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For seven seasons Tony's been least happy whenever he's forced to deal with his lawyer, Mink.

This is because Tony only visits with his lawyer when he's up shit creek.

Yet for seven years Tony has managed to escape serious legal penalties. We, the fans, are intimately familiar with the sense of anticipation Tony must be experiencing every time he's with Mink.

So naturally we revisit the 1970s "Anticipation" ketchup commercial as Mink is torturing Tony with the anticipation of something that never seems to come - the RICO case.

While detailing for Tony the troubles that lie ahead, Mink literally hits the bottom of his nonresponsive ketchup bottle with each syllable. Finally, a frustrated Tony snatches the bottle from Mink, so that he can get the shit over with.

Now that's anticipation.

---0---

Insightfully quotes Yeats, yet naively mispronounces the author's name.

Environmentally conscious, yet drives a gas-hogging SUV.

Despises Bush, but wants to join the war in Afghanistan.

Appreciates nature, and the appropriateness of the message in a counterculture, 2-generations-old Dylan song, but not so much that he'll dare leave his parents' nest, or even step out of his warm car to get a closer look.

Ironically, the most anti-pollution device on the gas guzzling SUV ignites a pile of dead leaves.

AJ and his doll escape the ensuing fire as the SUV explodes.

And so does AJ's self-pity, philosophical disquiet, and moral waffling.

The fence has fallen, and AJ is forced to pick a side. Soon, we see him happily zipping around in a beamer.

---0---

The only Sopranos character more superstitious than Paulie Walnuts was Christopher Moltisanti.

So naturally, the street cat we meet in this episode interacts - almost exclusively - with Paulie and Chris.

Well, a photo of Chris.

The jacket Chris is wearing in this picture - especially the way it's unzipped between two slanted "eyes" - looks a bit like the face of a tabby cat.

Okay, maybe that's stretching it.

Maybe we're supposed to think the cat is Adriana reincarnated, but I see something else - at one point revived from having been clinically dead, Moltisanti ("many known") literally had more than one life. Like the proverbial cat*.

In "The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti," would-be author Chris creates a story one plot twist of which involves a character walking on a Soft, Tar Roof, as opposed to Tennessee Williams, who wrote about a Hot, Tin Roof.

Upon which walked a cat.

Fishy characters populate the diner Tony and family visit.

Some guy at the bar keeps looking back at Tony, but Tony doesn't seem to notice.

There's suspense all around. Everything seems to be building up to something...

But nothing happens.

And that's life for the Sopranos, isn't it? Isn't every stranger a bit suspicious to this family?

Don't stop believing. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

As he, himself, speculated in earlier episodes, "made" guys probably don't realize it when they get whacked.

At a random point during their appetizer, everything stops. No sound. No video. Not "fade to black" - just black.

Tony never saw it coming, though the audience might have.

Just moments before the lights go out, that suspicious guy at the bar gets up and heads into the bathroom. We never see him exit the bathroom, but from the camera angles Chase gives us we wouldn't have.

Mario Puzo would be pleased.

Does this guy seem Arabic to you?

Did his cheesy jacket seem a little too stuffed?

Are you taking any of this seriously?

Meadow, whose symbolic readjustments are keeping her just beyond the nuclear family, enters the diner a little late, and so she misses it. What she witnesses may smother her idealism like AJ's exploding SUV extinguished his.

When this Members Only guy returns from the bathroom, he detonates a rack of TNT taped to his chest.

After all, the hatred that fuels suicide bombers was Made in America.

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