The Sopranos Ends With a ...

If you still have your copy sitting unwatched on your Tivo, I'd suggest that you stop reading before you are spoiled. The show is done at last and apparently fans are freaking out over the bizarre ending. At my house, we thought at first that the DVR crashed until the credits appeared in silence. Personally I thought that a show known for such excess tried to take an artful bow: It didn't work for me, but I get it at least. Anyway, I had a number of Sopranos submissions this morning and figured I'd just post this comment to give people who were interested in discussing the end of the show a nice place to discuss before they cancel their HBO.

He's dead, Jim

He's dead, Jim.

Re:He's dead, Jim

Whatever the original artistic intent of this ending was, it occurred to me that if I was going to depict a guy getting whacked who never saw it coming - from that guy's own perspective - this might be just how I'd portray that.

Re:He's dead, Jim

He's alive. And not just to leave it open for a movie or new series, but because the entire show was about this same cycle. The show was never about closure, or redemption, or the hero's journey. It was about making you sit in his seat for awhile, and see the world through his eyes, not a glorified "Top of the world ma!" go out in a blaze of glory type thing. It was an "end up in a wheel chair unaware of who you are" sort of thing.

The break away to black was a crescendo to the tension they created with the folks walking in, looking shifty. "OMG, that guys gonna whack him!", "OMG, that dude is gonna shoot AJ", "OMG, Meadow's car will blow up."

Why kill him? Why not show him being killed if he is? What lesson would we learn from that that we don't learn by him being alive, but trapped. By the life, the fear, the machine. He's not afraid to die, he's afraid of that senile old man in the chair.

"This thing of ours, once you're in, there ain't no gettin' out." Which is a fitting prison for Tony, locked in a life of his own making, nostalgically trying to reach out for the "old days" when his Dad and Uncle June ran N. Jersey. But those days are gone, if they ever existed. There are no good old days, just days, and life goes on. Let's get some onion rings tonight, b/c there's a good chance we'll all be dead tomorrow.

Re:He's dead, Jim

I just got this e-mail from a friend, obviously a cut-and-paste but I don't know the source:

"So here is what I found out. The guy at the bar is also credited as Nikki Leotardo. The same actor played him in the first part of season 6 during a brief sit down concerning the future of Vito. That wasn't that long ago. Apparently, he is the nephew of Phil. Phil's brother Nikki Senior was killed in 1976 in a car accident.
Absolutely Genius!!!!
David Chase is truly rewarding the true fans who pay attention to detail. So the point would have been that life continues and we may never know the end of the Sopranos. But if you pay attention to the history, you will find that all the answers lie in the characters in the restaurant. The trucker was the brother of the guy who was robbed by Christopher in Season 2. Remember the DVD players? The trucker had to identify the body.
The boy scouts were in the train store and the brothas at the end were the ones who tried to kill Tony and only clipped him in the ear (was that season 2 or 3?). Absolutely incredible!!!! There were three people in the restaurant who had reason to kill Tony and then it just ends.
This was Chase's way of proving that he will not escape his past. It will not go on forever despite that he would like it to "don't stop".
Not the fans!!! Tony would like it to keep going but just as we have to say goodbye, so does he"

Re:He's dead, Jim

Who is Jim?

Don't worry about it. It's just some obscure reference to a short-lived TV show from the 60s.

Re:He's dead, Jim

The full quote is "he's dead Jim, you get his phaser, I'll get his wallet"

mmhm...

It completely sucked. It left you with thinking "he either got shot.. or didn't get shot."

I guess their main objective was to leave question, but leave everyone realizing that he's got to spend the rest of his life in anxiety, wondering if he's going to get shot at any time.

Re:mmhm...

he either got shot.. or didn't get shot.

If Schrödinger wrote the script, all you had to do is open your TiVo box to know.

Re:mmhm...

If Schrödinger wrote the script, all you had to do is open your TiVo box to know.

Thanks for the suggestion!


(Spoilers below):


Tony makes a loud buzzing noise and catches fire. My house burns down. Damn, an interactive show finale! Great job, HBO!

Re:mmhm...

shroedinger was a famous veterinarian who liked to put cats in boxes with a vial of poison and a radioactive isotope. then if the isotope decayed the vial burst and the cat died. of course you couldn't tell if the cat was dead or not until you opened the box, but that spoiled the fun. so to please the humane society he decided that the cat was both dead and alive while in the box, thus proving the idiocy of humane societies.


some say he was a physicist but he was really a veterinarian who had been attacked by a cat during his childhood

Re:mmhm...

