Letters to the Editor
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"The Sopranos" goes dark
Cenk Uygur on Air America's "The Young Turks" speculated that the fade to black was Tony's getting capped. I think that goes too far, but Chase did manipulate the national expectation that looked for the Big Whack. For better or for worse, the show ends with an aura of uncertainty for good reason: Tony's whole life is an uncertainty: every time the door opens, he must look up to see if Trouble is walking in. Business as usual.
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I second ericg51's motion
Utterly meaningless. Head fakes here and there, but ultimately pointless.
I did watch the show. It was good for its continuing story (whatever was left) and moments of entertainment, but attempting to read further into it is as meaningless as trying to dissect the creatorwriters true intentions. Only they know and have no need to explain to the rest of us. We had a choice to watch the show. If we didnt like its direction then we didnt have to watch.
Furthermore, I didnt like the ending. I thought it was cheap, but to say that I could have done better would be completely unrealistic and making light of what it takes to createdirectwrite a show.
While we sit at our desks pondering potential "meanings", EVERYONE from David Chase down has moved on with their lives.
Lets try to do the same with ours.
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Great final episode, great reviews from Heather
Casting another vote for the "Tony got whacked, but we experienced it as he did...an abrupt cut to black" (which PRECEDED the credits by several long seconds) view on the finale. I'm surprised this seems to be the minority opinion, here and among other published reviews in newspapers this morning since I too thought it fairly clear...the cut to black was abrupt, jolting, and confusing...but a perfect fit with how one should experience Tony's end. No gore-splatterfest could live up to those that had gone before, so why attempt something which wouldn't have done Tony justice.
(So if Tony was whacked, who ratted him out, so that the killers knew he was having dinner there with his family? I think Meadow's boyfriend...)
I enjoyed the last episode a lot, and found the final scene with the buildup of tension and use of an abstraction which was clearly open to other interpretations as a way of whacking Tony to be worthy of the shows overall dramatic and artistic merit. I had dropped out of fandom the previous couple of seasons and felt the show had lost it, but this last season was a worthy and enjoyable wrapup.
Heather, also thanks for your reviews...I was looking forward to reading them and particularly this one on the finale all season. Made the watching even more enjoyable to ponder the various themes, and you definitely stimulated my thoughts on a lot of those mentioned.
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overthinking the obvious
We could go on and on over the triumphs and failures of the last few seasons, especially this last one. However, I think Chase did take the easy way out. Tony was distracted by his family (wasn't he always?) and the screen and Journey soundtrack both went black abruptly because a bullet had just entered his brain, courtesy of the hitman in the bathroom. Would David Chase really send Tony into witness protection to wind up as a "schmuck," like Henry Hill at the end of "GoodFellas?" Would Chase have shown us a bloody shootout? Would Chase have had the series end with nothing more than a family dinner at a diner? No, Chase's brilliance is in finding the tension and drama in the empty spaces, the stuff between the lines, the breath between the notes.
It is really over, for us, the series and Tony.
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1 more thing
David Chase has said that he knew how the Sopranos would end even before the first episode aired (or shortly thereafter). I don't believe it.
Now, having ended and looking back on the whole Series, I can say that it was brilliantly crafted crap.
Unlike quality shows, like Six Feet Under, which was driven by personality and evolved over time and told a real story with events with their array of predictable and unpredictable repercussions, on the Sopranos no one changed and key plot elements went nowhere.
If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, then the Sopranos had to be about less than nothing, because Seinfeld, ultimately, lifted its material well above meaninglessness and give its loyal following a farewell of sorts. Ultimately the Sopranos was essentially unchanged from its first season. It made its point, then kept making and then made it again and again. It went no where. So when we finally wanted SOMETHING, it continued giving the same thing over and over.
In contrast, The Sopranos hit absolute rock bottom last night. I wonder if the Sopranos following would have been so loyal to the show if they knew how vacuous the ending would be.
Outside of the tension of the final scene, last night's show was actually somewhat dull. It was meandering, episodic, and, consistently, indicated that nothing would ever get resolved. We all, nervously, looked at the passing minutes on the clock and as each minute passed, the knowledge of Nothing ever changing became increasingly clear.
Nothing mattered and we, the viewers, now know it. The task of engaging us, in stimulating us, utterly failed David Chase. Now we have to make desperate sense of our loyalty to this over-rated, hyper violent, show, that was empty at its core.
Yeah, America is a violent, consumption crazy, spiritually empty, paranoid society. Wow.
Sopranos hit THIS nail on the head. It was all of that.
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Nailed it.
Great take on the final episode. Brilliant ending. I love the way Tony can look so reptilian when that part of his brain takes over.
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Not quite
Of course, the most indeterminate show on television should end with the most indeterminate of possible endings; of course, this is David Chase's wry commentary on how so many of us can worry about The Sopranos but not about what's happening in the outside world; of course, a blank screen is open to as many interpretations as we can imagine.
But let's just pretend for a minute that this was not just Chase's metatextual joke; let's just pretend for a minute that the choice of sudden blackness (and not a fade to black) and the choice of ending before the family is entirely reunited (unlike previous seasons where the ending scans over the entire family together) are not random. Let's just pretend that this has some narrative meaning (even if we know that because we are only left with a blank screen, we'll never actually know; even if we realize that we're the butt of Chase's joke, interpreting and wondering about fictional characters who never really existed anyway). Within the narrative context of The Sopranos, the most consistent meaning of this black screen is that Tony has been assasinated. You mention two pieces of evidence: the Godfather reference (in a season with explicit allusions, eg Rocky and Raging Bull) and the recurring theme of getting hit without knowing it. There is more circumstantial evidence: why the sudden change of plans for dinner, and, more importantly, who heard about these change of plans? Has Paulie made the right decision and realized that since his boss only has him to depend on, his boss has lost all power (and come on, Tony can be a dick, but did he have to be that mean about Paulie's family?) Does Meadow's hastiness comes from the belief - one we all have - that the family is safe when everybody's together . . . and then she doesn't arrive in time? Perhaps. There are any number of these clues that all, within the narrative, add up to the possibility that Tony's luck has run out, that every season he has whittled down his crew and his family until all that's left is a stony wife barely keeping it together, a daughter who's about to head out to marriage and, yes, AJ.
This show hasn't been about Tony's "subjectivity" in the conventional, camera POV shot, but it has been about Tony's world (hence the dreams, the coma delirium, the way that loose ends that Tony forgets about tend to disappear into the snowy woods). So, it is about Tony Soprano, and if Tony Soprano were killed, that is how the Sopranos would end - sudden, mid-sentence.