes in the elevator screams he'd happily take out Ralph for free in other circumstances.
• Disposing of a Body: The plan, after Carmine has given the order, is to make Johnny Sack disappear completely so that no blame can be placed on either Carmine or Tony. That leads to briefly, on Uncle Junior's advice, courting the Atwell Avenue Boys to do the deed. An additional reason is that Johnny frequently visits his father in Boston, where the Boys themselves live.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Lots of it to go around in this episode, but Johnny Sack's brutal beating of Donny K certainly takes the prize. He put him in the hospital for laughing. And, of course, he wants Ralph to die for telling the fat joke.
• Double Speak: Carmine when giving Tony the nod to take out Johnny Sack. Even Tony is impressed.
• Dramatic Irony: Tony, Chris, and Silvio wonder among themselves who's leaking information to the Lupertazzi family. They literally name and consider almost everybody else besides the actual leak, Paulie. Heck, even Silvio is briefly considered once he steps out of the room. But their reasons to not even think of Paulie and run down the rest of the list is not without basis.
• Elephant in the Room: During the sit-down, Tony points out that this entire situation only came about because someone in the DiMeo family is leaking information and he has a right to know who the informer is. Junior agrees with him.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Johnny Sack clearly loves Ginny. He is notable as one of the only two crime family members on the show (the other being Bobby Bacala) who has never taken a goomar.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Joey Peeps is aghast that Johnny Sack would brutally beat somebody seemingly without provocation. "What'd he do!?"
  • Christopher and Silvio are more than a little freaked out by the Atwell Avenue Boys and have no interest in hanging out with them any longer than necessary.
  • The Atwell Avenue Boys themselves never touched the drug trade, and still don't, no matter how much money it could have brought them. They instead eked out a meager existence as hit men, who were especially enthusiastic about taking out drug dealers. But given the sheer joy and fun they derive from dealing out hits in gruesome and painful ways, you could make the case that they have their own brand of Blue-and-Orange Morality. Even Black-and-Gray Morality doesn't do justice to their particular outlook.
  • Uncle Junior of all people, has this reaction to Johnny Sack's anger after hearing the joke about his wife, noting that back in his day, made men would be frowned upon if they let those kinds of jokes fly about their wives.
• Evil Cripple: The Atwell Avenue Boys seem to fit the bill, even if only through the ravages of time.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Upon hearing Ralph's joke from Tony, Junior doesn't think it's a very good one and notes that in his day the mobsters would consider making fun of each other's wives to be crass.
• Excrement Statement: Johnny Sack urinates on Donny after beating him unconscious.
• The Family That Slays Together: The Atwell Avenue Boys.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Tony wonders if taking out Johnny clears the way for Carmine's son, whom Tony refers to as "Brainless the Second", to take over once Carmine dies. In one sentence Tony lampshades the coming Succession Crisis about to hit the New York family, and its reasons.
  • Johnny Sack, once the near-crisis has passed, tells Tony: "No more weight remarks, Tony. They're hurtful, and they're destructive." Tony will himself find out just how much those words hit Close to Home within the next few episodes.
• Gold Digger: Tony outright accuses Carmela of it during an argument: "You equate love with money!"
• Guilt by Association Gag: It was entirely likely that Donny was laughing about something else besides Ralph's fat joke about Ginny Sack. But just seeing Donny laughing, combined with the knowledge that Donny is in Ralph's crew, is enough to make Johnny beat him to a pulp.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Meadow signing up for Law Center volunteer work begins the Revolving Door for her. She enters it with intentions to do good things for the less fortunate and society in general, but it also plants the potential seeds for her to become a Mafia Princess in the truest sense of the term.
• Hidden Depths: Almost every mobster we've seen on the show has had goomahs and prostitutes on the side. Johnny Sack is one of the few to break the mold, and in a very pronounced way. He fully accepts Ginny, obesity and all, and is still in love with her, having never cheated on her or taken a goomah.
• Honor Before Reason: Johnny dives hard into this trope, placing vengeance for the insult to his beloved Ginny above all other considerations. It almost gets him killed since his actions potentially imperil the lucrative Esplanade project.
