Several threads from past episodes have coalesced in my recollection recently. I'm not terribly confident in the inferences I'm drawing from this convergence, but I thought them worth posting anyway.

First, I was reminded after Marco Polo of Tony's emotional answer back in the pilot when Melfi asked him why the ducks meant so much to him. "I don't know. It was just a trip having those wild creatures come into my pool to have their little babies." Melfi observes that the ducks thereby "became a family", and Tony then recognizes that they did symbolize his own family to him.

For some reason this resonated for me with the notion of Tony throwing Carmela into that pool, "forcing" her to back into the waters where the ducks thrived and procreated, and also resonated with their sex act in that same pool. It further brought to mind the past occasions when Carm has mentioned the possibility of having another baby: back in season 2 when she reneges on her demand that he get a vasectomy, saying that with Meadow leaving for college she might want another child; and talking to the black priest at the end of season 3 when she thought she might either be pregnant or suffering from ovarian cancer.

By the end of season 4, Tony was speculating that Carmela was nearing menopause (though she'd be pretty early). Unidentified Black Males underscored Tony's now mistaken belief that Carmela has never (and WOULD never) sleep with another man. A few episodes back, we had Wegler exposing Carmela to literature where a philandering wife, disillusioned with the unattainability of satisfying romance inside or outside of marriage, kills herself in despair (Madame Bovary) and where a teacher that beds and impregnates one of his students is castrated by her protective uncle (Abelard and Eloise). Then In Camelot offered Tony reliving the time his mother was pregnant with a "change of life baby".

So in light of all of the above, I'm wondering if Carmela might turn up pregnant.

It almost seems too classically soap opera, but there's no doubt that there is a truckload of compelling conflict to be mined from this development. Now -- when Carmela has finally resolved to actually divorce Tony and clearly wants out of their marriage permanently -- pregnancy would be her worst nightmare. And it would be that anyway since there is a possibility it's not Tony's. Pregnancy is also among the most plausible causes for Carmela to actually tell Tony she had sex with another man, a fact he is sure not to take well but which might do more to ultimately sensitize him to the emotional injury inflicted by marital infidelity than 100 more years of therapy with Melfi could every do.

Then there are Carmela's Catholic issues. Would she be distraught enough to consider, even for a moment, the option of abortion, especially if the pregnancy timetable proved Wegler was the father? And if she couldn't consider abortion, could she consider suicide, the fate of Madame Bovary?

I am actually thinking that the latter has some remote possibility of coming true. In other words, I could see Carmela being so distraught at a pregnancy with Wegler's baby -- knowing she couldn't tell Tony the truth, knowing she couldn't remain with him even if she did, feeling she couldn't abort it, and having this layered onto the increasing unhappiness that has trapped her since the series started -- that she might conclude the easiest way out is to swallow some hemlock. My fervent hope would certainly be that any such attempt would fail and that Tony would learn of the pregnancy by virtue of the medical interventions in her suicide attempt.

Whatever it turns out to be, I am increasingly feeling that one of the three members of Tony's "nuclear family" is going to die or meet with an otherwise tragic fate by the middle of the sixth season. The reappearance of that bear, the threats from Johnny Sac, the threat posed by Vito to Finn (and incidentally, therefore, to Meadow), AJ's scary downhill race toward danger (both as a teen driving a Mercedes and as a kid on a bigwheel), and Carm's hopeless plight as foreshadowed in the two books Wegler introduced her to all point to a very tragic future for the Sopranos family.

I also think there were some very interesting tidbits dropped in Unidentified Black Males regarding how Tony feels about Carmela sexually. But I'll put those comments in the ongoing disucussion of that issue in the psychoanalysis thread.


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