Cousin Tony heads off to avenge the death of his good friend, while a dream reveals to Tony what he must do to prevent a full-scale war.
The Test Dream (S05E11) aired May 16, 2004. Written by Matthew Weiner and David Chase and directed by Allen Coulter, it is the most formally unusual episode of the show's run, built around a roughly twenty-minute dream sequence that takes place while Tony sleeps at the Plaza Hotel in New York.
Plot
Tony is staying at the Plaza while Tony Blundetto is in New York hunting down the Leotardo brothers to avenge the murder of Angelo Garepe. Tony knows this. He is not stopping it. He falls asleep in his room and the episode goes inside the dream.
The dream pulls in the dead: Ralph Cifaretto, Big Pussy, Tracee the stripper from the Bada Bing, Tony's horse Pie-O-My. Carmela appears in a wedding context. His former coach, Coach Molinaro, gives Tony a football play to run, but every time Tony tries to execute it, the play changes. Annalisa, the Camorra boss's wife Tony met in Naples in season two, also appears. The dream logic is consistent with how dreams work: setting collapses, people appear who could not be there, an instruction that cannot be followed keeps being repeated.
The dream is about Tony's inability to act against someone he loves. He needs to stop Tony Blundetto from making a move that will force New York to retaliate against the whole family, but doing so would mean either restraining or killing his cousin. The dream works through this without resolving it. Tony wakes up and calls Tony B, but too late. Billy Leotardo is already dead.
Credits
Written by Matthew Weiner (who joined The Sopranos writing staff before creating Mad Men) and David Chase. Directed by Allen Coulter, who directed several of the series' more stylistically complex episodes. James Gandolfini carries the entire dream sequence essentially in isolation. Steve Buscemi appears briefly as Tony Blundetto. Annabella Sciorra returns as Gloria Trillo (Tony's deceased girlfriend), Ray Abruzzo returns as Little Carmine, and Robert Funaro appears as Eugene Pontecorvo. Frank Vincent appears as Phil Leotardo in the waking scenes surrounding the dream.
Music
The dream sequence uses music carefully: the hotel environment bleeds into the interior landscapes, and the soundtrack in these sequences does not follow the show's usual pattern of licensed pop and rock. Some of the dream's score uses orchestral material that returns in the final seasons. The waking-world music returns to the show's established register. Streaming versions may vary from the original broadcast.
Analysis
The episode asks a question about what Tony can do and what he cannot, and it asks it in the one context where the answer might be honest: unconscious. The play that keeps changing is the most straightforward image: Tony is being told what to do, and every time he is about to do it, the instruction shifts. The authority giving the play is his old coach, a figure of legitimate order. The play itself is from a world where violence is organized and has rules. In the dream, it never resolves.
What the show does with the dream is argue that Tony already knows what he needs to do about Tony Blundetto and cannot bring himself to do it. The dream does not give him new information. It surfaces what he has been avoiding. He wakes up and the problem is still there, except now it is worse because Tony B has already acted.
The episode is sometimes cited as an example of what prestige television could do formally in the early 2000s, but it works because the content of the dream is not arbitrary. Every figure who appears is there because Tony has unfinished business with them. The dead come back to complicate what the living need from him.
Pair this directly with the following episode, Long Term Parking, and see the season five guide for how Tony B's trajectory shapes the rest of the run.