The Sopranos *Spoilers*

The Sopranos is over, it's not resolved it's just over. The ending made many people believe their cable went out. With the ending of the biggest and perhaps most significant cable series, maybe it did. From what I can see online the finale is widely hated for it's ambiguous ending, though some critics are taking the high-brow approach and saying we just don't get how brilliant it is. Bleech.

This episode dutifully visited all the main characters and didn't do much to conclude their stories. Junior has lost it (at least it seems he's not faking his Alzheimer's as I've long thought), Sil is still in a coma, Pauli is still superstitious and loyal to Tony. Janice seems to have improved a bit with therapy and her mother issues but now has to loose weight to find another man. Supposedly she'll get some money from Phil's crew but they can't find Junior's stash. Carmela, AJ and Meadow are all back to their old deluded selves, they've learned nothing in 7 seasons.

The one bit of resolution is that Tony managed to beat Phil. After Tony's world was collapsing last episode and he was left with his crew decimated, his family in hiding and in a bed with an M16, Tony managed to broker a deal to call off the hit. All his cozying up to Agent Harris this season paid off in him sleeping with another FBI agent to get info to tip off Tony to where Phil is. Phil gets wacked and Tony survives.

I have to say, everything was going so well for Tony that when they showed AJ sitting on the couch with his girlfriend laughing at the TV I thought the episode was a dream sequence. The timing was odd, it could have taken place over several days, weeks or even months. If Tony had woken up in bed with the M16, it would have fit and I would have been happier. But of course that's not what David Chase did.

The already infamous last scene is actually a tour de force in cinematic tension. The elements shown are completely benign, Tony walked into a diner, picks a song, waits for his family, has chit-chat with his wife and son, his daughter has trouble parking her car and nothing happens. The soundtrack is an 80s pop song! And yet, everyone watching was on the edge of their seats, white knuckled, hitting a pillow, and every other metaphor for tension you can think of think of. Masterful audience manipulation (though it didn't hurt to have 10 years of buildup).

In fact I've seen posts who are sure Tony was wacked by the guy who went to the bathroom. They're convinced it's a reference to the Godfather, which it probably is, but there's no reason in this situation for the guy to have had to hide a gun in the bathroom, he could have just walked in with it. In the Godfather, Michael was frisked as he walked into the restaurant. The other evidence people cite is that the scene was from Tony's point of view and it went black when he died, the like the shot to the head Phil got and like Bobby said on the lake, you probably never see it coming. Or it wasn't.

Some people think Tony saw himself in the diner in a bowling shirt when he first walked in and some related that to his mistaken persona Kevin Finnety in the long dream sequence earlier in the season. Not so much. He walked in wearing that shirt under the leather jacket, looked around and saw an empty table, cut to his face, cut to the same shot of the diner's interior with him sitting in that seat, cut to him picking a song, cut to the cooks in the back. He just sat down and they didn't show it, just like they didn't show him ordering the onion rings for the table. The shirt is one he wore in the first episode.

With Meadow rushing to parallel park and get into the dinner I thought she'd get hit by car crossing the street (one went by her), the building would blow up with her just outside it or just inside it, or she'd get in just in time to see her father or whole family killed, even though Tony said last episode they never hit the family. It was all in my head, there's was nothing in the episode to hint to any of those things. Except for the fact that is was a culmination of 7 seasons of a show filled with violence.

As an aside, I've seen people so confused by what Meadow was doing. The San Francisco Chronicle said she had "all kinds of trouble double-parking out front". The wikipedia article says "Finally, Meadow double-parks". George Lopez asked some actor he was interviewing "You don't end up in a diner with your girlfriend trying to three point park?". Three point parking? Meadow was having trouble parallel parking, she didn't double park (which is to park next to a parked car, blocking the right hand lane and is illegal) and there's no such thing as three point parking (just turning). Learn how to drive.

Skipping the subtext, the text of the scene said Carlo was going to testify which meant Tony was probably going to be indicted. He clearly was going to have serious legal trouble. In the spectrum of will Tony get killed or arrested, it's seems clear that if he's not killed he will be arrested.

