Last night’s Sopranos was one of the most peculiar television episodes I’ve ever seen. It was, effectively, two episodes. In the first, Tony shockingly and brilliantly took Machiavellian advantage of a car crash to eliminate his increasingly unstable nephew-deputy, Christopher — and discovered, to his own seeming shock, that far from being racked with grief or guilt, as he was by his murder of his dear friend Big Pussy a few years ago, he was only relieved to be free of the burden.

Then, weirdly, Tony takes off for Vegas, meets a stripper ex-girlfriend of Christopher’s, does peyote with her, goes gambling and wins, and then goes to the desert like Jim Morrison and howls at the rising sun with glee that “I did it.”

That second part was, in a word, awful. It was overwrought, unbelievable, overdone, false, untrue to Tony’s character — would a Mafia boss fall to his back giggling in a Vegas casino? — and just plain weird. It made me think some writer on Sopranos went to Vegas and took peyote and thought it was so fascinating he should make an episode out of it.

In other interesting news, it may be that Tony is brought down not by the New York mob or killed by one of his deputies, but is rather busted by the EPA for dumping asbestos in the river.