The family tries to cope with Tony's hospitalization and possibly impending death, while Tony begins to hallucinate a new life parallel to...
Plot
Tony is in a coma following the shooting. His consciousness, as the episode imagines it, inhabits a parallel life: Tony Soprano has become Kevin Finnerty, a heating systems salesman from Kingman, Arizona, attending a conference at a resort hotel in California. Kevin Finnerty has Tony's physical presence but none of Tony's history. He has a briefcase, a room key, and a reservation that someone else claims is theirs. He is lost in a world of pleasant surfaces with no backstory.
At the hospital in New Jersey, Carmela sits at Tony's bedside with AJ and Meadow cycling in and out. The crew visits in ways that are partly genuine grief and partly an assessment of what Tony's death would mean for their individual situations. Dr. Melfi is kept informed. Tony's medical team works to stabilize his condition. The show cuts between the family waiting and Tony wandering through his parallel existence as Kevin Finnerty.
As Kevin Finnerty, Tony is directed toward a lighthouse and told that whatever is beyond it, he cannot come back from. His wife and children do not exist in this plane. He is alone with a briefcase and a name that is not quite his. The episode is among the most formally adventurous the show attempted, using Tony's coma to raise questions about identity and continuity that the series will spend its remaining episodes not quite resolving.
Credits
Written by: David Chase
Directed by: David Nutter