#like I'm genuinely asking I want to know if you can ever fully escape intergenerational trauma or if you just get shot in a diner

[sincetheducksleft]

I still think intergenerational trauma as tragic fate is a major theme of the sopranos, especially in this episode.... Tony saying AJ has "the putrid Soprano gene," and Melfi recognizes genetic predisposition as a euphemism for fate and so she's really telling him "when you blame fate you blame yourself" because she knows Tony thinks he's passed his ill fate onto AJ the same way ill fate was passed to him by his mother and father. And Melfi says "that's what we should talk about" as if this, too, is analyzable and graspable and fixable, and really it's a constant conflict across the whole show, that psychiatry is predicated on the ability to change yourself which means changing the fate that's written into who you are, but Tony never truly believes that fate is fixable. He says "how do we save this kid?" and the scene cuts out, because Tony never, ever knows how a person can be saved from who they really are.