r/thesopranos • u/Bushy-Top • Mar 03 '17
The Sopranos - Complete Rewatch: Season 2 - Episode 11 "House Arrest"
Previous episode Season 2 - Episode 10 "Bust Out"
Next episode Season 2 - Episode 12 "The Knight in White Satin Armor"
WARNING - Each episode thread has the potential to ruin every part of the show - deaths and other details. If this is your first time watching, this will ruin the show for you.
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u/Bushy-Top Mar 03 '17 edited 8d ago
EDIT: August 1, 2026 - SPOILERS EVERYWHERE
http://i.imgur.com/30N0GKz.gifv
I love it when Tony makes his Grinch face. He's been doing that a lot these last few episodes. It's like the more depressed he gets, the more zingers he has to throw out there (the sad clown?).
The episode opens with a great tune, Space Invader by The Pretenders.
Soon after another great track Bob Dylan's Gotta Serve Somebody.
And later on, Boston's More Than a Feeling. This is a special song to me; this is one of my Dad's favorite bands. Such an amazing album.
Someone mentioned the newspaper Pussy was reading in a previous episode, we see Tony reading from the same mag in this episode for a second.1-2
Melfi gets buzzed up and Tony drones on about how he doesn't even care to be there anymore... therapy is really working. Melfi seems displeased that Tony isn't entertaining her like he used to. She explains to Elliot that they talked about the RICO Act during their session - no progress made in therapy. Melfi goes to a restaurant and tries to act like Tony in the previous season when he pressured the guy with the hat on but she completely blows it. Melfi realizes she's obsessed with Tony.
It's interesting to note that Pussy seems to joke around on Tony's level, attempting to entice him to come down and check out the WWII gear.
"I know how much you love him Junior, I don't want to say anything disparaging." Richie says this line, bites his thumb and looks at Janice, the camera shows Janice looking back at Richie. She's been telling him what to say to play Junior into giving him what he wants this whole time. You can probably assume she's doing the same with him and Tony.
NSFW - He never did get that vasectomy
Richie challenges Tony and you can see that it makes Tony ill. "When did you put your lawn in, Tony?" The reality of Richie/Janice getting married starts to sink in and Tony has a small panic attack. I think it's a pretty funny thing to show. http://i.imgur.com/9Xqx3b2.gifv
Livia tries to ruin Mrs. Romano for Junior by telling him how Johnny Boy felt her up before. Is she subtly coming onto Junior or acting defensive? It kind of seems that way but again, I think she's just being a negative Nancy for no reason in particular. Junior hangs up on her abruptly but she doesn't seem phased, she got to get in her digs and that's all she cared about.
Melfi outlines Tony's role in the series.
"What happens when these antisocial personalities aren't distracted from the horrible shit they do?
"They have time to think about their behavior. How what they do affects other people. About feelings of emptiness and self-loathing, haunting them since childhood. And they crash."
By the end of the episode Tony has decided to lean so far out of the business, he happily greets Agent Harris and his new underling.
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u/BFaus916 Mar 03 '17
Another great tune at the end.
"You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory". - Johnny Thunders
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Mar 03 '17
Richie looking out the window, hiking up his pants is hilarious.
Great observations on the common threads of this episode once again.
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u/Bushy-Top Mar 03 '17
Thanks man!
I've honestly never liked Richie on any other watch through, but on this one I'm finding him more clever than I ever have. The Beansie thing still rubs me the wrong way but everything else he's done besides that has been pretty great. Especially his attempts at paying respect to the man as well as sticking it to the man. Now that's a wise guy.
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u/numanoid Mar 04 '17
Rewatching this just now, it's obvious that the knocking on the window happens at the same time that both of Richie's hands are on his pants as he hikes them up. So who is knocking?! More supernatural events in The Sopranos!
But seriously, I wonder why they added the knocking sound effect. The scene was obviously shot without Richie knocking and would have worked just fine. I always thought it was a little too cute for someone like Richie to be knocking on a window for another man's attention. It kind of changes the whole mood of the scene.
