Well, well. I suppose that what everyone will really be talking about today is the last episode of The Sopranos. Opinion seems to be divided. There are some who are very angry at David Chase. Apparently, they either wanted all the ends tied up or, at least, some serious violence.
I am not one of those. I think the ending was perfect. This is the hell that Tony has chosen. To always be wondering if the people surrounding him are the feds investigating him or his enemies come to whack him. He has this Sword of Damocles hanging over his head with the Grand Jury investigation. Perhaps this will be the time that the feds nail him, but perhaps not. Otherwise, he's lost two top guys (if Bobby can be considered a top guy) and is forced to rely on the weak reed that is Paulie. His son is just as much of a loser who momentarily gets passionate about some issue but then gives up his passion as soon as a suitable bribe from his parents comes along. Meadow is going to be a lawyer interested in investigating corruption in New Jersey. Lots of work there, including her own father, perhaps. And Carm is just as always, trying to hold her family together while closing her eyes to what her husband does and where the money comes from.
David Chase was surely playing with us. Most of the show was falsely building up tension in the viewer. He knew we were all waiting for someone, besides Phil, to get whacked, and so every sight of one of the Sopranos created this expectation that someone would be killed. I'm sure that everyone in the audience was thinking that something was going to happen to Meadow as she tried to parallel park. (Boy, can I relate to her difficulties - parallel parking is a skill I have never mastered!) And then the shots of all these different people in the diner. The viewer experienced all the tension in those few minutes that Tony must experience for the rest of his life. But that is the business he has chosen.
And he even through in one more shout out to Yeats (or as AJ pronounces it "Yeets")and his poem, "The Second Coming." Just to give the English majors in the audience something to chew over. What is slouching towards New Jersey to be born?
I'm just glad that Chase didn't decide to end the show by killing off one of Tony's family. That would have been too much of a copy of Godfather III and we don't need to be reminded of that.
I'm sure that cries went up across the land as screen went blank fearing that cable had gone out on them. That was Chase's final trick on the viewer. He wasn't going to give us a closing shot or a particular song played over the credits. All we get is the message we can take away from listening to Journey's "Don't stop believin'" It's up to us to decide what we believe in. Timothy Noah thinks that it is a "Lady or the Tiger" ending. That's fine with me. Most of life doesn't come to some explosive ending that wraps up all the plot points of our lives. And what made The Sopranos so great was its versimilitude. (If we can just forget about Big Pussy talking from the fish or that dreadful dream sequence when Tony was shot.) So we're left with an indeterminate ending that we can finish off in our own minds. I like that better than some deus ex machina ending. By leaving it open-ended, he made sure that it would stay with us that much longer as we imagine different fates in our own imaginations. It is a trick on the viewer, but also a sign of respect. And we know how importance respect is to the mafia.
What did you guys think?
UPDATE: Matt Zoller Seitz reviews the episode and well expresses why this was a very appropriate ending.
Here, yet again, Chase exactly what I expect him to do: the unexpected. No gangster story has ever ended like this. The lack of resolution -- the absolute and deliberate failure, or more accurately, refusal, to end this thing -- was exactly right. It felt more violent, more disturbing, more unfair than even the most savage murders Chase has depicted over the course of six seasons, because the victim was us. He ended the series by whacking the viewer.
