Shook the Spot

"I LOVED HIM LIKE A BROTHER-IN-LAW" . . . THE SOPRANOS — SEASON 6, EPISODE 11 . . . "COLD STONES" . . . POUR A LITTLE OUT FOR VITO . . . CARMELLA IN THE CITY OF LIGHT . . . AJ ENTERS CONSTRUCTION AT THE GROUND LEVEL . . . NEW YORK: IT'S ON

Barbaro, the stalion everyone had picked for the Triple Crown this year, suffered a life-threatening injury at the start of the Preakness on Saturday, ending his bid and disappointing a nation. The Times has a nice piece on why we care so much about horses . . . 'cause admit it, you do . . . and what we have invested in the colt's survival . . .

In victory and defeat, and every day in between, horses remain wordless creatures. To those in the sport who spend their days caring for them, these thousand-pound thoroughbreds are like children — not in any sentimental sense, but in the sense that they cannot take care of themselves. They need people to provide them with water, food, shelter, exercise. The good ones are treated the way every child should be treated — with the mixture of care and discipline best suited for that particular individual.

Reading that tonight, Shook was reminded of the classic Sopranos episode, in season four, when Tony's horse Pie-O-My falls ill and has to be put down. Those scenes proved the show's genius and demonstrated, for those who ever doubted it, that character acting was as critical an element of The Sopranos as anything else. Season five, with its flowing dream sequences and heavy symbolism that featured the writers as much as the cast, departed from the acting emphasis, but this season has reclaimed the stage. Carmella . . . AJ . . . Sil . . . Vito . . . Artie . . . and, gradually, Tony. In the time we have left . . . perhaps Paulie . . . Phil, even . . . and surely Christopher. With only nine episodes to go, each character must take his final bow.

Tonight was Vito's. Those of us who got to the television early, hoping to catch two episodes of Entourage as an appetizer, were instead subjected to HBO's fiercely graphic documentary Baghdad ER. That shit was too intense to watch for more than a minute . . . by which time we'd already seen a military doctor carrying a soldier's severed arm . . . so we hit up On Demand for the hour. (We oppose that fucking war, anyway.) But during the main event at 9, the murder of poor Vito seemed just as brutal as anything on Baghdad ER. Though neither heaven nor hell exists (Shook sounds like AJ at his Confirmation), Vito is definitely in the great Cosa Nostra in the sky. As Phil's wife — or, rather, her priest — observed, "There's nothing gay about hell." What were we supposed to think . . . other than, hilarious! . . . when Phil came out of the closet to kill Vito? Probably the same thing we're supposed to think of Phil summoning Tony (twice) to meet him under a statue of Lou Costello.

The Carmella sequences in Paris were pretty unbelievable and thick with ominous foreshadowing. The wide shot of Carmella and Roe in the pit of that archealogical site said nothing short of they're all gonna die in the end. It was hard, also, not to compare the Paris getaway to Carrie's City of Light soul-searching in the series finale of Sex and the City. HBO and The Sopranos have a long history of riffing off the network's other shows, so Shook doesn't think the comparison is unwarranted. What it might mean . . . that Carmella Soprano would make a better love columnist than Carrie Bradshaw? . . . Shook can't say.

The question all season, of course, has been, how is this all going to end? It's been complicated, unfortunately, by those pesky bonus episodes that may or may not constitute an extra season. (The coming attractions for episode twelve dealt with that so awk-ward-ly . . . "It's Time To Say Goodbye . . . For Now.") All indications in tonight's episode pointed to an escalation in the long-brewing war with New York. We might end up watching Baghdad ER after all.