Adriana’s brutal termination was all the more shocking and painful because she had been the show’s closest approximation of an innocent. Optimistic and go-getting, sheisa mob boss’s vision of a glamour girl, with her scraped-back, bleach-blonde ponytail, spackled-on makeup, and tight leather pants and miniskirts. But by the fifth season, the veneer is starting to crack. Adriana is on Prozac and has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, her bowels wracked by stress.

“What do you got to be stressed about?” Christopher mocks—unaware that she’s been ensnared by F.B.I. agents, who are forcing her to spy on Tony’s crew. Cornered in a labyrinth of nightmarish options , she does her best to give the Feds as little information as she can get away with. “I love Christopher, and sooner or later, we are going to get out from under all this,” she tells her F.B.I. contact, who proceeds to mock Adriana behind her back. Her life is equally disposable to the mob and to the F.B.I.

The episode is perfectly structured to maximize suspense and dread. When Adriana tries to convince Christopher to enter the witness-protection program with her, he chokes her until her eyes go blank—and then lets go. The harrowing near-death experience lends an intense sweetness to the ensuing scene, in which Adriana fantasizes about their future life, playing a Jersey Juliet to his Romeo. They can live in a picturesque cabin; he can finally make a go of his screenwriting dream! But during a drive to clear his head, Christopher stops at a gas station and spots an ordinary schmuck in a broken-down car with his rundown wife and kid. Is Christopher strong enough to relinquish the power and status of his mob-tied life?

It’s not clear when Adriana realizes that she is marked for death. Like the viewer, she keeps on hoping for the best. So she willingly gets in a car with Silvio (Steven Van Zandt), after Tony calls to tell her that Christopher tried to commit suicide and is in the hospital. ln a Sopranos oral history, de Matteo told V.F. that Chase insisted on filming two different versions of her final scene: “We shot one where I get away, where I don’t believe Tony on the phone. You see me in my car and I’m driving away and I’m crying, and my suitcase is next to me.” We see a flicker of that version in the finished episode, and for a moment we feel relief that she has gotten away—only to understand that it is just a daydream.

The 30 seconds after the car stops, in a beautiful autumnal clearing in the woods, are appalling. You can see Adriana’s panic as Silvio yanks her out the door and she tries to crawl away on the leaf-covered ground. The camera tilts aloft toward the cloudless blue sky and the glorious treetops, as if averting its eyes so that we don’t have to.

“I had written some of the most horrific, graphic violence on the show, but for some reason I didn’t want to see her get shot,” said Winter, the writer of that episode. We never see Christopher betray Adriana, which allows us to momentarily take comfort in a fantasy that he was not involved in this decision. That fantasy is soon punctured when Christopher ditches Adriana’s car in the airport’s long-term parking lot, supplying a gut-pummeling punch line to the episode’s seemingly flat title.

And then there’s the head-spinning final twist, in which the camera returns to the scene of the crime—but instead of Adriana’s corpse, we find Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco). She is leading Tony around some property in the woods that she is hoping he will buy her to jump-start her new career as a developer. She has traded in her pious state of denial for conscious complicity. As have we, the audience—who have seen something terrible, but already know we will be tuning in again next week.

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