I’m still trying to digest this one. On one level, I agree with one of the Slate observers who writes

I think it might represent the purest distillation so far of the Sopranos ethos: to relentlessly invert the most sacred principle of TV writing, which is “Do Not Discomfit the Viewer.” Making the viewers squirm, as David Chase, Terry’s boss, recently suggested, keeps them from going out and buying stuff, which is the point of television.

I mean, let me just run through it: Uncle Junior complimenting the “nice and spicy” chicken at the wake for a 7-year-old who drowned in a Jacuzzi; Tony’s father’s girlfriend mimicking—in the Sopranos’ most David Lynchian moment yet—Marilyn Monroe’s infamous “Happy Birthday” present to President Kennedy (thank you, Terry, for keeping Tony out of her bed, which would have been too much for me); a teenage Tony lying to his mother—as she recovers from a miscarriage—about his father’s infidelity; and, of course, Christopher’s beat-down of his AA buddy, the loser TV writer, for missing a payment on a gambling debt. Should I go on?

Of course, in the end, I think it was all about the myths we live by. Tony Soprano, even confronted with the extremely weird and discomfiting reality about his father’s life, and some possibility of his mother being humanized, even an iota, in the end, clings to the myth and even expands on it. He has to.