It completely sucked. It left you with thinking "he either got shot.. or didn't get shot."

Try being a Blakes 7 fan. Meh.

Re:mmhm...

It completely sucked. It left you with thinking "he either got shot.. or didn't get shot."

I guess their main objective was to leave question, but leave everyone realizing that he's got to spend the rest of his life in anxiety, wondering if he's going to get shot at any time.

Their main objective was to have everyone talking about it, weighing in with their own theories as to what happened as the screen went black. I think it worked flawlessly.

You may not like it, but you are still talking about it. Isn't that the goal of art? Not to produce something that everyone likes, but to produce something that has people thinking and talking about long after it's gone. You have to admit, it is brilliant!

Re:mmhm...

I unapologetically believe that tragedy, and narrative that denies that kind of closure, is more grown-up

I unapologetically believe that you are an arrogant snob.
Sad-ending vs happy-ending, or realistic-ending vs fantastic-ending, is just a matter of taste, not a matter of maturity.

Intelligent dialogue might be more "grown up" than fart jokes, but only someone who wants to gaze down his nose at anyone with different tastes would say tragedy is more grown-up than comedy.

Re:mmhm...

If I wanted to see harsh reality I'd put the book down, turn off the TV, or stop playing the video game.

I have nothing against people who enjoy tragedy. To each their own. But to me, happy endings in entertainment will never be cliche. No matter how many hundred shiny happy people appear on screen, you can see billions of tragic endings in real life.

Re:mmhm...

Reading Slashdot at comment level 3 and up leaves you wondering "WTF" sometimes when the last comment you see is about the artistic merit of the Sopranos ending, and the next comment you see has someone talking about why the Ringwraiths weren't brought out early in the Lord of the Rings.

Seriously, total non-sequitur. It's like playing memetic telephone.

Re:mmhm...

I unapologetically believe that tragedy, and narrative that denies that kind of closure, is more grown-up and artistically viable than stories which satisfy that itch to see wrongs righted, the meek inheriting the earth, and everyone living happily every after (or at least stewing in their just desserts.)

Or maybe tradegy is just the hack writer's easiest way to make his story seem more profound than it actually is, because people think the way you do?

The Sopranos

I never was an avid fan of the Sopranos. My roommate was seriously in love with it and I'd catch an episode with him. I've seen only a handful and they spread across a broad spectrum from an interesting first season episode full of mob action & scheming to a kid shitting in a shower and stepping on it. Ok, so maybe I'm oversimplifying the episodes that slowly build up family strife and psychological problems that must come with being in organized crime families.

Last night, it was very easy for me to accept the ending of the series finale. Because I wasn't addicted to the show. Logically, not all mob stories end in a Scarface-like explosion where everyone dies ... if they did, mobsters would have just killed each other off. But there are smart mobsters out there and what I took the ending to mean to me is that Tony is, after all, a smart mobster. He made it. Guys around him were dying left & right and his time had come but he struck a deal after holding out. I think they killed his brother or at least someone close to him but he was smart enough to write that casualty off. Not a lot of people could do that. Maybe this series chronicles the growth of an intelligent mobster? The old Tony might have made an offensive after that.

I kept waiting for an assassin to pop out & kill Tony for the last half of the show. But, I didn't have a reason why that should have happened. Am I so trained by movies & books on endings that I can't accept one without a climax? My roommate new it was coming because he kept looking at his watch and saying stuff like "ok, shit better start happening because they've only got like 15 minutes." But you know, you're at the mercy of the writers and creaters of the show.

It was unorthodoxed for it to end that way. I'm reminded of the utter ripoff I felt when I saw the last episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. But that was due to funding, I think this was the idea of the minds behind the show. Good for them. I like seeing deviations from normality when I don't have to suffer from it. :)

In the end, there were a lot of things that weren't wrapped up and I think that's the big problem a lot of fans are having to deal with. I think the reason so many fans are going to feel this is that the show started off as a badass mob series that attracted viewers of a certain nature who enjoy living a vicarious life of crime. Unfortunately, the ending just wasn't juicy enough to satiate that kind of appetite and I think that's why you'll hear so much about this. Personally, I liked it although I recognize that too many questions were left unanswered, too many futures were left uncertain & too many problems were left unresolved.

