From the Halls of Fire: Bada Bing Bada Bow
Tolkien's Domino Effect Storytelling
Hey Tolkien Poppers,
I have a few posts that I wrote at the beginning of the Substack and thought that I would bring them out of the “Hall of Fire” and back into the digital world for you to enjoy. My first post was on The Sopranos, Tolkien, and narrative. I’ll sprinkle these tales in between
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OH! – What do The Sopranos and Tolkien have in common? Well, apart from Jersey mafiosos harboring a hobbit-like proclivity towards six meals a day, smoking, and drinking as well as James Gandolfini (a.k.a Tony Soprano) sharing an uncannily similar surname with the name of Middle-earth’s favorite wizard, both have a connection to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.
It’s true! In Season 4 Episode 9 entitled “Whoever Did This,” Ralph Cifaretto, one of Tony’s captains and consistent pains in his ass through Ralph’s run in the show, takes a bath while his son Justin and a friend play with a bow and arrow outside. The scene opens with Justin and his friend, who are about ten years old or so, running in the yard. Justin is holding a wooden box with a target drawn on its exterior and his friend is holding the bow and arrow. The shot cuts to Justin’s friend draws the arrow on the bow string, aiming the arrow high in the air, and yelling “Son of Gondor! The bow is meant to find the ring!” He releases the string, and the arrow hits the box Justin is holding. The boys erupt in victorious celebration. An all too familiar scene for those of us who were adrenaline junkies in our adolescence. Unsurprisingly, the boys’ enthusiasm as well as Ralph’s bath are cut short. Justin is found unconscious, with an arrow protruding from his chest. You can watch the whole scene here.
You may be asking yourself, “That’s it?” Yea, that’s it. Just a very obtuse reference to The Lord of the Rings without any real accuracy. No one is referred to as “sons of Gondor” in the Tolkien’s three volumes or the Jackson films and there is no bow that serves as a tracking device to locate the One Ring. No crossover. No tribute. Not even an attempt at adapting any themes from Tolkien’s works or their adaptations. If you are interested in The Sopranos and The Lord of the Rings crossover content, I would recommend HitFix’s hilarious “Gandalfini: The Story of a Connected Wizard.”
So why talk about this tiny allusion to The Lord of the Rings in a random episode of The Sopranos? The episode originally aired on November 10th, 2002. With The Fellowship of the Ring being released the previous December and The Two Towers’ anticipated release for December 2002, hype The Lord of the Rings was at an all-time high. Many shows based in the time period they are filming attempt to make relevant pop cultural references to increase the immersive experience for viewers. A recent example is NBC’s This Is Us placing its characters in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in its fifth season. While The Lord of the Rings did not impact global communities in a way that COVID-19 did, its pop cultural impact can be felt through the ripples of references throughout shows like The Sopranos.
This sort of referencing is commonly referred to as “intertextuality.” The Sopranos may not be a literal “text” in terms of medium, but we can refer to it as a text because audiences interpret its meaning and make meaning from it. I discuss intertextuality’s impact on how a text is received in my paper on South Park’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. You can read my paper here. In many cases, writers do not solely use cultural references to deepen readers’ experience of their text as an extension of our real world, but also manufacture those references as devices that mitigate their intentions for a story. “Whoever Did This” is no exception.
The Sopranos shares very little in common conceptually and thematically with The Lord of the Rings. But one thing that “Whoever Did This” does share with Tolkien’s storytelling is the way in which events unfold in the narrative. Tolkien is notorious for setting up various “domino effects” that place its characters in situations of peril and triumph. An example of this is in The Return of the King. After the battle at Helm’s Deep and the drowning of Isengard, the stronghold of the corrupted wizard Saruman, Gandalf acquires the palantír that Saruman was using. The palantír is one of a set of stones created to communicate with one another through a sort of telepathy. Magical walkie-talkies if you will. Most of these seeing stones have been lost and considered dangerous to use because of not knowing their whereabouts. Aragorn, Gandalf, and others find out that the Saruman has been in contact with the Dark Lord Sauron through Pippin’s handling of the palantír. Later, Aragorn, the rightful user of the palantír because of his royal lineage[1], eventually reveals himself to Sauron through the stone from Isengard. At this point in Sauron’s attempt at conquering Middle-earth, he was unaware of Aragorn’s involvement in the war effort against him. Aragorn is the prophesied king of Middle-earth and one of the few powerful enough to bring about Sauron’s downfall. Sauron unleashes his army of orcs from their stations in Mordor. In doing this, Sauron ironically clears the way for Frodo and Sam, who, at this point, are in the land of Mordor trying to get the One Ring to Mt. Doom so they can destroy it and, in turn, destroy Sauron.
Back to The Sopranos. The reference to The Lord of the Rings sets up such a domino effect. Justin and his friend have most likely seen The Lord of the Rings and it is this intertextual manifestation that results in Justin’s being shot by an arrow. I will not give an episode summary here, but you can read a great summary and analysis of “Whoever Did This” at Sopranos Autopsy. I will give a spoiler warning though. Canvasing the drama surrounding Ralph and his son’s injury are tensions pertaining to an insult made to one of the underbosses’ wives of a rivaling family and ownership over a racehorse called Pie-O-My between Ralph and Tony, who has taken a particular liking to the animal. We find out later that Ralph is the one who made the insult and, confirmed by an interview with the show’s creator in 2021, kills Pie-O-My by staging a barn fire where Pie-O-My is stabled to collected the insurance money for his son’s medical bills. From the other characters’ points of view, there is no evidence that Ralph committed these acts beyond a shadow of a doubt. Lack of evidence does not save him, however. Tony is suspicious of Ralph because of his previous of acts of deviance and ends up killing him over a heated moment in Ralph’s kitchen.
Ralph begins the episode carrying on as the conniving loose cannon he has been throughout the show. Justin’s injury inspires him to change. He visits a priest and makes amends with a former lover. It is a curious thing that his son’s near-death experience leads to both Ralph’s repentance and demise. Where the virtues of The Sopranos are ambiguous at best, those of Middle-earth are more clear in their exemplification of nobility and self-sacrifice by Eowyn confrontation with the Lord of the Nazgûl on the Pelennor Fields and Sam’s unrelenting love for Frodo. But the common ground shared between “Whoever Did This” and The Lord of the Rings is that Tolkien’s influence set the key events in motion for each.
[1] For more information on the palantíri, see https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri.
There is also a Tolkien Pop! library in the “about” section of the Tolkien Pop! Substack, where you can check out some of the books on Tolkien I have and am reading as well as those that I have reviewed. Checkout my library page here and see if anything strikes your fancy: https://tolkienpop.substack.com/about
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