Of course this was after Carmela asked "what looks good" and saying Meadow was at the doctor to switch birth control; completely benign. This was just another day in the life. AJ said "focus on the good times". AJ delivering the morale of the show?!?! Who would have thought that? Earlier he gave that rant too, was this David Chase screaming at the audience?

"You people are fucked. You're living in a dream. You still sit here talking about the fucking Oscars. What rough beast slouch towards Bethlehem to be born. Yeats. The world, don't you see it. Bush let al Qaeda escape, the mountains. Then he has us invade some other country. It's more noble than watching these jack off fantasies on TV if I were kicking their ass. It's like America. I'm mean this is still where people come to make it. It's a beautiful idea. and what do they get, bling, and come on for shit they don't need and can't afford."

AJ quoting Yeats!!?!? (at least he mispronounced his name) Here's the poem if you, like me, had no idea what he was talking about. As the girl at the table said, "You're all over the place I don't know what you're trying to say". Still I don't feel like Pauli then spouting gibberish since that's all he heard. AJ basically said it was just a TV show, there's more important stuff going on in the world. The next scene has a Twilight Zone episode in the background with the dialog: "Give me a chance. Give me first dibs at this television thing or whatever it is. Let me do the pilot please. The television industry today is looking for quality they're looking for talent. They're preoccupied with talent and quality and the writer is a major commodity." I guess quoting Yeats means you have talent.

Some people were looking for clues in the song titles in the jukebox. Sorry no, well maybe just a little. In a few shots the songs actually moved around and most didn't mean much. There were three times where they zoomed in on two song titles by the same artist. They were:

Who Will You Run to
Magic Man

Don't Stop Believing
Any Way You Want It

I've Gotta Be Me
A Lonely Place

Tony chose "Don't Stop Believing" and I think "Any Way You Want It" is implied. This was a "Lady, or the Tiger" ending. The lyrics were good, particularly if you spell "fill" as "Phil".

Working hard to get my 'Phil',
Everybody wants a thrill
Payin anything to roll the dice,
Just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

So given that, here's what I think. If they wanted to kill Tony they would have just done it, an ending. Not killing him what's left? While they could end with his arrest or conviction that's not really an end either. He'd get out eventually and his family would go on. So without a death, it's hard to have an ending. That may be a cop out, since other stories manage endings and that's true, but with seven seasons of ups and downs would one have been significant?

One thing is undeniable about the last scene, it was intense. Every single little detail, every gesture, every camera angle, every sound seemed significant. Everyone was riveted and nervous. Why? Because something might happen. And that's how Tony lives every second of his life. He looked up every time someone walked in the door or walked passed him. The likelihood of being indicted was just something else to throw out before enjoying onion rings. This show was always about a guy who just trying to do well for his family (however inept he was at that) who just happened to be in an illegal profession. His whole seven years of therapy was him trying to cope with all of these stresses. In one sense he was like everyone else, but in another, his stresses were way more than most peoples'. And at end of the series, for a mere five minutes, David Chase made everyone feel Tony's stress; and it was maddening. Imagine if the whole episode was like that last scene? Or your whole life. It really is an impressive achievement.

And it still sucked. I mean really, if the point was to show tension they could have done that at any point in the series. After seven seasons it would be nice to have seen at least some of the characters change. All of the possibilities were there, someone in the family could have grown a spine and stopped deluding themselves about Tony's life. He was a brutal killer and a sociopathic thug and it would have been nice to actually see some justice done, not just alluded to. If that's all they wanted to do they could have ended the series with last week's episode, Tony alone in a strange bed with a gun waiting to see what happened. This episode really didn't add much to the story on top of that.

Ambiguous endings aren't better or more artistic, they're just ambiguous. And annoying. People hated the ending of season one of Lost when the camera just fell down the hatch we'd been wondering about for a half a season. As a series finale this was much worse No matter how much Chase tried to tell us it's just a TV show, people obviously got very involved it in, and this was just a big "fuck you, get over it". It was great filmmaking and really bad storytelling. If the point was to say that you don't know what's going to happen next and what's important is family and to do the best you can, is Tony Soprano really the best way to say that? This should have been about crime or justice or anger management or consequences of your actions or even managing a small yet difficult team. But who am I to say what the artist should have said? I was just a fan.