But, hey, that's life, isn't it?

Re:The Sopranos

I think the reason so many fans are going to feel this is that the show started off as a badass mob series that attracted viewers of a certain nature who enjoy living a vicarious life of crime.

This show started off as a show about a mobster who's mother had driven him to panic attacks.
It was not really until the actress playing Livia Soprano died that the show really took its turn into
badass mob series. It was the quirk of a mobster in therapy that drew me to the show. It made for
interesting drama.

Unfortunately, the ending just wasn't juicy enough to satiate that kind of appetite and I think that's why you'll hear so much about this. Personally, I liked it although I recognize that too many questions were left unanswered, too many futures were left uncertain & too many problems were left unresolved.

You have to give credit where its due. They sure as hell created massive tension in the last 5 minutes with all the cuts between the family at the table, the guy at the counter, meadow trying to parallel park, the other customers in the diner. The cut to black left me sitting in my dark living room, with my heart racing. It was a great ending. Life is tense. Life goes on. Life sucks, then you die. Shit happens. Shit fails to happen. Resolution is for the lucky.

That was significantly better than a climactic gun fight, a last second hit, a wake-up from a dream, or, heaven help us, an animal-house-style what-happens-to-the-characters montage.

Go black. Never go back.

Ciao Tony Soprano. Thanks. It was fun while it lasted.

So it ended...

and I canceled HBO.

Not just because the ending sucked but because there's nothing else I watch on those channels.

But that episode really sucked. I get it, "You won't know it's coming. Everything will just go black."

I don't care.

Besides I really wanted to see Meadow and AJ beheaded. There I said it. I can't take it back. It's out there.

Re:So it ended...

The removed all the thetans from their bodies and reached OT 3. This angered the church of bad SciFi who sued them off the air.

Re:So it ended...

I'm an American Goddammit! I demand to be TOLD things.

Popular online explanation (excuse)

That sense of tension and anxiety at the end is how Tony has to lead his life, every minute of every day. He doesn't know what's going to happen next, and now you know what that's like.

Re:Popular online explanation (excuse)

Yeah, that's exactly what I go out of it. The tension of that would drive me insane.

People didn't get that? Christ, it was like a fucking neon sign. All they needed was a slow pan of a white wall.

They set it up exactly as though there we going to be a hit on Tony. They did 3-4 minutes of just exposition, showing the happy couple, the Cub Scouts, the creepy guy at the bar. They played a memorable song (Journey's Don't Stop Believin' -- "it goes on and on and on and on...").

People feel gyped because it wasn't a Hollywood ending. I loved the ending. It was memorable and it spoke to exactly what the series was about.

Hey, this is like theold days...

Back when Slashdot was just a "stuff that Taco thinks is cool" site. I miss those days.

Re:Hey, this is like theold days...

Back when Slashdot was just a "stuff that Taco thinks is cool" site. I miss those days.

what is this place? what is 'slashdot'? i searched google for "stuff that taco" and ended up here.

He's dead

It was pretty clear to me that he died. Remember the flashback in the previous episode, where Bobby says "You never even hear it when it happens, do you?" Implying everything just goes black - you're dead before you even hear the gun being fired. Well, that's exactly what happened. The last thing Tony say was Meadow walking in the door.

Earlier in the episode, he was eating an orange, which is a reference to the Godfather files that has been made before in the series. They signify death, don't they?

I thought it was an excellent episode. It would be so cliche if they just showed him getting his head blown off, or even ended with a black screen and gunshot. If you pay attention, you pretty much know what happened. But you have to think about it.

Re:He's dead

No, what happened is that all the fanboys and fangirls wanted it to end with a big grisly bloody killing spree and Chase didnt let it happen. The suggestion here is that their lives go on but you dont get to watch them anymore. Plus not killing off the main Sopranos family opens the show up to movies.

The oranges, etc are red herrings. The show is full of red herrings. Not to mention that the show isnt from the POV of Tony, so going black doesnt mean the "camera" died.

Re:He's dead

He might also have not been shot. I just had to point that out.

Re:He's dead

As my Koine Greek professor stated in illustrating the many uses of 'that,':

"Is that that that that man talked about?..."

