The Sopranos Ends With a ... 519
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.
Lady or the Tiger? (Score:2, Interesting)
HBO giving the finger to the Tivo generation.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Like that Beatles song (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:He's dead (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mod this whole thread offtopic already (Score:0, Interesting)
Move on to what exactly? Slashdot is full of irritating Politics and "Your Rights Online" articles which have fuck all to do with IT or Technology. When a technical story does come up, it gets maybe 50 comments, 30 of which will be bad trolls, 15 of which will be whiny kids who don't even grasp the basic premise of the article, 4 people complaining about an obscure technical mistake in the article and 1 interesting comment that's worth reading.
The majority of comments on Slashdot have always been shit[1], but at least there used to be some interesting articles to read. Even the trolls used to try. Now it's a fucking wasteland. You know what's even more pathetic: it's still better than the alternatives!
Take a look at the Firehose. It's packed full of political and "Rights" stories that have been done to death and are not interesting. I vote each and every one of them down, in a vain attempt to stem the tide, and still they get through.
It's high time Slashdot split the Politics & YRO sections into a seperate site and let Slashdot get back to doing Tech and IT, like it used to. Perhaps if we're really lucky, Zonk will go with it.
[1]: Yes, including this one. You made a funny. Ha. Ha.
Re:He's dead (Score:1, Interesting)
Good riddance (Score:5, Interesting)
The last show I was this happy to see check out was Friends. Finally, another execrable piece of shite not wasting any more resources that could be used for a worthwhile purposes.
Re:He's dead (Score:5, Interesting)
"Is that that that that man talked about?..."
Re:Soprano's and tech? (Score:5, Interesting)
Same here. There are a lot of angles you could take on this story as to why its posted here. I for one find it interesting to see how people react to a television show ending in such an unorthodox way. Television is so pre-packaged and easily digestible and it has affected our perception of reality. People want quick fixes, they want stuff to resolve, all within the space of one hour. Well, sometimes it doesn't work that way. I for one, not having watched the show, find the concept of this particular ending ingenious.
Plus, in accord with GP's point about
People who complain about this story is a bit like me grousing about another article about the end of BSG just because I don't particularly care for the show: Frankly, nobody gives a damn.
Re:Question for older fanboys (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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?
Re:Good riddance (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as a 'waste of resources,' I'd be perfectly happy if they put their effort towards shows that are worthwhile. They don't have to be shows that I want to watch (there are tons of shows out there that are decent or mediocre or quite good that I don't watch), but they shouldn't deliberately try to be the worst show the creators can get away with.
That's what I feel about the Sopranos: It's not that I hate it (which I do), but it's one of the very very rare shows I consider to be created as deliberately bad-but-enticing. It has made its audience from shocking and then manipulating people ("ooh, naked boobs on American TV!!!"), rather than creating a good story. It is anti-entertainment.
Entirely my opinion, I realise, and no more valid than that of anyone else. Still, this show has always stood in my mind as an example of how the entertainment industry avoids having to create entertainment, and I'm glad to see it gone.
(Random aside: I mentioned Friends, which similarly exemplifies how TV makes comedies that aren't funny--without the laugh track, the show wouldn't have lasted two seasons.)
Re:mmhm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Question for older fanboys (Score:5, Interesting)
Tony is not dead! (Score:5, Interesting)
No. *We* got shot by the suspicious Italian guy when he was coming out of the bathroom, or perhaps by the two African-American guys (just like Tony's close encounter in Season 1).
Clearly the end was meant to be somewhat ambiguous (to understate the point), but I truly believe that the intention was to kill US, not to kill Tony. Life goes on for the Soprano family, just like it has in every other episode. It does NOT go on for us. The viewer finally experiences what has happened to so many other characters on the show. We're dead before we even hear the shot.
Tony didn't get whacked. WE DID.
I find it hard to believe that anyone would complain about the ending. It's difficult to get more closure on a TV show than one's own death.
Re:mmhm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, total non-sequitur. It's like playing memetic telephone.
Re:He's dead, Jim (Score:5, Interesting)
"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"
The point wasn't alive or dead (Score:4, Interesting)
The absolute paranoia. The focus on every single little detail. The search for the smallest scrap of meaning in anything as if our lives depended on it because they do.
I watched it with a bunch of friends and every single one of us was on the edge of our seats, every single one of us was muttering something along the lines of "oh, no, here it comes," and every single one of us jumped when it went to black, just completely confused.
As endings go, Six Feet Under was *closure* and it was brilliant. The Sopranos wasn't closure, not by a long shot, but it left me with something just as satisfying - I got it. I finally understood, just for a minute, how Tony Soprano works and I felt sympathy for this monster.
That's pretty good in my book!
Re:He's dead, Jim (Score:2, Interesting)
"That all sounds like urban (emerging) legend. The NY Times reviewer was on ESPN radio a couple hours ago and was asked about the Italian-looking guy at the counter and the 2 black guys, and if they appeared in earlier episodes. The NYT guy said no. The Italian-looking guy isn't even an actor. He works at a restaurant in the area and the Sopranos people asked him to do the scene because he looked the part.
And Tony was supposed to have killed one of the black guys who tried to kill him way back when."
Re:He's dead, Jim (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess it could be argued that the POV is a killer and Tony looks up just as the end comes, but I am not sure I like the idea of switching back to Tony's POV after he is dead.