Tv Shows I'm Watching - The Sopranos Series Finale

Don't read this article if you haven't seen the second half of Sopranos season 6, the series finale or care about the series finale. I'm giving you time to turn back now.....

Still time.....

Okay, you've been warned, here we go.

After six and a half seasons, The Sopranos has finally ended, and in the final episode....well....nothing really happened.

I have my thoughts, and I'll share them in a bit. First though, I just want to state that for the most part, I loved the last nine episodes of the show which finally seemed to embrace David Chase's mid-series change of pace. It appeared that Chase grew quickly bored of the ultra-violent, tightly paced, comic mob drama after season three and slowly transformed it into a slow, pondering, often brilliant, often frustrating meditation on violence and family in its last three seasons.

I felt like seasons four, five, and 6.1 were tonally inconsistent, abandoning the clear, suspense laden storytelling of the first three seasons by adding multiple open ended plot threads (that were often never resolved or wrapped up so quickly there was little time to develop any tension), a growing labrynth of paper thin mob associates (who were instantly forgettable, especially considering the show's year long breaks), and occasionally diving headfirst into the bizarre realm of esoteric psychobabble through elaborate, often baffling dream sequences.

It became clear by the second half of season six, that the transition was complete, and the final nine episodes were the mournful cries of a show exploring abandonment, loneliness, and the sad truth of the world these mobsters live in. Each episode provided closure to a particular character, sometimes shockingly, sometimes inevitably.

Perhaps the key scene of the last episode involved a conversation that took place in Little Italy. As a tour guide explains at the beginning of the scene, Little Italy, at its height spanned forty blocks of New York City. Today, it is a fraction of the size, and as one mobster finishes his short phone conversation he finds that he has traversed the entire breadth of the neighbourhood in a matter of seconds.

These final episodes, taken as a whole, depict the death of the mob.

As the older mobsters succumb to health issues (Johnny Sack, Junior), the young ones succumb to greed and addiction (Christopher). The next generation, having lived a life of wealth and abundance, doesn't have what it takes to move into the business.

And as the final episode wraps up, with half of Tony's associates dead or dying, with Paulie, in his own mind, signing a death warrant, and with Junior losing himself completely to dementia, Tony decides to have a family meal at a diner.

He sits down, and turns on the jukebox - Journey's Don't Stop Believing. As the tune starts, Carmela sits down and talks family matters, then A.J. shows up and talks about focusing on the good times (clearly a step away from the depressing thoughts he has recently had). Meadow has trouble parallel parking outside. A shady figure at the end of the bar heads to the bathroom. Meadow parks and runs toward the diner. The door clangs. Tony looks up, the song says "Don't stop"....complete cut to black. The Sopranos is over.

Theories have been popping up all over the place from - "the last episode was all a dream" to "Tony was killed by the man in the washroom", but personally I think it's much simpler.

The show just ends.

Yep.

That's it. No bang, no whimper, just a quick cut to black midway through a perfectly normal moment in Tony's life.

Journey's song claims, "Oh the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on", and that incapsulates the feeling of the finale; knowing that despite that cut, things go on. Tony's life continues, but Chase's cut kills the relationship between the viewer and the characters.

David Chase doesn't try to hide this. The final line of the previous episode reiterates Bobby's assertion that "you don't even hear it when it (death) happens." And like that, The Sopranos is over, dead, a complete unexpected surprise. For us, Tony's story is finished, the mob's story is finished.

At first, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I thought the final seconds had been mistakenly broadcast. Then I was angry, pissed off at David Chase for taking me through six seasons of a show only to end it like THAT!!! Then I went on the Internet and tried to see what people were saying...everyone was trying to say...it's not over, it's just making room for the movie. Then people were sad....and then the reports started coming in from the major publications about how brilliant the ending was.

At this point I realized the brilliance of the ending. Chase had created an ending so shockingly similar to death, that I, and most of the viewing population, was experiencing the five stages of grief used in the Kubler-Ross model.

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

What better way to depict the death of the mob than to actually kill the entire show.

Another key to understanding the ending seems to lie in Goodfellas, the Scorcese film referenced frequently, and admired by every single character in The Sopranos universe. In Goodfellas the final shot shows Joe Pesci's character firing a gun directly at the audience. It's a direct homage to The Great Train Robbery, a 1903 silent film, that used a similar final shot. There a man pointed his gun to the audience and fired. Because movies were so new, legend has it that audiences were scared out of their minds thinking that somehow they were going to be shot.

So, Goodfellas apes a technique originally designed to make an audience think they were about to be shot. And The Sopranos, never one to shy away from Scorcese references, playfully throws in its own technique to simulate murder.

I can certainly understand why the ending is so frustrating, but in recent years, The Sopranos has trusted its audience to work through some complex, often difficult-to-understand moments. The ending is certainly no more difficult to analyze than the bizarre episode, The Test Dream, where Tony had a twenty minute dream sequence, or the episodes after Tony is shot where, in his camatose state, he imagines that he is living the life of another person.

Chase provides an ending that is open for interpretation, and I think it's fair to say that The Sopranos will be analyzed and discussed far more because of its final moments, than if the show had ended with a typical bloodbath.