46 Long


"46 Long" is the second episode of the HBO original series The Sopranos. It was written by David Chase, directed by Dan Attias and was originally broadcast on January 17, 1999, in the United States.

Starring

Synopsis

feels sorry for A.J's science teacher, whose car has been stolen, and persuades Tony to help. Tony tells Pussy, who has a car body shop, to look out for it, a task Pussy resents. The thieves are found, but the car has been "chopped" so they are told to steal another one. The teacher is somewhat surprised when his car is returned with the same plates, but different keys and a different color.
Christopher and Brendan Filone, who has a meth habit, hijack a shipment of DVD players and are pleased to "scathe" the truck driver, at his request, so that he cannot be suspected. They deliver the players to Tony, Silvio and Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri at Sil's strip club, the Bada Bing. But the truck company pays Junior Soprano protection money, and he angrily arranges a sit-down with Tony and the DiMeo family's acting boss, Jackie Aprile, Sr.. Jackie has cancer and is thinking of naming a successor. He rules that restitution must be made, which Tony accepts, but Chris, who thinks he is due his button, attempts to reject the $15,000 that Junior claims. Tony insists on receiving the full amount from Chris, saying he will beat Junior down; but Chris can tell that Tony will take some for himself, and little will be left for him and Brendan.
Although they have been told not to attack the truck company again, Brendan and Chris, both high on meth, next plan to hijack a shipment of Italian suits. However, when Brendan arrives to pick up his partner, a sober and reflective Chris decides to sit the job out. Brendan proceeds with the hijacking along with two associates, both nervous. One of them drops his gun; it fires when it hits the ground, killing the driver. The two of them flee in panic. When Tony learns of this, he orders Chris and Brendan to return the whole consignment to Junior and come to terms with him, though first his crew help themselves to a few of the suits.
A small fire occurs when Livia is cooking, and Tony insists that she accept a nurse/companion, but Livia soon enrages her and she walks out. He is proud that his mother still drives, but she knocks down and badly injures a friend of hers to whom she has just given a lift. She now has to go, very reluctantly, into the Green Grove retirement community. In her almost empty house, collecting old photos of himself as a child with his parents, Tony nearly has another panic attack.
Although Tony himself tells his mother, "You've got to stop with this black poison cloud, because I can't take it any more," he cannot bear hard words about her from Dr. Melfi. She says that Livia has "great difficulty maintaining a relationship with anyone"; he speaks of his guilt. She says that he must either acknowledge or displace his "feelings of hatred" and anger against his mother; he walks out. In the Bada Bing, when the barman Georgie Santorelli clumsily uses the telephone in a manner similar to Livia, Tony grabs the handset and bashes him with it, displacing his anger.

First appearances

46-Long is a large man's suit size. Silvio, Pussy, etc all try on the Italian suits Christopher and Brendan hijacked.

Cultural references

was mildly positive toward the episode, writing that "some of it – particularly anything involving Tony and Livia feels fully-formed and very much of a piece with what we would come to know as one of the greatest shows ever made. And some of it is David Chase still fiddling with the knobs and levers"; Sepinwall considered the family-oriented scenes strong while viewing the subplot about the car theft as "still on the broader, lighter end of the comedy spectrum, It's not bad, but it's not quite right, either." In The A.V. Club, however, Emily VanDerWerff praised "46 Long" as "a confident expansion of the show's universe", considering it an example of "the show's keen sense of generational conflict, of the ways that different kinds of people come into conflict with each other."

Music

In order of first appearance: