My favorite episode of the entire series is still season two’s "D-Girl," in which Christopher comes extremely close to leaving the family and going off to Hollywood, but eventually decides to give up his dream and focus full time on his work. This episode brings us back to that same emotional place, with Chris drifting away from Tony and his crew as he becomes aware of a life that doesn’t involve violence, substance abuse, and criminal activity.

After the dim drawing back in of the first part of this season, this episode offers some hope. Now, it may very well be dashed later on, but for the first time, we’re given a character who has left the drive for world of mob power behind and chosen to do something else, Little Carmine. The scene with he and Tony is central to Tony’s dilemma since being shot. When Tony first came back, he didn’t feel like the person he had been, and I don’t think he wanted to be that person anymore, but he didn’t see any way out. Speaking with Little Carmine, Tony seems almost baffled, how could someone choose to walk away from all that power? But, the story makes it pretty clear why, as Tony himself has constantly emphasized, it’s not easy to be boss, and if Little Carmine has enough money, he’s got no reason to get back in the game.

Could Tony just walk away now? That has to be what he’s wondering, I’d argue that he couldn’t because that’s not the character we’ve seen over the course of the series. It’s been dulled as things have gone on, but I think Tony still holds a romantic image of the mob, believes that he’s doing this for a reason, and to walk away would be to admit that was all a lie.

I think a large part of Tony’s angst comes out of the fact that he saw Christopher as his successor. He’d been grooming Chris to take over since the beginning of the show, and once he realizes what the film is saying, it crushes him. If this is his legacy, what’s the point of everything he’s done?

Going along with all this, there's Phil’s angst at the end of the episode. Here’s another character who’s chosen to sit out the conflict that got his brother and protégé killed. Looking back, he can only wish he did more to help his brother, and disregarded the code of conduct that locked him in prison for twenty years. His associate tells him it was the right thing to do, but Phil doesn’t believe that anymore. In that same scene we also get the hilarious Leotardo/Leonardo material. It was perhaps a bit broad, but it definitely worked.

On a general level, I really liked the way they presented Cleaver, giving us something that isn’t so over the top ridiculous it makes Christopher look stupid, instead it feels like a fairly typical modern-day horror film. There’s a tendency in films within films to make everything extremely broad, you can’t have the film within a film more real than the film itself. Cleaver also had enough parallels to be obvious to the viewer, but it’s also plausible that Tony wouldn’t have immediately seen the connection. He’s the only one who knows for sure that he never had sex with Adrianna, so he might read that scene differently than the others. I liked Chris’s defense of the scene, saying that it couldn’t be Ade because “she’s an Oriental.”