R.I.P. Sopranos - 06/10/07 (Open SPOILERS after post #12)

Cafe Society
101

I thought it was great. Every scene change, we expected a whacking… and life goes on for the Soprano family. I thought we would be left with a million dangling threads, and Chase did exactly that.

We’ve been conditioned by this show to expect death and destruction around every corner. But I think Chase’s point was, this is life for Tony. Every single mundane action, even his daughter parking her car, random guys walking into a restaurant, he has to be vigilant. If Gandolfini is undecided about doing the movie, Chase set it up so the theory that Tony got whacked could work, but I think it’s business as usual otherwise.

I don’t think truck driver guy whacked Tony. He was just an ordinary dude. I bought Butchie and the other NY guy’s OK for the Jersey crew to take out Phil. That part was pretty much resolved. Butchie takes over NY. The hard-on to take out Jersey was Phil’s and Phil’s alone. He has no family to avenge him.

102

Was Carlo the one who put up that picture?

103

So… what’s up with that cat?

Does that mean Christopher was a rat? It kept looking at his photo and cats don’t really like rats…

104

They teased the hell out of us in this episode.

I assume everyone noticed Tony eating an orange earlier in the episode? A definite reference to “The Godfather”.

I also noticed that the theme “Made in America” was very cynical. We were shown at least a couple major American brands in a negative context. There was the close-up of Phil’s Ford truck just before it ran over his head, for example. (He didn’t have Firestone tires by any chance, did he?) We saw good ol’ American Heinz ketchup doing what it does best - not coming out of the god-damned bottle. The show ended in a diner, complete with jukeboxes, truckers, and cliché music that everybody is supposed to like because we just are, dammit! It’s a classic, really!

And we saw a certain Italian-American institution portrayed in a completely unglamorous light. Junior once ran north Jersey. He was powerful, a force to be reckoned with. Now he’s a sad senile old man who watches birds. (Much like Tony watches ducks.) The Mafia, while still dangerous, is a weakened pathetic version of its former self. But it still exists as a “brand”, regardless of how useful, important, or ethical it is. This Thing of Ours - Right or Wrong! Love It or Leave It!

I think Chase was comparing the Mafia to America in the sense of brand loyalty.

The cat: I have no idea. But I did love every second of Paulie’s interaction with it.

Meadow can’t park: She tries out this, that, the other thing and finally settles on something that works. I think this is a sign that her current goals are what she will continue with.

I concur with the notion that the episode ended the second Tony was shot. It’s a bitter-sweet ending in that his final moments were (relatively) happy and peaceful. His final sight was his beautiful daughter walking through the door. Of course, the viewpoint of his family isn’t nearly as pleasant. She comes in just in time to see her father shot in the head. Carmella probably gets bits of brains on her. Anthony sees the violence right close up, and while just as upset as his sister and mother, probably gets a secret thrill from the bloodshed.

105

In a way it seemed uncharactaristically optimistic and upbeat (in the absence of any visible violence) to have the song “Don’t Stop Believing” play during the final four minutes, mixed at a fairly high volume level, much like the final song ended each episode in the early days and continued on into the credits. As a soundtrack to the killing that the scene seemed to suggest was imminent, it would have been ironic and much more in keeping with the show’s mentality. My first thought after realizing that the cable had not cut out, was that the ten or fifteen seconds of blackout before the credits was intended to force the viewer to fill in the blank, as is happening all over this thread. I may have to come down on the side of directorial genius. This ending is both more and less satisfying than a concrete Tony gets whacked or doesn’t type ending.

106

I agree. I’m glad someone else sees it this way, so I know I’m not just experiencing blowback from too much lit-crit theory in grad school.

I wonder if Chase has been reading Derrida… “there is no meaning outside the text.” Everything we say happened after the screen went black is speculation and will remain so unless a sequel is made.

107

After having some time to think about it, I loved it. I still haven’t decided which version of the ending I liked more but either way, it doesn’t really matter to me. Just getting to that point was so well done.

From Tony complaining to A.J.'s psychiatrist about his issues with his mother to both A.J. and Meadow looking like complete idiots in my mind to Paulie with the broom.

Plus Phil getting his face mashed by the SUV. That was also sweet.

108

All in all, it’s juuuust enough ambiguity, just shy of the point of having to actually show us. It’s like he put all of the dots in an outline on a page, and is handing us the pencil only to connect all of them. But really, you can tell picture just by looking at the dots. That said, I concede it’s not a smoking gun (heh)… but very satisfying after the initial: WHA?! When you think about it in this light, it just all makes sense and like BlackKnight said… bittersweet.

I agree that the Journey song was a soundtrack to his death… just the way the normalcy and happiness of the scene was at odds with the situation and paranoia Tony was in… very disconcerting.

