You could have done a story like the main one in “Pine Barrens” before 2001, but it would have been much harder. Just look at how little trust any of these people have for each other when the normal rules go out the window. Just look at how quickly they turn on each other, on their boss. Just look at how lost these guys are out of their element. (Thank God for cell phones, or these two would almost certainly have never gotten out of there.) It’s a storyline that’s primarily comic-maybe the most comic storyline the show ever did-but it has thick undercurrents of a tragic nature. The two kill a deer and spend a night in a truck, finally calling Tony to come and get them. Paulie loses a shoe after tumbling down a snowy bank. The two soon realize that they’re well away from where they started and don’t have much of an idea how to get back to the car, even if they’re willing to leave Valery for dead, assuming Paulie’s shot took him out. The guys give chase, and while Paulie seems to clip him in the head, he gets up and races off again, leaving Chris and Paulie far behind. Valery wasn’t as dead as he seemed, and when the guys attempt to make him dig his own grave (with what looks like a snow shovel), he whacks Chris in the face with the tool, making his escape-in pajamas, no less-into the snowy woods. You can probably guess what happens from there. The guys head to south Jersey, to the wilderness area Pine Barrens, to deposit the corpse, though they’re far from dressed for the chore. The two call Tony, who’s got a meeting with Valery’s partner and pal, Slava, later in the day, and he tells them to make sure whatever they do, it happens far away from him. The fight turns into two-against-one, with Valery more than holding his own, but the two finally bring him down, theorizing that a crushed windpipe has felled him and will keep him that way, if he doesn’t die. Then, Paulie picks a fight with Valery, despite Valery’s size advantage, because he doesn’t like what Valery says to him. When Paulie dicks around with Valery’s remote and Valery asks him to return it to the docking station, Paulie drops the remote on the floor, shattering it. Needless to say, this ends up being a mistake, as Paulie’s growing resentment of seemingly everyone (but especially his boss) has grown all-encompassing. Unfortunately, he’s unable to collect, so Tony sends Christopher and Paulie in to do the job. Silvio (who appears in the background of exactly one scene) is owed some money by a Russian named Valery. “Pine Barrens” is a nice reminder that The Sopranos, despite being a slow show in its own right, was always more jittery than that. Since The Sopranos, TV dramas have, by and large, gotten slower, more drawn out, reaching a point where atmosphere and character moments are everything. And it’s that structure that keeps the episode engaging to this day. “Pine Barrens” probably spends the MOST time with Paulie and Christopher, but it spends a substantial amount of time with everybody else. If it were a replica of “Pine Barrens,” we would keep cutting away from Walt and Jesse’s predicament to hang out with Skyler or Gus or Saul or some of the other characters, just as we do here. But “Fly” really IS that tiny, two-character play. Breaking Bad’s recent episode “Fly” garnered lots of comparisons to “Pine Barrens,” for essentially being a two-character play set in an isolated location. What’s easy to forget is that this doesn’t dominate the hour as much as it might if the episode were made today. “Pine Barrens” is most famous (and it may very well be THE most famous Sopranos episode) for its Paulie and Christopher subplot. David Chase and his writers (Terence Winter gets credit for this script, from a story by himself and Tim Van Patten) build to the moment when Meadow realizes Jackie, Jr.’s an ass, when Tony is forced to sit down for another cup of coffee with his in-laws and leave Gloria waiting, when Paulie and Christopher slowly realize just how lost they are, out in the Pine Barrens, and then the episode starts pinging between storylines, seemingly, thrillingly, at random. And if you look at the back half of “Pine Barrens,” it’s there as well. If you look at the back half of “College,” you can see this principle play out. The show will spend the first half of an episode carefully developing three or four storylines, bring them all to a point of maximum tension, then throw them in the air and start cutting between them, seemingly at random. There’s a kind of what-will-happen-next chaotic rhythm that the very best episodes of The Sopranos take on, an editing rhythm unlike any other show in the history of television. In which Paulie and Christopher get lost in the woods.
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