The Sopranos: Ranking Every Main Character Worst To Best

Season two’s finale is one of The Sopranos’ high points. Tony and co cornering Big Pussy on his boat, finally outing him as a rat, and then assassinating and dumping him in the ocean, is a game changing moment for the show, an underscoring of the fact that anything can happen, anyone can die.

Big Pussy was never the most engaging of Tony’s crew, though. The rest of his associates all have far more interesting or entertaining hooks - weird quirks, familial connections and personal demons. While Big Pussy gets perhaps the most screen time out of any of the gang in the early days, he’s a fairly vanilla gangster comparatively speaking.

It would be a couple of seasons in before the entire mob had been properly developed, and accordingly Big Pussy is more of a plot device than a fully fledged character by the time he takes that ill advised trip on The Stugots. His memory haunts Tony for a while after, but most of the impact comes from the fact we’re told he’s such a close friend of the boss - we don’t actually get to see it all that much.