The Sopranos Final Season

[Serren]

FIN. Any questions?

[Wondermonkey]

****ing amazing. I wonder how many calls to the cable provider those last 2 minutes produced...

I loved that for the first time ever, we saw what it was like to live as Tony in the last 3 minutes of the show. My heart was racing the whole time, that's never happened from a TV show. Anyone could be there to kill you, anyone. I also love that we were at Holstens for a work outing last week.

Sweet.

Flickr Photo "holstens" by lorenzodom

I'm in mourning, so I can't say too much right now, but Lisa from EW always has great write-ups after the show, so here's hers:



It's a tribute to the passionate discussion about The Sopranos that has gone on in this space over the past year that the minute the credits concluded for the last time ever, in reverberating silence, following a heart-stopping picture blackout that probably generated a million panicked phone calls to cable providers across the country (''Noooooo! I'm missing the mass rubout of the entire Soprano family!''), I thought of you. Yes, you, you who loved every ballsy contrarian move the series took as well as you who were impatient and critical, you who thrilled to whackings as well as you who thrilled to everything that happened in the psychic abyss that signified the opposite of whackings.

I admit I had gotten myself so anxious between last Sunday and this that I almost — almost — expected to witness Tony's actual end-of-the-road death, in bloody color. And yet I also knew that The Sopranos wouldn't end that way — it just couldn't, not if David Chase remained true to his vision of psychic mess handed down from generation to generation. Really, did you expect otherwise? Toying with many of the big-bang endings predicted (and wished for) by plenty of opinionated viewers in a final episode he wrote and directed himself, Chase (1) didn't turn Tony over to the witness-protection program; (2) didn't expose Paulie as a turncoat who would sell out his boss; (3) didn't let AJ kill himself, or Meadow distinguish herself, or Dr. Melfi take T back as a patient, or the Russian mobster come back out of the Jersey Pine Barrens. Hell, Chase didn't even let Silvio live or die — just left him there in a dreamless coma so very different from Tony's, hooked to a breathing tube while his wife clipped his toenails and Little Miss Sunshine (family, redefined!) played on the hospital TV screen.

Nevertheless, Chase had a grand time in his almost playful home stretch, offering a clue-strewn valedictory episode and a beautifully unresolved stopping point — not so much a conclusion as a curtain coming down, with the suggestion that in this thing of theirs, these people will continue to go about their business, even if we're not around to see them doing so. Beginning with the classic overhead view of Tony gathering his wits on his back in a bed — a POV that has, over the years, been associated with dreaming, with a coma, with waking in bed with his wife, or with finishing off a rendezvous with some woman or other not his wife — the episode, called ''Made in America,'' rewarded our shared deep knowledge of the show over the years. Agent Harris — who told Tony, ''You're overreaching,'' when T asked for help in finding Phil — turned out to have not only a wife at home who heats up his dinner but also an illicit hotel-room life of his own. A visit to Tony's sister Janice, the moderately grieving widow, recapped the vista from John Sacrimoni's McMansion where T and Johnny Sack once did business (and where Tony, spotting FBI agents emerging from the woods, bolted in the snow).

This time, it was snowing, too, and Phil's hapless tool of a captain, Butchie, walked down a street in Little Italy that's just a tinselly remnant of the neighborhood's former ethnic grandeur. The new shrink AJ went to crossed her legs in a disorienting variation of Dr. Melfi's famous Basic Instinct pose, yet — smiling and immune to Tony's litany — she didn't rise to the bait as he talked about ''this whole therapy thing'' and how there was ''little love in the house'' of his youth.

As it was in the beginning, world without end: AJ moved into the space left open by his late would-be movie-mogul cousin, Christopher; Meadow, now engaged to Patrick Parisi, morphed into a vaguely more legitimate but still self-deluded version of her willfully ignorant mother; and Paulie still read baroque, dumb-ass signs and wonders into everyday occurrences, whether he was meeting up with a baleful cat or confessing to a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary at the Bada Bing. Nothing's the same — their world has shrunk, family has died — but nothing's different, either, even if Phil, a vision in a velour tracksuit, was finally dispatched with a macabre flourish, done in first by a bullet and then by his own SUV, rolling over his body while two infant grandkids gurgled in the back seat. (As the man said on the episode of The Twilight Zone flickering on a TV in Tony's safe house, the television world is always looking for writers who can deliver talent and quality....)

In one crucial theme-enforcing scene and the end of the end, Tony finally went to visit Uncle Junior in June's shabby prison hospital. The old man was wizened and seriously addled, a lost, nattering guy in a wheelchair, apparently minus his upper dentures. The same monster who once pumped a bullet into his nephew's gut now didn't recognize the man he shot, nor did he remember the name or face of that same nephew now standing in front of him, invoking the memory of Junior's late brother, Johnny Boy. ''This thing of ours,'' said Tony, ''you two ran north Jersey.'' ''We did?'' replied the former power broker. ''That's nice.'' So much for dynasty.

In my favorite, crucial theme-enforcing scene, meanwhile, pathos played no part in my pleasure, and neither did playful misdirection — you know, the cutting to various strangers in that final diner scene who could have been hitmen waiting to strike. No, what I'm thinking of is the food line at the reception following Bobby's funeral, a sleek shot that panned right to left sweeping over the faces of so many we've known over the years, and loved, all of them ready to chow down. There they all were, in their frequently used funeral clothes, chatting and tasting as the living do. And there it was, a huge pan of baked ziti.

What? No more f---in' ziti? How are we gonna live? Was this the ending you hoped for? And if not — whaddaya gonna do?