• Horrifying the Horror: Chris and Silvio, themselves hardened killers willing to off somebody at a moment's notice, are completely freaked out by the Atwell Avenue Boys. The longer they interact with the Boys, the more and more that their one-consuming thought is to get the hell out of the house with all possible speed.
• Hunk: It turns out that Furio isn't just a Long-Haired Pretty Boy and Mafia thug. He can also do hard sweaty work renovating his new house and starting his own winery and garden. Seeing it only makes Carmela that much more attracted to him.
• I Need to Iron My Dog: Or in Carmela's case, "I need to research real estate law on something Furio brought up earlier, as an excuse to go see him in person". Even A.J. sees right through it.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Hinted at with respect to Ginny. She used to be a ballet teacher (lampshaded by Joey Peeps) but has had trouble losing weight after having children.
• Ignored Expert: While ordering Ralph to call Johnny Sack and settle things, Tony warns him not to apologize, because Johnny will just take it as an admission of guilt. Sure enough, when Ralph goes off-script and offers an apology "if that's what it takes [to resolve things]", Tony's warning comes true.
• In the Blood: A few, but not all, of the Atwell Avenue family suffer from blindness.
• It's All About Me: Tony suspects that Meadow doing Law Center work is somehow meant to get back at him for being racist to Noah. He overlooks that Meadow may actually be genuinely interested in helping the underprivileged for its own sake, and she calls him out for it.
• It's All My Fault: Dr. Melfi still blames herself to a degree for her rape, on account of walking into the parking garage without an escort.
• Jerkass:
  • AJ shuts Bobby Jr. in Furio's garage after promising him toys. Remember that Bobby Jr.'s mother died last week.
  • Elliot gets a subtle moment. When he's trying to find a space in a parking garage, he sees Tony walking to his car, and despite there being plenty of room to go around him, he tries to rush Tony by crowding him with his car. When Tony understandably tells him to "take it easy", Elliot interprets this as a threatening situation only because of how Tony looks.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Ralph points out the hypocrisy of the crew's grandstanding about Ginny when they were all guilty of mocking her weight as well. He also rails against Johnny for raising such an issue on the topic when it's Ralph, personally, whose blood money is paying for Ginny's lifestyle anyway.
• Love Makes You Crazy: Johnny Sack's excuse for being out of control in his hatred for Ralph.
• Morality Pet: Ginny ultimately becomes this for Johnny Sack, as their Pet the Dog moment together convinces Johnny to call off the hit on Ralph.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Lou Di Maggio and the Atwell Avenue Boys. The whole scene involving them is genuinely disturbing.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Johnny on Donny to start the episode.
• No, You: Carmela's retort to Tony's claim that she equates love with money.
• Nostalgia Filter: Uncle Junior again reminisces about the perceived loftier standards of his generation of mobsters compared to Tony's generation. The specific point of reference is Junior feels Ralph shouldn't have made the joke and agrees Johnny Sack would have had a right to seek vengeance for the sake of Ginny's honor if things were like the old days.
• Oh, Crap!: The pause and slight change in facial expression betrays that Tony is having one of these when Johnny lets on that he knows the fat joke that Ralph told about Ginny, almost word for word.
• One Degree of Separation: Dr. Kupferberg's daughter (who knows Dr. Melfi's son Jason) talks to Meadow about the Law Center, and he later unknowingly encounters Tony in the parking garage.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Played with, but not quite straight. Johnny Sack has up until this point been the Reasonable Authority Figure from New York who helped smooth over disputes between the Jersey mobsters by being the Voice of Reason. Ralph even lampshades that. This episode sees him dive hard into Honor Before Reason over the fat joke at Ginny's expense, to the point that his actions imperil the Esplanade project and places a target on his own back. Not played quite straight, because his genuine unconditional love for Ginny is such an integral part of his character that the drama couldn't help but inevitably unfold once he learned about the joke.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Johnny Sack has arguably one of the most human moments in the whole series when he catches Ginny with her Secret Snack Stash, and she breaks down crying under the stress of Weight Woe. He lets her know that he loves and fully accepts her, weight gain and all.
