Another Weak Episode of The Sopranos (s5ep11)

Hawk and I recently finished watching season 5 of The Sopranos. The 11th episode (out of 13), "The Test Dream", left us wondering if the season was going to run off the rails.

"The Test Dream" is dominated by a 20 minute dream sequence. Well, the episode's Wikipedia page says 20 minutes, but to us it felt a lot longer because it was unfocused. Tony is having a feverish dream that involves elements of flashback to childhood experience as well as omniscient understanding (or imagining?) of recent events he did not witness. There's also a vision of something he'd like to happen.

Look, I get it that IRL people do have dreams, and flashbacks are a common enough storytelling device. This exercise in using flashbacks has multiple problems, though.

• For one, it runs too long. It makes the episode dangerously like a "clips episode"— one of the major tells for when a show has jumped the shark. And this is not the first tell that The Sopranos is at risk of jumping the shark.
• Two, this prolonged dream sequence is confusing to viewers. After every cut we're left unsure if the next scene is real or a hallucination. Done once, maybe twice, it's fun. Done 7 times in a row it's just tedious.
• Three, the prolonged dream sequence does little to add to Tony's character or advance the plot. When Tony had a fever dream in the season 2 finale it was a) shorter and b) was the point where he connected the dots of evidence to recognize that one of the guys in his squad was a rat.

After this episode Hawk uttered the Seven Deadly Words.

"I don't care about these characters anymore."