Wait a minute. Supposing that Tony did indeed kill Ralphie over Tracee, and not Pie-O-My, how does that redeem him? How does murdering Ralphie out of vengeance for a person qualify as morally better than murdering out of vengeance for a horse?

Ahh, Dr. Elliot Kupferberg. His many douchey moments were a consistent comedy highlight.

I have to disagree about Tony not having an arc. While he starts the series as a murderer and an unrepentant criminal, the crimes he finds himself willing to commit go deeper and darker as the series progresses until there's finally nothing left to the man at all.

Melfi's son gets most of his screen time during Season 3, I recall. Definitely in Employee of the Month, as well as a couple of other episodes. Kids, and the hopes and disappointments they carry for their parents, play a major part of Season 3.

Yeah, 24 Season 1 was in 2001, The Sopranos started a year or two before that.

Drea de Matteo was originally just cast as a waitress in the pilot. She made a good enough impression that she was asked back to play Christopher's girlfriend when the show got picked up.

Wait, Paulie was ALWAYS the comic relief. Right up to the very end:

Yeah, Johnny Boy Soprano is probably the most crucial character we almost never get to see, apart from a couple of flashbacks. The show pretty artfully hinted that Johnny Boy's feelings about his son were complicated at best, something Tony never got close to confronting in the course of his therapy. In any case, Tony…

AJR, you need to watch some Hayao Miyazaki or something, clear that gloomy thinking about the youngin's right up.

Big Pussy was perhaps the best staged of all the whackings, and his death presaged the frequency we'd see the show's characters done in by their loved ones, their "family" members.

Since we're all just a conglomeration of aliases and .jpeg files, your privacy should remain snug and secure here at the AV Club. Take heart, Facebook refugees!

I don't think it's possible at this point for me to feel sorry for having read a WUiB selection, but this is certainly a case where the experience of discussing and dissecting the book has been more substantial than actually reading it.

Yes, for that very reason alone, the Scanner discussion should be quite raucous and lively.

A stellar point, MikeStrange. All of this talk about the challenging and demolishment of conventional artistic tradition and expectation keeps leading me to the ne plus ultra of "Just what IS art?" artistic statements: 4'33" by John Cage.

"Now I'm trying to think why I loved [Young Goodman Brown] and am still opposed to Destroy. Besides the obvious stylistic stuff, the ambiguity is there in Brown but it's grounded in the character. These characters are blanks and there's nothing ambiguous about nothing."

Identity doesn't call to mind Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras so much as it recalls The Three by Donald Kaufman.

As always, a well-written and whip-smart post, MikeStrange. You've obviously invested more time and energy into researching and appraising Destroy, She Said than I have, so i'm curious, were there statements or writings in the supplementary material you've examined that directly led you or quoted to you the…

"As for the hotel/forest divide, I think it's interesting that the more 'chaotic' forest is also the more natural. The unnatural is the orderly and proper hotel. "

Don't many authors create books intentionally designed to mimic their respective views of existence?

There's something to be said for the obvious divide geographically between the ordered, civilized Hotel and the chaotic, primal Forest just beyond its borders. The conflict between civility and cruelty, social construction and anti-social, "mad" destruction strikes me as a central thread through the book. Your…