[Serren]

If there is a movie, many will feel ripped off, that is for sure.

[Wondermonkey]

Originally Posted by Serren

If there is a movie, many will feel ripped off, that is for sure.

James Gandolfini is done with Tony Soprano, I don't think we'll see any more of him.

[Serren]

Or in Hollywood lingo, "I would need a truckload of money before I could be persuaded to be Tony Soprano again."

Should we have a new thread or a poll on what we think happened at the end?

[D_Litch]

Overall, I liked the finale. While I was smacking my TV at the end, and I think that doing a "blackout" ending was bullshit, I liked the episode as a whole. The Leotardo death had everyone at my house cheering, and I felt that his death is one of the most satisfying to watch deaths in Sopranos history. I did think that the tension in the last scene was genius, everytime that door chime rang you felt the same tension that Tony feels whenever he is in a restaurant.

Do I feel cheated? A little, I hate the fact that Silvio's fate was left in limbo. Am I angry? Not really, every Soprano's finale is a big tease. Am I going to miss the show? Hellz yeah

I've always felt that the Sopranos was a window that looked into the life of Tony and his family. Chase & crew just closed the window. I hope that there is not a movie though, The Sopranos is a TV show, and I think that it would bastardize the fabric of the story if it were a movie. *sigh*...Oh well, at least I can watch my Soprano DVDs for the rest of time.

[Crankbait]

I prefer an end to a story, thats just me. That end did not have to be the end of Tony, but an ending nonetheless.

[Serren]

I think the lack of a written ending is why many people are annoyed. People pay HBO $13 a month for stories, not to use our imagination to determine the fate of one TV's biggest stars.

I read that Chase is hiding out in France while the controversy goes on.

I'm over it. Hells Kitchen is on, and that is some good arse TV!

[Wondermonkey]

It makes me wonder what show people thought they were watching for 8 years. David Chase set out to make the anti-television television series, and for all intents and purposes he succeeded. I suppose people get uneasy when they aren't told what to think about something, but they also like to bitch on the internets I suppose, especially HBOs site (it's like reading xbox.com).

I thought the last episode was near perfect - some of the best dialogue in the series to date. I don't think it could have ended any other way. Tony wouldn't flip, you really can't kill him a) because it's too implausible that anyone would know he's at Holsten's aside from his family and b) it would be too network soap opera to kill the main character in the last minutes. I'm glad that we were allowed to live Tony's paranoia in the last seconds of the series instead.

[Wondermonkey]

And just in case you want to feel love after it's gone:

[D_Litch]

I could watch Phil's head get run over for the rest of eternity.

[Wondermonkey]

Not that this would matter to anyone who doesn't love Battlestar Galactica, but here's what Ron Moore has to say about the finale:

The Sopranos Ends Perfectly

I will never forget the moment.

Terry and I sitting up in bed, in shock, the single word, "What?!" bursting loose from both our lips as black filled our TV screen and we briefly wondered if the cats had bumped the TiVo at the worst possible moment and destroyed the payoff to one of the most tension-filled moments of television we'd ever experienced. Then, the credits rolled by in silence and there was an exhalation of shock and amazement.

What had David Chase done? Oh my God, hit the jump back button and watch it again.

Yep, that's it. He really did it. The man has guts. No, that's not enough. The man has balls the size of Volkswagens.

For weeks, the speculation has centered around a simplistic black and white question for a show that revelled in never providing monochromatic answers: would Tony live or die? The prosaic nature of the question and its anticipated answer was itself was the most disappointing thing about the lead-up to the finale. Either Tony was going to get whacked, or he wouldn't. "The Sopranos" would end with either the bitter little pill of the "bad" guy finally getting what he's got coming or with the vaguely false relief of family affirmed and life goes on.

Instead, Chase managed to do the unthinkable, the unbelievable and the unprecedented: he yanked us out of their lives without any resolution whatsoever. We were torn away from Tony, Carmella, AJ, Meadow, Paulie, Sil and the all the rest without any idea what happens to them tomorrow or even later that same evening. In real life, when you lose contact with someone, you seldom if ever have the satisfaction of knowing how the myriad threads of their lives resolved themselves. They are removed from your circle of knowledge and yet their lives go on unbeknownst to you in ways you can only imagine. The Sopranos are gone from our lives, but their lives go on without resolution, much like ours. None of us have tidy, revelatory endings that are the culmination of our "story arcs" and neither will they.

Oh, I'm sure there are those who will bemoan the lack of resolution to the story or that Chase has somehow "robbed the fans" but I'm a fan and I'm ecstatic. I'm glad he thumbed his nose at the tyranny of the narrative drive to bring things to a tidy conclusion so we can all clap and walk away without another thought about that mob family in Jersey, satisfied that all's well that ends well. Screw that. I don't want to see Tony's death, nor do I want to watch him drive off into witness protection, or sit down to some kind of illusory happiness in the bosom of his family. I simply want to pretend that his life continues, that he's still simultaneously worrying about onion rings and whether that guy is hiding a gun in the restroom.

It's poetic. It's exciting. It's perfect.

And most of all, I wish I'd thought of it first.

[MadBryan]

Yep, I gotta disagree with Mr Moore and Mr. Monkey. I got season six part 2 fer xmas and that was the worst ending Ive ever seen. I own all seasons on dvd and LOVED it. Watching that last episode was a bitter pill for me. I knew it was coming and hoped it wasn't as bad as some said. It was, and I am left wanting more. Six feet under wrapprd up nicely. why couldn't this

[D_Litch]

Six Feet Under did have a good ending, I just hope The Wire has a good ending. HBO series are about as hit & miss and you can be.