This episode provided a lot to chew on in relation to what is increasingly being revealed as Tony's difficulty in identifying one true father figure. Going all the way back to Down Neck, Tony talked about how Johnny Boy "wasn't around much", spending much of Tony's youth apparently either incarcerated or socializing with mob cronies and goomars.
When Melfi asked Tony early on to talk about his father, Tony suddenly had a flashback in her office to Junior throwing him a baseball, Tony dropping it, and Junior yelling "heads up". This is significant, first, because the word "father" didn't make Tony first think of Johnny Boy but of Junior. Second, the memory Tony had was not of some moment when he felt really loved by Junior but of a chastisement for dropping a baseball. That incident seemed to resonate with Junior's more serious indictments of Tony's athletic ability, indictments so damaging to Tony's self esteem that they figured in two of the three most serious eruptions ever between them (Junior revealing how ashamed he was to face his friends when Tony dropped a pop fly (Boca) and, of course, the perrennial sting of "you don't have the makings of a varsity athlete", which led to the "he's dead to me" of season 5.)
Tonight we learned that Tony wasn't sure whether his father was ever proud of or believed in him. And we even hear that, at one point, Tony wished Paulie was his dad.
Putting this together with last week, we know that Tony might well have loved Dickie Moltisanti more than any of these guys and considered him a real friend, someone he could respect and look up to. But Dickie was killed when Tony was still a kid of about 10. So the one guy who might have been the best surrogate father for Tony never got the chance to complete the role.
As others have noted, Melfi has been steadily trying to get Tony to critically examine his father and the impact he had on what Tony has become. Tony has shown very little willingness to consider the issue thus far and insists on preserving this increasingly false image of him as a "good guy". A good guy who rarely spent time with his kids, who wouldn't leave his goomar when his wife was in the hospital miscarrying their child and in danger of dying, who came perilously close to shooting Livia in the head in a fit of rage, and whose compliments to his son were apparently so rare that the one leaving the biggest imprint was praise that Tony had not "run away like a little girl" after seeing a finger chopped off.
Despite Tony's resistance to taking him off his pedastal, I feel there has to be something substantive on the horizon here. As Melfi said, Tony never saw his mother chop off a finger, and it wasn't she who sent him out at 22 to whack a bookmaker. He's a gangster primarily because Johnny Boy, and all his other father figures, were gangsters. And it's time Tony shifted some of the blame for what he's become from his mother to them. That seems a necessary stepping stone to putting the ultimate blame where it belongs, on himself.
All Tony's Fathers
1Tony, his spirits crushed after b-lining to the fridge first thing in the morning: "Who ate the last piece of cake?"