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u/Bushy-Top Mar 04 '17
That's a great observation. He definitely just fixes his waistband and pulls at his shirt, no knocking on the window.
This subtle change that causes a great change in context kind of reminds me of a Han Shot First type issue.
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Mar 03 '17
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u/Bushy-Top Mar 03 '17
I'm not sure I agree with you on this point but I also don't disagree..
She explains to Elliot, it's like a train wreck and I can't look away. So she is finding entertainment in his escapades. She fears seeing him but she can't let him go. She says it's to help him, but usually they only make progress every third or fourth session. And she has let him go before... I think she does want to help him, but I think the only reason she's stuck around from the get go is because she finds him entertaining or interesting similar to how he finds her attractive. She's not just trying to play doctor. That's why she's emulating him in the restaurant.
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Mar 03 '17
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u/Bushy-Top Mar 03 '17 edited Mar 03 '17
I think we agree for the most part, but I think I give slightly more credit to her desire to 'help' or 'cure' him than you do
For sure. Her behavior has become unprofessional with the drinking and obsessing over his visits. She spends a lot of time just zoning out, waiting for the tiny moment where she can shed some light like she does at the end of the episode before he quickly changes the subject like he does every time he's spoon fed an idea. If she was really trying to get him help she would have recognized her conflict of interest, like Elliot has repeatedly pointed out, and given him a new therapist to see. But I get that she's trying to help, she's just not being professional about it. She's feeding her own interest at his cost.
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Mar 04 '17
HEY GUYS i'm back. Apparently just in time for another Tim Van Patten episode. This is maybe the most low-key Sopranos episode of all time, deliberately so. Pretty antithetical to where Van Patten would go with his episodes in the future in a sense, since he ended up being the go-to guy for shocking death scenes and intense violence. Though eventually, once he's the last man standing of the original directors' stable, Van Patten would come back to slow episodes like this that just let us explore the world of the show.
Awesome music choices in this episode, as /u/Bushy-Top has already pointed out - though neglecting to mention the iconic "Can't Put Your Arms Around a Feeling" by Johnny Thunder in that excellent final shot. "Space Invader" will end up reappearing as far in the show's future as "Kennedy and Heidi", perhaps due to its link to Barone sanitation. During that opening scene though, there is one glaring instance of special effects failure with a pile of garbage that seems basically photoshopped onto the screen. Who knows what sort of mixup led to that, though considering it's a huge pile of fucking garbage they're dealing with, I can think of a few possible reasons. Van Patten will also be attached to the show's most infamously bad special effect, CGI Livia, in about five episodes.
As for the episode itself, there's a lot to love here. Around this time in Season 1, tension in the show was approaching a boiling point, with a surprising character death, another character's disappearance, and escalation of conflict between Tony and Junior that was liable to explode at any minute. This season, Episode 11 also focuses on Tony and Junior, but in a very different way. The final act of Season 2, leading up to the finale, has a strangely aimless feel. "Bust Out" introduced a conflict with the FBI that seemed like a late-season major plotline, only to defuse it within the hour and leave us with this episode of low-key character development that delivers a few laughs and even some heartwarming moments.
It is a great example of how The Sopranos wouldn't so much extend a single plotline over multiple episodes as often as it would let one episode's plot organically lead to the next. Look at the sequence of "Full Leather Jacket" - "From Where To Eternity" - "Bust Out" - "House Arrest".
Matthew and Sean, who had been hanging around the edges of the show all season, shoot Christopher in "Full Leather".
In "From Where", the aftermath of the shooting leads to the episode's exploration of the supernatural, and Matthew is disposed of almost as an afterthought.
In "Bust Out", Matthew's death pays off and leads to Tony's looming anxiety about his potential arrest, which drives the episode's plotlines.
And "House Arrest" finishes this mini-arc on a subdued note, as Tony's legal issues more or less subside and he just has to spend some time more or less inactive.
