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June 10, 2007
The Sopranos - We Kept Telling You This Guy's Good
LAist could have covered this final season of The Sopranos, but we intentionally didn't. We've covered other tv series's but The Sopranos is holy. Which is why God put it on Sundays.
The finale was just as controversial as the best moments of the groundbreaking HBO drama. The kids on the message boards on the Interwebs are irate. And some of us feel like it was even more perfect than could be expected.
We'll explain why, and unload spoilers like a semi automatic machine gun after the jump.
And yes, we will show you what the best 10 seconds of any finale looked like.
Some fans are complaining that they didn't get the wack that they wanted in this episode. They're upset that there wasn't a huge, bloody shootout with everyone dying, and the survivors being arrested.
Even the NY Times didn't like it, calling it cruel and a joke.
Fools.
The Sopranos were always as much about subtlety as they were about brutality. It was always punk rock, it never followed convention, it never went down the path that we expected it to go.
The only possible conclusion was one that did exactly what went down: some people got popped, most didn't.
When it became obvious that tonight's episode was only going to be an hour long, what possible good would have come from some bizarre melee? Plus, who wants The Sopranos to end? Why would anyone stop this good thing?
This ending shit while it's on top is for the birds. That bothers us way more than this perfect ending of a perfect episode that did deliver some unforgettable moments including the best (and crunchiest) wacking of them all.
But what we did get during the last moments of the last scene was the family - who all arrived to dinner in separate cars, all (except Meadow) eating the greasy onion ring as if it were communion, and all about to possibly meet the Maker.
The Sopranos have been a family in limbo ever since we met them, to end the series with the ten most thrilling seconds of blackness was television genius that even John Cage would have loved.
Now lets hope this means there's an afterlife to this premature departure.
Amen.
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I was so glad that David Chase didn't deliver a Godfather-type whackfest (like some fans wanted) or a tidy roundup-by-indictment...he left us in existential limbo, which is where we started out with Tony and the damn ducks. Brilliant. He led us on to think that half the diner (Holsten's in Bloomfield -- yay!) could be after him...or maybe not. We'll never know -- so much truer to the spirit of the series than stacked bodies and wailing survivors.
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They got me. I totally yelled, "Fucking TiVO!" before the credits rolled.
The ending was very much like the ending of "Taxi Driver".
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"Life goes on" limbo is for sentimentards.
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So when Bobby and Tony were fishing about four eps back this season (the fight at the lake), Bobby says something along the lines of "they say right before you get hit, you're at peace, and then suddenly, everything goes black. I think Tony got it in the end. All in all, great ep., and you have to love how two weeks ago, his son was suicidal, his daughter was in med school, and he was in the desert doing paote in vegas w/ a quasi-hooker. god bless that show!
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excellent insight Ross!
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Dude, the NYTimes critic did not say she didn't like it.
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dude what did she say then?
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Chase and Gandolfini are sick of the Sopranos, but this episode tells me that it will be back, in some form.
Historically, when a creator truly wants to be done with something, he kills off that creation, so no one can bring it back. The classic example is Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, although in that case he had to bring back Holmes anyway because of popular outcry.
I don't think there was "one ending" to the story, just like the juke box said "any way you want it". In two years, perhaps Chase and Gandolfini will feel like doing a Sopranos mini-series of 6 episodes. The door is not closed to that and I think that was intentional.