Letters to the Editor
-
All the times were good
David Chase gave us the greatest gift, and I for one am accepting it with pleasure and gratitude. The ambiguous ending means that no more rabid speculation is needed. The show is a fiction, and it has ended. A month or a year ago, there was plenty to wonder about--the #1 question being, What will happen to Tony? Now we can let it go. The ending was comedy, not tragedy, and that seems one with the entire series. During the finale, I alternately laughed my head off, gasped in horror, and clapped my hand over my mouth in fear of what would happen in the diner. When the screen went black and the credits finally rolled, I laughed my head off again... Thank you, Mr. Chase!
It feels good--cleansing, like AJ's SUV blowing up. We don't need to know any more. We don't need to know how they cleaned up Phil's smushed head, or whether they got the babies out before they drifted into traffic. We don't need to know if AJ stuck with his movie job or joined the CIA. Or whether Meadow ended up having to defend her father. Or even whether the guy from the restroom blew Tony's head off 5 minutes later. At the "Don't stop" moment, Tony died into the Mystery, as we all will someday. There is no God, not even David Chase, to explain to us what would have happened if we had lived.
-
Like a voyeur...
Did anyone else get the feeling that you were just watching events unfold, and not really watching a show? Does that even make sense? I just felt so curiously disengaged...
And what of the other song choices that Tony passed up unitl deciding on Journey? Guess he really was in charge of his destiny, deciding to forego Tony Bennett's "lonely guy" for Journey's halcion lyrics. Bravo, Brilliant, pass the xanax now.
-
small favors
I'm just thankful Chase pulled the plug before we had to hear one more fucking note of fucking Journey.
-
Review
Great review- one of the best I've ever read, especially the last line.
-
Should we really be surprised...
Should we really be that surprised that a show that continually referred to Yeats' "The Second Coming" would end any other way?
Chase's ending of the Sopranos, while not the neat and tidy exercise we may have hoped for, was not unsurprising. In thinking of it, I'm reminded of Eliot's "The Hollow Men:"
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Sarah
-
seemed clear to me
I didn't find the ending ambiguous at all and I'll bet Chase confirms this in interviews soon: Tony got killed. The music didn't continue over the credits or fade out like in every other episode. It stopped and the screen went black for several seconds and the credits rolled over silence.
We watched the show mostly from Tony's point of view and it ended, as it had to, with his end.
Yes the line about how he wouldn't see it coming was pretty clear foreshadowing. Tony went just like Phil Leotardo did - A gun to the temple that he never saw and shot he never heard or felt.
I don't think Chase was being cute or cruel with his ending. He was just giving us Tony's subjective (non)experience.
-
The end of days - SPOILERS
Well, what did we expect? The first hint was that the finale was only an hour long, just like every other episode. Whatever happened, there weren't going to be any enormous plot twists. Half the things we guessed were impossible simply due to a lack of time.
I felt the whole thing with Phil's guys agreeing to a treaty with Tony was a little contrived. A complete 180 for no apparent reason, the most bloodthirsty character left on the show is suddenly overwhelmed by fear of a crew that hadn't earned it.
Maybe he knew things we didn't, the kid who killed Phil was the most professional killer we ever saw in Jersey. No talk, no nervousness, no antics, just a guy doing his job. For the first time I can remember a guy in Tony's crew killed somebody with none of the comedy (or drama) reaching him.
2 things I disagree with Heather. First, Meadow is not in denial. Meadow is brilliant. Of course she knows what her father does, she's the one who told AJ. She just backed Tony into a corner where he couldn't argue any more, ending all objections to her career choice forever. She has a lot of her grandmother in her.
Second, and you put this out there, made me think about it differently, and then walked away from it, is the ending. I think Tony is dead. I think the guy in the bathroom killed him. This entire show, the whole jackoff fantasy we have been imersing ourselves in, has always revolved around Tony exclusively. Every scene and story arc either had Tony in it or had us wondering how it would affect him. Even Paulie's mother dying became about Tony. Silvio is for all intents and purposes gone, and all I thought when he went to the hospital was what did Sil's wife think about Tony now, was she mad that he didn't visit sooner (he did an awful lot of stuff to get his life back to normal before he went there), did she blame him for what happened. And then she just walks out without a word, leaving Tony as the only concious person in the world at that moment - where he was surely thinking about how this was affecting him. The FBI agent cashes in some pretty valuable chips (his integrity, his reputation, and his fuckbuddy) to make a difference in Tony's world because trading his family and his health didn't make one in his.
So, we can believe that Chase played the nastiest trick in the history of TV, getting 50 million people to simultaneously say "What the fuck!", when trickery has never really been his style. Or, he was saying that this was Tony's world all along, and it stopped existing the moment he left it.
It was a brilliant final scene no matter what. For the first time I really understood how stressful and fraught with peril the world seemed to Tony.
AJ was AJ, a lost little boy who wants to believe in something, fighting against the words of his grandmother in his own selfish, whiny, misguided way, but really only needing to feel important to himself. Maybe he won't save the world, but at least he has a cool car (23MPG highway, that really isn't too bad) and a hot underaged girlfriend and he gets to make bad movies. Junior shows that AJ's fight is futile, but I think also led Tony to coddle AJ once again. If you don't even get to keep your memories, family really is the only thing that matters.
This is an ending that is growing on me. One that makes you think before you can understand it. Maybe the best episode ever.