Re:He's dead

The best comment I have read (on the imdb forums) regarding the ending that it is the viewer who was "wacked" at the end. We didn't even see it coming.

Sounds like....

Sounds like they got the Seinfeld writers to come out of retirement to do the series finale episode.

Re:Sounds like....

Jerry: It's a finale about nothing.
Tony: Nothing?
George: Nothing.
Tony: WTF do you mean about nothing?
George: What'd you do this evening?
Tony: Well, I had a meeting with some guys, then I went to dinner with my family.
George: There, that's a finale.
Tony: How is that a fuckin' finale?
Jerry: Well, uh, maybe something happens on the way to dinner..
George: No, no, no. Nothing happens.
Jerry: Well, something happens.
Tony: Get the fuck outta here!

Big Pussy and the Zombie Mafia

You know, I came up with a rather nice ending about a year ago that involved Big Pussy coming back from the dead as zombie and using voodoo to take over Tony's crew, then going to war with Phil and then the rest of the Five Families. I even wrote a theme song (to the tune of the Three's Company theme song)...such a pity they didn't use it. Now that would've been a great setup for a spinoff. People like the mafia, they like zombie flicks...how could it fail?

HBO giving the finger to the Tivo generation....

HBO hates, hates, hates time-shifting and anything else that replicates their content without paying them tribute. It was not in their best interest to put on a great show that would be Tivoed and passed around the internet.

It has been stated many times that Chase filmed several endings. He did not do that to keep the actors and writers from knowing the ending.

He did that so that HBO could put the better, alternate endings onto highly marked up "collector's edition" DRM'ed DVDs for us to buy.

Here's my belated Sopranos prediction: Within a few short months, certainly in time for Christmas, the alternate endings will appear on DVD. This will be heavily advertised. The base price DVDs will be a piece of crap. Ysou'll have to buy the collector's edition to get the alternate endings plus other "exclusive" content. The DVD will use a "better" encryption than ever before, followed by the inevitable posting of the decryption key or keys by some geek on digg.

It's not personal, it's just business.

huh?

"DRM'ed DVDs" and ''DVD will use a "better" encryption than ever before''

huh?

If it's a plain ol' DVD, that will play back in any regular ol' DVD player, then there's no DRM. There's encryption, sure, but the CSS encryption was cracked completely. Done. They *could* encrypt the thing better, but then it won't play back on DVD players - it's no longer a DVD.

Now perhaps you actually meant it'll only be available on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and by some magic way the HD-DVD version won't be 'cracked' almost instantly (as the keys have been found for HD-DVD perpetually).. or, knowing that HD-DVD's only protection is swiss cheese, only go with Blu-Ray and its additional protection layer.

Or maybe it is a DVD - but a data DVD, and you can only play it back on a special HBO set top box media center thingamajig?

Anyway.. if it comes out on DVD at all, it'll be ripped in no time.
===
Other than that, I fully agree with what you're saying - production companies are exploiting the Regular > Special Edition > Collector's Edition > Director's Cut > Director's Cut Collector's Edition > etc. thing up the wazoo. I wish it would stop - but it's a moneymaker, so I doubt it will. As you said - it's just business.. but it's pretty dirty business.

I don't mind the model in general - I don't mind paying extra for additional content if that's what I want to see. What I do mind is if you have e.g. a Special Edition which has bonus features A, B, C and a Collector's Edition which has bonus features B, C, D, and a Director's Cut which has features B, D, E and F You'd have to buy all three to get the full extras. That's just lame.

Re:Question for older fanboys

I'm curious, of the people who watch Sopranos and are old enough to have gone through the previous pop culture obsession with the mob, around the time of The Godfather, what's the attraction still? It all seems so '80s to me.

This probably reads like a troll, but I'm genuinely interested, because I so don't get it. Think of it as a personal failing on my part, and point out the cultural riches I'm missing out on.

People have a fascination with badasses and few people have a better image of badassery than mobsters. All of us live life constrained by the rules and subservient to those with power. Mobsters take power and make their own rules. We see the danger they live in and see ourselves as too timid to embrace the prospect of self-destruction at any moment but our popular image of the mobster is that he lives and dies hard. Of course, since most of us also have no direct experience with these people, we fill in the blanks with our own romantic ideas of what goes down. I remember reading about one mobster who went with his mugs to go see a crime picture. He was very impressed with the fictional mob rites of loyalty and oath-taking. "Dis stuff is good," he said to one of his goombahs. "We need to be doin' dis."