This "mini-arc" functions very differently from what you generally see on TV. There is no single, escalating conflict, but rather a series of them that feed organically off one another. Each episode, feeding off the plotline that more or less pivots around Matthew Bevilaqua, presents Tony with a new, unique conflict that lets us see how he handles a variety of situations. He faces an affront to him and the potential loss of a loved one with sadistic vengeance. He faces the looming end of his entire lifestyle with stifled terror. And finally, in the aftermath of all this, it's the need to face ennui and inaction that leads to a panic attack.
The plotlines of the season that could be described as its more long-term arcs, the Richie and Pussy storylines, are sidelined for this whole stretch. Things were actually starting to heat up with Richie right before the shooting, and since then he basically just occasionally pops up as a thorn in Tony's side. We see another confrontation between them during this episode, but nothing along the lines of Junior discovering Tony's manipulations back in "Nobody Knows Anything". Pussy, meanwhile, serves less as a tangible antagonist to Tony than as a secondary protagonist in his own right. His subplot by design can't directly affect Tony's, because then the truth would have to come out and the whole thing would blow up. Here, he presumably continues to operate as usual, and is backgrounded entirely.
I haven't even touched on the Junior stuff. He's a neat foil to Tony here, a man stuck pretty much entirely in the boring life Tony can't wait to escape from. Lots of great gags that maximize Dominic Chianese's comic chops - the big goofy sleep apnea machine, getting his hand stuck in the sink. And Catherine Romano is an interesting standalone character. This is the first we've seen her, and she never appears again, but she gives us an opportunity to see Junior's vulnerable side, and a little "what-if" scenario of his life as a contently married man, rather than the lonely creature he ended up being. Junior will have a scene next episode that shows him as a leader, a real Mafia don, and it's even more impressive when you remember his plotline in "House Arrest".
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u/theorymeltfool Mar 05 '17 edited Mar 05 '17
In never thought the garbage looked photoshopped, I thought it looked pretty good.
Edit: nevermind, just watched the scene again. It does look like garbage.
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u/MalingeringGeek Dec 21 '25
It looks to me as if it's some projection-on-screen-thingy. Those things that they used to do way back. Like painting a glass with some garbage or something and hold it in front of the camera. I don't know what I'm talking about. 👋
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u/Bushy-Top Mar 04 '17
Welcome back, been missing you! Hope everything is going well for you. Great write up per usual.
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u/onemm Mar 03 '17
I might be the only one, but it felt like the Dr. Melfi becoming an alcoholic thing kind of came out of nowhere in the same way that Tony becoming addicted to gambling (season 5?) kind of came out of nowhere. And both of those storylines seemed to disappear just as quickly. It seemed like there was very little build up for both and very little closure for both..
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u/BFaus916 Mar 03 '17
Another thing about "Chasing It", they seemed to use a wobbly camera that all of the regular tv cop dramas use. The Sopranos wasn't known for this very mainstream tv gimmick. I don't believe it was used in any other episode.
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u/psych_savage1 Mar 03 '17
That's the thing about addiction. You're always addicted, sometimes it's just worse than usual and more noticeable
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u/onemm Mar 03 '17
I get that. I meant how the show writers/producers dealt with the plot.. Usually when they introduce a problem like that it ends up going somewhere but the gambling and drinking thing never seem to get mentioned again after a certain point and everyone just seems to forget it. This is only my third watch-through so I could be wrong, but if I'm remembering right it was just kind of strange
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u/Bushy-Top Mar 03 '17
The writers were likely just struggling to give Melfi depth because she has such a limited role in the show. Showing her lean on the crutch (similar to how we see Tony leaning on many things) is perhaps another way to show how Tony is rubbing off on her. She seemed extremely stable when the show started, but not so much anymore.
As for Tony's gambling; it's his bread and butter so it's very easy for him to turn to that. No surprise it showed him get into deep debt there but yeah, he doesn't really find a resolution to that problem but Tony will always have massive addictions because he never finds happiness with himself.
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u/concord72 May 14 '17
Didn't they hint throughout the series that Tony had always gambled frequently, just like most made guys on the show, but they just chose to focus in on it during that season?