  • A more downplayed example. Despite Johnny Sack beating (and pissing) on Donny K simply for laughing, he does seem to show some remorse after Tony convinces him to hear Ralph out, asking Donny's condition and deciding to send his mother something as recompense.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • When push comes to shove, and all reasonable alternatives haven't worked, Carmine is perfectly willing to order a hit on Johnny Sack when the latter is on the cusp of becoming a liability who can cause enormous financial fallout by screwing up the Esplanade Project.
  • Tony despises Ralph but protects him anyway because Ralph's one of his captains, and the Jersey family's best earner to boot.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Carmine and Tony come as close to living up to this trope as is possible in The Mafia. Both try to defuse the whole Johnny-Ralph situation before it gets out of hand. It is driven by the recognition that while Ralph is The Friend Nobody Likes in the mob, and Johnny Sack may have a legitimate grievance, Ralph is needed to make the Esplanade project work. Carmine in particular only orders the hit on Johnny after all previous attempts at reigning him in have gone nowhere.
• Recognition Failure: Elliot has a brief but harsh encounter with Tony Soprano in an underground parking lot. The doctor doesn't recognize Tony but uses the incident as an example during therapy with Melfi, in-which Tony is the main subject.
• Rejected Apology: Ralph goes off script and switches from denying the fat joke to trying to apologize for it to Johnny Sack. Johnny gives it a hard pass. Tony subsequently views Ralph as making things worse.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Uncle Junior explains some back story for the Atwell Avenue Boys. A past mobster made a habit of selling out his fellows to keep himself and his drug trade going. He and his wife were found with their skulls bashed in by the Boys.
• Reverse Psychology: Carmine tries it on Johnny Sack in an attempt to make him see reason when it comes to Ralph. Johnny comes across as fully expecting Carmine to share in his outrage over the fat joke at Ginny's expense. Carmine instead responds with a mixture of...
  • Obfuscating Stupidity, uncomprehending silence when the joke is described combined with a Blank Stare, forcing Johnny to explain the joke. And ...
  • Rhetorical Question Blunder
    Johnny Sack: What's next, Carmine, he gets to FUCK HER FOR A MILLION!?
    Carmine: He wants to fuck her?
  • His purpose is to try and get it across to Johnny that he's being unreasonable in insisting that Ralph should be killed over what is in the grand scheme of things an insensitive joke. But it doesn't work, forcing Carmine to consider other options.
• Secret Snack Stash: Ginny's is in the basement laundry room.
• Stealing from the Till: Johnny Sack accuses Ralph of pocketing extra for himself from the construction site as a lame excuse for beating the crap out of Donny. But it's really a cover, as Johnny is initially reluctant to admit that he's furious over Ralph making the fat joke about Ginny.
• Ten Little Murder Victims: A downplayed version. None of the Jersey crew were in real danger of actually getting killed by Paulie, who was in the can. But Tony and others really wring their hands trying to figure out who's suffering from Loose Lips, whether it's by logical deduction among themselves, or trying to offer Ralph to Johnny Sack in exchange for the leak's identity during the sitdown.
• That's an Order!: Carmine to Johnny Sack during the second sit down: "So either name a price or get the fuck over it!"
• TV Telephone Etiquette: Johnny Sack walks out in Suppressed Rage over a sit-down that clearly went against him. Meanwhile, Uncle Junior on the other end of the line is offering him a piece of Ralph's company, not realizing Johnny left the room and thinking that the negotiations are still in progress.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Things get more intense with each episode between Carmela and Furio.
• Unsafe Haven: Ralph tries to wait things out by hiding in Florida at Tony's urging. But it turns out that Joey Peeps was able to track him down there, and Johnny Sack authorizes the hit.
• Weight Woe: Ginny clearly struggles with body image after gaining weight post-children and not being able to lose it.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Tony is clearly upset with Johnny giving a near-fatal beating to a member of Ralph's crew.
• White Shirt of Death: Not quite, more like a beige jacket of bloody ass whoopin' or something like it after Johnny Sack comes home from nearly beating Donny to death. But the dramatic effect is similar, as Ginny clearly knows something was up while her husband was out.