Vito considers starting a new life in New Hampshire, while Anthony Jr. looking for a purpose and finds it when he continues his pursuit of...
Plot
Vito Spatafore has settled, temporarily, in a small town in New Hampshire called Dartford. He is going by the name Vince and working at a local diner. The town is quiet and orderly in ways that New Jersey never is. He makes a life for himself with surprising success and becomes friendly with the other men at the diner and in the community. He begins a romantic relationship with Jim, the short-order cook who makes the johnny cakes that give the episode its title.
Vito's life in New Hampshire is treated without irony or caricature. The episode genuinely explores what it would look like for this man to have the life he apparently wants, in a place where no one knows who he is. Jim is kind and stable. The New Hampshire sequences have a quality -- quieter, more open, without the surveillance and compression of mob life -- that makes Vito's eventual return to New Jersey feel like a choice toward destruction made with open eyes.
Back in New Jersey, AJ Soprano is in his first serious relationship with a girl named Blanca. Tony and Carmela have fully reconciled and are living together again. Tony is managing the crew and watching New York with increasing concern about Phil Leotardo's ambitions and the overall instability of the Lupertazzi family following Johnny Sack's incarceration.
Credits
Written by: Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
Directed by: Tim Van Patten