Well, while many of us find it impossible to hate him, we still can’t help but realize that he is the definition of evil.
The Sopranos is one of those shows that touches every inch of your soul and causes such a wide and varied range of emotions that sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s love or hate. This is especially true for Tony Soprano – the head of the family and number one mobster of the show we almost worship. He is, however, as far away from being a knight in the shining armor as one can be.
He does so many terrible things throughout the series that it doesn’t even make sense for us to keep rooting for him, yet we do. However, there are some points of no return even in his life where we realize how much of a lost soul he is, and he’s so far from being a hero that it’s strange to even think about it.
Here are five scenes that prove Tony is not the protagonist of the story at all.
5. Paulie And The Painting
As funny if not even inappropriate it may seem to include this moment in the series, Reddit users referred to this particular scene many times while telling the exact moment they started hating Tony. It was the time when he asked Paulie to get rid of the painting he once had, with his horse, but was too sad to keep it after the horse died.
Instead of disposing of it, Paulie kept it, transforming Tony into some sort of Napoleon. When Tony saw it, he took the painting from Paulie furiously, ripped it off and threw it away.
4. Gambling Problems and Hesh
One of the most hated episodes in the whole show is the one where Tony behaves like a real jerk to his oldest and most loyal friend Hesh and many others close to him.
“Seeing him as a full blown degenerate gambler, one of the only vices he didn’t have throughout the series, makes him really unlikable. He blows the money meant for Vito’s kids, gets nasty with Carm, and turns ugly with Hesh, one of his oldest friends,” Redditor Brewguy86 said.
3. Hypocrisy About The Value Of Life
Throughout the series, we witness Tony’s murders many times, but most of the people killed on the show were somehow made worthy of death. It really seemed like he didn’t care about human life at all. But he did care about his horse, Pie-O-My.
When there was a fire in the stable where the horse was kept, Tony got the idea that Ralph Cifaretto was responsible. And while Ralph is not an ideal human being, brutally killing him is not the way to mourn a horse.
2. Dealing With Christopher’s Addiction
We know that Chrissy was far from perfect, but he was loyal to the family and he cared deeply for Tony, even though he feared him. So when Tony made it clear that in order for Christopher to make a difference in the family, he needed to be sober and stop drinking and using drugs, Christopher agreed to go to rehab.
But after he got clean and came back, Tony made him drink. Initially as a joke, he then forced the guy to become an addict again, neglecting all the success Christopher had made before.
1. Killing Christopher
While there have been a lot of questionable things Tony has done on the show, out of love, revenge, power blindness, or even boredom, this one stands out. One thing he has done makes him the antithesis of a human being.
Killing his own nephew, brutally, at the moment he needed him the most, was the most horrible thing Tony did in the entire series. It was the moment that even the most positive viewer understood that Tony is a deranged man with a totally damaged soul for whom there is no salvation.
