Sopranos chat

[laxative]

Not all narratives end with resolution, no matter what Jerry Bruckheimer tells you.

Exactly!!!! Not everything gets wrapped up with a nice little bow on top.

[yourmom]

I agree with what was said before. Remember at the end of the previous episode when tony thinks back to a conversation he had with Bobby. They were talking about how when it happens [that is, when you get whacked] you probably don’t even know it. everything just goes black.

that is what happened at the end. we witness tony get whacked from tony’s point of view. if he got a bullet straight in his head, then he would probably have no idea what happened. he would probably never know what hit him. and consequently, he would never know ANYTHING after that.

So the ending created a sense of what its like to get whacked. BAM! End of story. And all the suspense was just what it's like to be Tony for five min. not knowing if someone is about to whack you.

[yourmom]

Oh forgot to mention I think:

Cat = Adriana

[Ryan Hanavan]

did anyone notice Tony sitting in the diner when Tony walked in? My wife and I thought he was going into another dream sequence.

I thought it was pretty good except for the 10 minute parallel park job by Meadow.

[Sonny]

Interesting read on the final episode from a poster on a Soprano's blog elsewhere...

There's a lot of evidence to support this final episode as being one extended Tony dream sequence. As I watched it, I thought the inconsistencies were the product of a rushed finish for the writers, but upon reflection, nothing about this show has been an accident. The only explanation, then, for the apparent plot gaps and character quirks is that we spent the hour in Tony's alternate reality.

** An attractive female therapist appears from out of nowhere, replacing the male shrink that A.J. had been seeing in recent episodes. Later, Tony and Carmella go in to discuss A.J.'s sudden interest in joining the Army. Tony digresses into his own history, while Carmella glares and the doctor smiles benignly. (Tony conjures a non-judgmental substitute for Melfi.)

** In the episode in which Phil schools the group of children on their Italian heritage, he laments never having children of his own as one of the things he sacrificed for his "other" family. Suddenly, two infant grandchildren appear in the backseat of his SUV moments before he takes the hit? (Tony's sociopathic compassion fixation on babies is manifested again, as he "saves" them from the evil Phil.)

** Hunter reappears in Meadow's bedroom, sitting on the bed and girl-talking like the old days. The formerly flunked-out party girl is now a second-year med student? (Tony's disappointment over Meadow's decision to drop med school is exacerbated by the idea that even a loser like Hunter could be a doctor. Why not his little girl?)

** Agent Harris becomes a reflection of Tony's own persona, complete with a goomar. Tony addresses the fed as "my friend" (unthinkable) and Harris openly roots for the Jersey mob as "we" when he learns of Phil's murder.

** The cat which pops up at the safe house and is brought back to the Bing, and which spends its days spookily staring at a picture of Christopher. ("The sociopath's compassion is primarily directed toward babies and pets," as Melfi's text read.)

** A.J.'s unlikely detour into the world of cinema, creating a weird convergence of Tony's two "sons", Christopher and A.J.

** Butchie goes from Phil's approving bulldog to simpering sellout virtually overnight? In the course of a brief phone conversation, he wanders from Little Italy to Chinatown. And has anyone else ever heard of this shadowy "George" figure whom Tony contacted to broker the sitdown with New York prior to last night's episode?

** The Parisi's are invited to the Soprano's for "wedding talk" when Meadow has repeatedly downplayed the notion of marrying Patrick any time soon. Also, Patrick has inexplicably progressed from law student to practicing attorney who's been assigned a lucrative, high-profile case.

** Tony's attorney lunching on a cheeseburger in the backroom at Satriale's, annoyingly banging on the bottom of a ketchup bottle as he informs Tony that someone is giving testimony to the grand jury. Since when does his lawyer have a sitdown in the neighborhood?

** And, particularly, the final scene itself...The choice of a diner as the family dinner meeting spot, when upscale bistros have always been the norm. The editing makes it seem as though Tony already sees himself seated across the room as he enters the door. The jukebox in the diner stocked almost exclusively with classic rock tunes, except for one Tony Bennett number. Meadow's repeated and frustrated attempts to parallel park (find her place, fit in). The eucharistic manner in which Tony, Carmella, and A.J. in turn place small onion rings on their tongues. The parade of characters into the diner which seem oddly reminiscent of past characters...a glimpse of a Phil lookalike as Tony enters, the FBI type seated behind Tony and watching him over his shoulder, a guy wearing a Members Only jacket who resembles the hanged Eugene, a Janice stand-in who breezes into the room just ahead of A.J., a truck driver who looks a lot like Davey the degenerate gambler, and two black guys in urban attire that seem totally out of place in the middle-class white establishment and remind us of the two gangbangers Uncle June enlisted to whack Tony.

All of the above seems to strongly imply events unfolding entirely in Tony's head. Which means our jarring cut to black could have been Tony waking up in the safe house...or perhaps being put to sleep permanently. You never hear it coming, right?

[Sonny]

David Chase speaks!
http://blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/06/david_ ... peaks.html

Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

[KnoxVegas]

Oh forgot to mention I think:

Cat = Adriana

No way. That cat was much more attractive.

[StrykerFSU]

I loved the ending. To have had some sort of moral lesson taught at Tony's expense would have been completely inconsistent with the rest of the show. I tend to think that Chase was trying to show that Tony had a life before we the viewer joined in, we were allowed to watch for 8 years as voyuers not unlike Dr. Melfi, and then our time with Tony and the family ran out. I think that Tony goes on living his precarious existence and not knowing for sure what happens to him is somehow fitting as he does not know what's going to happen from one moment to the next.

As I have read elsewhere, I think those fans who were disappointed that there was not some bloodbath at the end were not true fans of the show and perhaps did not understand what the show was all about in the first place. I don't know that Tony dying in Carm's arms and uttering last goodbyes, or some other such Hollywood cliche, would be any more satisfying to those people and it certainly would have sullied the legacy of what is the 2nd best drama in television history (The Wire is #1).

Just to address one of the supposed dream sequence points, Tony may have awoken to an alarm clock on a made bed rather than the bare mattress he fell asleep on because the last episode did not occur the day after the penultimate episode. That was my interpretation.

[Danny Hogan]

Just to address one of the supposed dream sequence points, Tony may have awoken to an alarm clock on a made bed rather than the bare mattress he fell asleep on because the last episode did not occur the day after the penultimate episode. That was my interpretation.

my problem is i do not want to have to interpret so much that i imagine a whole other story. Where do you stop with the interpretation?

i think the ending is a cop-out.

And i understand David Chase is such a genius and so much deeper than me because i fell for it and i am still talking about the ending of the sopranos.

[KnoxVegas]

Tony Soprano didn’t just get whacked; he practically got a funeral

http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/1406/1/

[Sonny]

wow. good find E.

Nice read.

[laxative]

Tony Soprano didn’t just get whacked; he practically got a funeral

http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/1406/1/

Wow. That's the most fascinating analysis I've read yet. Good stuff!