Letters to the Editor
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The endgame...
My predicition is simple - an old-fashioned all-out mob war between Phil and Tony's crews. Phil strikes first, but Tony strikes last and winds up on top. Tony and Phil are equally brutal, but Tony is more intuitive - and lucky. It will be a costly victory....
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The Second Coming--William Butler Yeats/Things Fall Apart--Chinue Achebe
Yeat's full poem indicates the direction of the series. Among several interpretations, an important on my be found in Chinue Achebe's "Things Fall Apart." Achebe's novel has striking paralles to Chase's series, where the central character, a tough man whose main goal was to protect his family, ultimately killed himself. Yeats' poem reads:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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Soprano's end
I think Tony is going to be killed and AJ will step up and become the new head of the NJ family. Thus the cycle continues.
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The incident with Meadow
reminded me of the set-up to Sonny's death in The Godfather. Sonny was making his way over to beat up his brother-in-law for attacking his sister when he was ambushed in a pre-arranged trap at the toll booth.
It wasn't spontaneous.
In the same way, those blatant, sexually-suggestive and deliberate insults to Meadow (while being accompanied by someone else in the 'business') were obviously intended to get back to Tony and provoke armegeddon. It was part of a plan.
While thinking it's of his own volition, Tony will decide to cross the river (Styx?) only to find himself trapped in New York. Alone. In the long shadow of both the dream and the tragedy it now represents.
Or Carm will kill him - after a long, dark night of trying to wash spots of imaginary blood from her tiny hands - convinced it's the only way to protect her extravagently vulnerable children from 'the life', ie. the curse, and make amends to God. Talk about a mercy killing...!
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Do Youse Guys Know War Movies?
At the end of "The Great Escape," they show a few lucky soldiers quietly getting away, after everybody else is dead or recaptured. And Steve McQueen gets caught, but still gets his baseball glove in The Cooler.
The Soprano end will be that way. Fiery, bloody deaths for most everyone, and a few lucky goombahs sneaking away, but no Steve McQueen.
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Sopranos
One striking element of this season is the submission to institutions. A few weeks ago, Uncle Junior captitulated to the drugs and rules that his hospital had imposed, after tremendous resistance.
Last night ended with Tony offering no argument when told that he could not take the pizza to AJ in the locked unit. We are conditioned to believe that Tony will bully his way in, but he just left it, asked no questions, made no plea. In some ways it was the most stunning change in Tony's behavior in years.
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Yes, good call on Meadow "Connie" Soprano
Of course Coco was just trying to get Tony to bring about a battle with Phil. She was Connie Corleone to Tony's Sonny. When has any of these mooks done anything but pat her on the head?
And it's clear to me that the thing slouching toward Bethlehem is indeed AJ, who will take Tony down one way or another. Maybe not by killing him, but by somehow destroying the evil empire. (Probably as ineptly as the time he and his pals trashed the school trophy case, but still . . .)
Wouldn't it be funny if, after all those years of hanging in the background looking stupid, little Fredo had overheard enough to put Tony away?
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No, no, wait
It's Tony who's being reborn, really. He's had enough. He beat up Coco in a nice big public way for a reason. All season he's been revaluating and smelling roses, and his talking to the FBI about the "terrorists" was sort of a practice run at being a snitch.
Thank God this isn't a network show, or the coma dream would turn out to have been Tony's real life and the last 10 years have been the dream!
I think AJ will totally repudiate everything. There was glimmer when he bargained with those kids who were making Blanca's life miserable. I'm hoping he leaves his new thug friends behind, at least.
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Am I wrong . . .
or did AJ use two contradictory methods to off himself? I'm thinking of the plastic hood - isn't the idea of drowning to allow water into one's lungs? If so, then the kid was saved, in part, by his own ineptitude.
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"What next?"
Every episode this season seems to have a point. Their sole reason for existing is to tie up those last loose ends. Havrilesky is right- the baked ziti is gone. The odd ettiquette that made this life possible for Tony for so long is gone. He can't separate his work from his family, or his family from his work. He's weathered worse, but the cumulative effects have taken their toll. I think it's pretty clear we're headed for something here... a bloodbath. Tony Soprano has been given more chances than any fair and rightous universe could ever offer. Maybe the truth he suddenly grasped out there in the desert is, it's all random chance. The universe is amoral, after all. In the end, the only thing to decide is if you will live for yourself, or live for your children. Tony has always affected the stance that everything he does, he does for his family. And yet, in the next breath, he expresses such contempt for his genes, his family heritage... is there a curse? If he's so cursed, should he hate himself as much as he hates his mother? Does he believe he deserves to be loathed by his children? Intellectually, I believe he believes he believes this. Emotionally, I'm not so sure... it's not all an act, Tony at times has a pretty high opinion of himself. And yet... the benefits of the life don't seem to captivate him like they might have, once. The big house, the lavish dinners at Vesuvio, the adrenaline rush of playing the odds with your life, and emergine alive. Last night was the first time I ever believed, even for a moment, that Tony could flip. Not all sociopaths are serial killers, after all... Tony has explored various codes of honor, of right and wrong, since that first visit in Dr. Melfi's office. Perhaps, after one of his own (Phil) is prepared to betray him, he reaches a point where he's ready to sever his ties. It won't be to get back at Phil- he'd as soon kill Phil as look at him, were he not a fellow made man. Tony's Personality isn't going to allow that. As for Tony- I don't think the FBI would take him, to be honest. His hands are too dirty, they'd never take him under their protection when Tony has never made the slightest overtures... I mean, they courted Adriana for years. On the other hand... what other options are there? Tony dies, and has a final moment of clarity just before his soul winks from existance? He chooses to protect what's left of his family, but too late? There's a war, Phil dies, Tony prevails, and mob life goes back to "normal" with the boss stronger, surer, and more ruthless than ever? I'll be honest... I am not convinced AJ dies. Although clearly, someone's gonna take a good crack at it. And maybe AJ witnesses Tony rise, and fight for the only decent thing left in him- his loyalty to his children. There's only a set number of ways, with two episodes to go, that these last threads can be tied. I think the interesting thing will not be watching what happens, but how.