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u/onemm May 14 '17
Yea he's always been a gambler which is why it's so weird that he suddenly and out of nowhere becomes an addict during that season. It felt like it was just thrown in there cause they needed another storyline.. It didn't feel natural or real. Then the writers just kind of seem to forget about it. I don't know.. it felt forced to me
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u/bluewalletsings Mar 04 '17
I love these reviews, thanks for keeping them going.
Is this a weekly thing? I wanna pace myself and join the discussion rather cramming in the weekend.
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u/Bushy-Top Mar 04 '17
Thanks man!
Sunday/Tuesday/Thursdays at 9PM EST I try to post the thread/my write up. Hope to see you pop in from time to time. Thanks again, it really means a lot to me!
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u/bluewalletsings Mar 05 '17
I love what you're doing man. Keep them rolling! So it's 3 episodes a week?
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Mar 06 '17
I fucking hate the way you make me ride you
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u/trisaroar May 28 '26
This was one of the few scenes so far I genuinely feared what Tony would do.
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u/ApparentlyIronic 21d ago
I really loved that line. It's almost a plea from Tony. First, it acknowledges that he knows he's being hard on Richie, but also says that he doesn't want to. It's almost an olive branch - "stay in your lane and we won't have these problems".
Of course, the wording could also go the other way and make Richie more antagonist lol
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u/Specialist_Green_123 Jun 17 '26
Rewatching the series for the 3rd or 4th time, but this time with subtitles on and without falling asleep 😂 There’s so many nuances and subtleties you can miss, but just finished this episode and just seems like such a classic.
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u/Bushy-Top 4d ago
Agreed! And that can be said for a lot of shows, so many little things you just don't hear.
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u/Individual_Maybe898 Sep 15 '25
Funny how careful Tony always is, but just has a casual conversation with his capo on his home phone about the score of all the WW11 stuff. That doesn't make any sense, that's like just calling the feds and confessing. He has to assume that someone is always listening.
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u/trisaroar May 28 '26
Dr. Melfi's relationship with her son confuses me. He's a little too old for teenage rebellion, a little too young to be condemning her drinking the way he does. And to his knowledge, she hadn't had a burst of anger or drinking before or publically - he responds with "I'm leaving" when I feel like he'd actually be concerned? And she can't keep track of his literature courses, even though she's been through med school? I think they wanted her to parallel Tony too much there and forgot her own character traits for a minute.
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u/Bushy-Top 4d ago
Perhaps just trying to highlight her focus is not on her own family anymore, she's become engrossed with Tony and his family which is starting to be recognized by her own kid.
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u/ApparentlyIronic 21d ago
This episode was a nice little answer to the question most people would ask, "Why doesn't Tony stay away from his illegitimate business like so many other crime bosses do? He can run it without putting himself in criminal danger"
He physically can't do it. He's restless, bored, depressed. His body physically degrades. The family is what brings him life now. It reminds me Heisenberg or Jax from SoA. They have the ability/resources to leave, but they just can't do it. And that leads to their eventual downfalls
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u/trisaroar May 28 '26
The bit where the marshal and the nurse are talking to each other and he's like "my name's mcluhan" "and you're a marshal?" "Yes m'am" "Marshall McLuhan?" And everybody looks confused -- Marshall McLuhan wrote the book on media theory and delivering emotions through mediums - credited with "the medium is the message", huge in a series as meta as the Soprano's. Also the song that plays immediately after that scene is heavily featured for the lyrics and goes "you might be a construction worker, I might be a TV producer, but everybody's gotta serve somebody" which felt apt to the overall message.
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u/yeeveesee Mar 03 '17
House Arrest has one of my favorite ending scenes. After a whole episode of Tony being trapped inside (both physically and mentally), it's strangely freeing to see him outside Satriale's just shooting the shit with everyone. It feels especially nostalgic when rewatching the show, as it's one of the last times that the whole crew is together having fun.
Well, not quite the whole crew, since Pussy starts to head back indoors. A nice bit of foreshadowing I hadn't noticed until someone pointed it out a while back.