Mobsters were simply the latest flavor of the generation. Before the mobster fascination we had cowboys and gunfighters. Before that we had romantic notions of pirate kings and exotic foreign lands. If you think the mobsters are bad, you don't even want to read about what hardcore pirates were like. The level of violence and brutality is sickening to see described in words on paper, I cannot even imagine what it looked like in person. And somehow, despite all that, we see pirates celebrated as shady but with hearts of gold.

But here's the funny part. What do you call a truly successful pirate or mobster? Your majesty. Seriously. Where do you think the ruling houses and nobles came from? Sure, ten generations down the line the House of Someguy is represented by some effete twit but I guarantee you the original Someguy was a badass you did not want to cross. And the best mobsters were the ones who figured out how to operate with the law on their side. Robber-baron was not a title of pressroom hyperbole. Where did Daddy Kennedy make his money? Rum-running. How did George W. Bush's grandpappy get rich? Doing business with the Nazis.

We don't see movies made about average joes living contented lives. We never read about the farmboy who stayed home, obeyed his fathers wishes and took over the farm. We read about his brother, the one who ran away to join the Navy, who decided to fight in some noble war in some far-flung land. We read about the man with the ambition to do something great, no matter how much blood was needed to grease the wheels. It is spectacle, it is horror, and it is a dreadful fascination, and newspapermen will continue to make money feeding that curiosity.

Re:Question for older fanboys

Thanks for the reply. But you've tangentially hit on exactly why I don't find the classic fictional Sicilian mob very interesting: they're dumb. They physically hurt or kill each other for no good reason, or for reasons which only make sense in their twisted reality frame. They don't seem able to rise above this dumbness, no matter what happens. They're uncivilized, literally: they haven't quite figured out that "do unto others..." doesn't mean "do others before they do you".

Prepare for more disappointment in life: humans in general are dumb. The dotcom I worked at had so many deals walking in the door it wasn't even funny. Management could have actually paid to develop the snake-oil they were selling and turn it into a real product. Unfortunately, that wasn't even in their radar. You'd think that people would see the benefits in taking a modest cut of whatever business they're in and spread the wealth around, improving the quality of life for all and thus indirectly benefiting themselves. But people don't work that way. You remember what Milton's Satan said, "It's better to reign in hell than serve in heaven?" If you gave these power-crazed fucks the option of living in a high state of luxury along with everyone else or living in a dark ages castle as the king, they'd pick the kingship every time. Why? Because they have to be the king of shit hill. Life has no meaning if they cannot have more than someone else, a way of demonstrating superiority and dominance. So what if it means the kingship's living standards are worse than anything our modern American poor would put up with, that fuck still gets to be king.

Mobster movies never end with a conversion into legitimate business. Casinos don't count, since at least in their fictional representation, they're little more than fronts, an excuse for the same murderous macho silliness in a modern context. Attempts at such a conversion typically end in disaster, presumably as some kind of morality play. So Sicilian screen mobsters are not like the Kennedys, Bushes, Carnegies, or Windsors.

Um, have you paid any attention to the current war we're in? "Murderous macho silliness in a modern context" sums it up nicely. As for the Kennedeys, their worst scandals have been with the kids that will never amount to anything. With Windsor, it's been so many generations since they became a line of nobility that I don't think the family historian even remembers how they made their fortune. Carnegie was a motherfucker who built museums and contributed to charity to make himself feel better at the end of his days when he thought back to how many died to build that fortune. He used Pinkertons to break strikes and if there is a hell, he'll surely be burning there. I don't remember hearing anything about his descendants. If he has any, they certainly know how to keep a lower profile than Paris.

Perhaps it's similar to the fascination with celebrities and rich people having troubled lives: showing that the behavior we can't have doesn't lead to anything good, anyway. But in this case, who ever imagined that it did?

I think it's more a matter of schadenfreude. Look, those rich bastards aren't enjoying it any more than we are. Or it could just be that the average tabloid reader's life is such a yawning chasm of emptiness that they are forced to live vicariously through the thrills of others. "The only mark I'll leave in life is the splat on the sidewalk when I finally jump. To kill time until then, let's see what the beautiful people are doing."