The Sopranos, Season 3 Episode 6: University - Is Life Really This Cruel?

Spoiler warning: This article contains all the details of the episode.

There are some TV episodes you watch, enjoy, and then move on to the next one. And then there are some that settle inside your head and never really leave. The Sopranos’ Season 3 Episode 6, “University,” falls exactly into that second category for me.

Those who love the series already know this; every episode is almost like a film in itself. But this episode goes even beyond that standard. After watching it, I just sat in front of the screen for a long time. The only thing I could do was ask myself, “Is life really this cruel?”

Pain Is Relative, But This Much?

The episode tells the parallel stories of two completely opposite women. Both are young. Both are unhappy. Both have problems. But the gap between them is so deep that you first smile involuntarily, then feel ashamed of that smile.

On one side, there is the college roommate of Tony Soprano’s daughter, Meadow. She has watched the 1932 film Freaks, and after seeing disabled people being exploited in a circus, her mood is ruined. Later, she sees a homeless woman on the street. A piece of newspaper stuck in the woman’s clothes affects her so much that she starts crying right where she stands. On top of that, she has no boyfriend, feels lonely, envies Meadow’s relationship, and occasionally pulls out her hair.

On the other side, there is Tracee.

Tracee

She is only twenty years old. She is the mother of a baby without a father. She works at the strip club run by Tony. Stripping is not enough; to get into the “VIP” rooms, meaning to make more money, she has to bribe the club’s security guard 50 dollars every time. I do not need to explain what happens in those rooms.

We also learn that she is pregnant by Ralph. Her dream is simple: she wants Ralph to take responsibility for her and the baby in her belly. She wants to be taken care of, protected, loved. She wants the most basic things a human being can want.

Ralph has no intention of giving her any of that. When Tracee does not show up for work, Silvio finds her and beats her badly. When I saw Ralph laughing while watching that scene, something inside me shrank.

In the end, Tracee tells Ralph the truth: “You’re not a man.” She slaps him. Ralph beats her so brutally that... This girl, only twenty years old, loses her life next to a drainage pipe, in the middle of filth.

The Sopranos turns the classic mafia myth upside down here. In that sense, it touches the same dark place as my article The Godfather: A Transformation From Number to Human, From Human to Office >>, where I wrote about how mafia narratives turn a person into a number, a role, and a system. But The Sopranos does this from a more understated, more everyday, and much more brutal place.

The Real Blow Of The Episode

While watching the episode, I realized that the director cuts between these two stories deliberately and intentionally. When Meadow’s roommate is crying, the scene shifts to Tracee. While Meadow is devastated because she breaks up with her boyfriend, Tracee dies in the filth.

This editing is not a coincidence. It is a slap.

Life gives some people a warm bed and the question, “Why does nobody love me?” To others, it gives a burden so heavy it is almost impossible to comprehend, and then crushes them under that burden.

What Tracee expects from Ralph is not some grand love story; it is something much simpler, much more human: to be protected by someone. That is why the episode goes beyond being a mafia story and touches a dark place about authority, father figures, and power relations. In that sense, it also stands close to the twisted authority issue in Succession and Logan Roy - Perverse Authority and Childlike Heirs >> : the way the powerful can turn even love, protection, and loyalty into tools of pressure.

Pain is truly relative. But this episode taught me something else too: saying that is easy; feeling it is much harder. Meadow’s roommate’s pain is real to her. Tracee’s pain is real even to us.

Maybe the real point is that these two truths can exist in the same world, at the same time. One person’s pain is measured by loneliness, the other’s by the struggle to survive. And The Sopranos tells this in 50 minutes, in a single episode, more cruelly and clearly than many films ever could.