The Sopranos 6x8 | Watch Along

Alicia Florrick? Oh man if you guys end up reacting to more netwrok tv on this channel "The Good Wife" is a great show to react to.

I go back and forth on whether or not I think the whole AJ storyline is well written. I've said before that I think one of the few weaknesses of Chase's writing is how he portrays young people. Overall, I do think the way AJ behaves and how his personality has evolved is quite realistic but I think Chase gets himself in a knot about what he wants to say about it. To some degree we're obviously meant to sympathize with Melfi's position because she's the rational one, she's the one that knows her stuff, and usually, she's right. But at the same time, her advice on how to deal with AJ and her explanations of his behavior are so overly facile that it makes me think that Chase just kind of wanted to ridicule the way child psychologists of the day spoke about these things. In general, from what we can glean, I think it's clear to me that Chase leans slightly conservative in how he thinks about what "good parenting" is, in that he mostly thinks AJ was just spoiled and should have just had a sterner hand, and anyone trying to coddle him now is doing him a disservice. And that's obviously true to an extent but it's clearly not the whole story with someone like him. So I don't know, it's complicated. Combine that with the fact that AJ is just overtly annoying as a presence, even if we can theoretically sympathize with him, and this adds up to the fact that it's never been my favorite storyline or character arc.

I love how even with the dementia, Junior instinctively and immediately says the knife isn't his. You can take Junior outta the streets, but you can't take the streets outta Junior. Also, I know Robert Iler (AJ) isn't considered one of the stronger actors on this show, but I do crack up at his incredulous "What?!" when Tony of all people tells him that murder is wrong.