I finished Sopranos…. Bake Snaker’s take
Thank god for torrents..I finally finished the series!!!!
of course this contains spoilers….
I love it. It’s probably the best possible way to finish off this great series.
Many are upset by the ending…. wanting a big shoot-out, more drama, whatever…but what I saw was the most mature, intelligent way of wrapping things up.
When Tony was talking to Bobby on the boat in the season’s first episode, they were talking about
what happens when an animal is shot. Bobby said he thought that when it happens, you don’t even know it.
Everything goes black.
So, in the last, beautifully paced scene, the audience is on the edge of their seats, wondering..”how is Tony going to get it?”…. “who’s going to whack him?”…. “will one or more of the family members get caught in the cross-fire?” It’s a very tense scene. The most obvious choice of assassin simply went to pee. But perhaps it’s the guys who just entered the diner…. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” is perfectly scoring the scene…. Meadow is trying to parallel park a Lexus (the car that parallel parks itself, perhaps meaning that Meadow still retains her independence)… then we think she might get hit by a passing car….then she enters…
AND THEN…. we are whacked!!! The audience is whacked. We never even saw it coming…. Everything goes black. We’ve been around too long….we knew too much. Nothing is going to change in Tony’s life. The danger and paranoia will always be there. He succeeded in his goal he set 7 years ago… he kept his family together…they are all having dinner together. We however had to be sacrificed. It was our time to go.
OpenCritic
Brilliant encapsulation. I too am one of the few who found this ending wonderful, and your summation makes the most sense of all. So well put.
This series has had its ups and downs but I have been fascinated by Tony, loved visiting his world and being a fly on the spaghetti-stained wall. A lot of times “nothing” happened. Sometimes the show felt mundane. To me, this is the new movement in television.
Affected by reality tv, documentary, and even Seinfeld. Shows where dramatic conflict is not ALWAYS the driving force. Cable, where characters rule. Where just having dinner is an episode of a show.
At first, I thought the ending was morally ambiguous. Some might find that cowardly. I found it as leaving the audience to judge Tony’s fate.
Did he live on? Did he die? Did everyone die but him, and he’s left alone with the burden?
To do any of these things is to punish him, and since the series tried to take an objective look at this man and his life, I think they just chose to leave us on edge—as Tony lives, as they all must live, with eyes in the back of their head and the constant fear that concequence is just around the corner.
The tension in that final scene was so unbearable. I loved it. And honestly, what ending would we have been satisfied with? There will always be someone, somewhere, who would be disappointed. This way, it ends how you see fit.
And its more real anyway – to end a show does not mean you end the lives of the people watching. They live on. We just don’t get to see it. Again, conflict plays second fiddle to character.
Now reading Sean’s interpretation I love it – WE got whacked. Amazing. Absolutely. The best description of this yet.
We saw too much. The whole thing was a setup. WE saw too much, and it was OUR time to go.
Brilliant, Sean. Makes up for the last 200 reviews of J-girls’ nipples.
Brilliant.
j-girls’ asses
Thumbs down to the ending. The episode does a good job of resolving the overall conflict between New Jersey and New York (and what could be the best death scene in the series, Phil getting popped). However, ending the episode like this is a huge “fuck you” to the audience. It may be unique, it may be artistic, but in my opinion, it isn’t good.
And even though there may be an link with one line of dialogue spoken several episodes before, an ending that takes this much work to interpret is not a good ending. Ever have to explain a joke that falls flat, for a longer time than it took to originally tell the joke? Same thing going on here.
I was never dedicated to this show. I never got HBO, I never owned the DVDs, and I’ve probably only seen about 2/3 of the episodes, so you can take my opinion as you wish.
However, I know plenty of people who have put up with what they saw as slow pacing and weirdness for years, hoping that things would clarify at some point. Guess they really got the shaft.
I’m totally fine with the way Sopranos ended because it’s akin to every other season ending. The man ended a crazy season with singing during Christmas or something… c’mon, what do you expect?
Also, I’m mostly glad Sopranos is over because the last few seasons kinda sucked and it’s as old and tired as Uncle Junior. Now “John From Cincinatti”, while probably not going to gain a Sopranos following, is pretty cool. John is the most lovable character since ALF.
“Did you dump out this morning?”