109

I thought it was pretty clear that Tony got shot in the back of the head. And Meadow got there just in time to see it. Lovely.

110

You know what I’m doing right now?

I’m reading all the posts on IMDb over the past week that claim to be revealing what happens in the final episode. Like, “FINAL EPISODE PLOT CONFIRMED (spoilers)” or “don’t read this if you don’t want to know what happens,” and laughing at how wrong they are! I was really looking forward to doing this very thing as soon as I was done watching the final episode. I can’t believe people went to so much trouble writing fake endings for the show and passing them off as real spoilers! Some of these are so hilariously stupid.

Like:

EDIT: OK, I just realized this is supposed to be a spoof on the Godfather.

Or…

Obviously this guy saw the picture of Phil’s head getting crushed (which was apparently leaked) and built all this bullshit around it.

or…

OK, so my thoughts on the episode: I was let down at first, I felt very betrayed by what I saw as a stupid and “look how clever [pretentious] we are” ending to a show that I had invested so much of my time in watching. As I think about it more, though, I kind of like it. I like how unpredictable it was, and I like that it leaves the show open to interpretation. Like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction - I wouldn’t want to know what was actually in it. It’s better as a mystery. I like that it leaves it open to the possibility that Tony was shot and didn’t hear/see it coming. On the other hand, I kind of wonder whether the New York family really would have hired guys dressed as truckers to kill Tony. For a minute, I wondered if Tony and his family were going to get killed in a crossfire between two rival gangs in the restaurant (like that X-Files episode where the guy calls four different gangs and tells guys from each one that their rivals are going to be at a diner - for the purpose of getting a man that he knew would be at the diner killed in the shootout and making it look like an accident.) But alas, we were left with the black screen and the silence - and a gigantic question mark.

Edit: Oh yeah, I loved the fact that it was Benny that killed Phil. I love that guy! And I can’t believe Carlo was a rat. Dammit! I thought he was the most badass guy on the crew.

111

now that I think about it, Phil was shot quite graphically in front of his wife and grandkids. If the hit was from one of Phil’s associates (and I think theoretically, it could be anyone in the Five Families,) they might have wanted to make sure Tony’s wife and kids were there.

But I’ll agree that the ending was ambiguous. If they want a movie, no one’s going to pay ten bucks to see “The Sopranos: The AJ Years.”

112

The “Tony’s Dead” theory makes sense given the number of times the idea of “lights out” was brought up, but they made no attempt, and tell me if I’m wrong, to give us the idea that we were looking through Tony’s point of view at that time, correct?

EDIT: Come to think of it, Tony was facing away from the door. If he had been sitting in Carmela’s seat it’d have been more believable.

113

There was also the statement at Bobby’s wake about “in the midst of death we are in life, or was it the other way around?”

There were also two guys walking into the diner rather purposefully, sort of like the two who shot Bobby.

On second thought, maybe Meadow shot him? (Just kidding.)

114

Regardless of the ending, the rest of the hour was top notch Sopranos. There was some really great dialogue, especially from Tony and Paulie (“look at the stems on blondie”). That the underdog gang who seemingly couldn’t shoot straight pulled out a bottom of the ninth with two outs hit on Phil was an unexpected crowd pleaser.

But most of all I applaud Chase for not making the finale gradiose. It did for most of the hour what the Sopranos has always done which is to provide great characters delivering great drama with well written dialogue. As pointed out above, the scenes with Uncle Junior were so much more telling than the abbreviated dialogue might seem at face value. The FBI contact’s reaction hearing the news about Phil getting whacked was deliciously subject to multiple interpretation. And finally, although that clip of Bush dancing has already been shown on every late night comedy, news, and talk show, it never fails.

My only beef is that it’s now finally over for real and that if there ever will be more Sopranos, episodes (movies) will be even fewer and further between.

115

OK, I’ve given this a bit more thought, and while at first I HATED the ending (“Copout!” I screamed), I’m coming to think it was brilliant. NOT because of the ambiguity, but because it let us know so clearly what happened, without having to actually show us what happened. (Most of what follows was written just now for my blog, so I apologize if the tone is a little weird for the SDMB.)

First of all: Tony got whacked. The guy who looked all suspicious, who the director clearly wanted us to think was there to kill Tony, went into the bathroom, then came out and killed him.

There’s a thematic reason for this: Think about the restaurant they were in. It was pure, wholesome Americana, straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. A den of Cub Scouts sits at one table; a tired old trucker sits at another, looking like a Ford F-150 commercial. Two young black guys come in and check out the jukebox. Hell, there’s even a jukebox at the table, something I haven’t seen since probably 1980.

What’s going on here? The writers were taking us out of the Sopranos’ moral universe, and into the world at large. They were taking us out of the moral framework in which it’s OK to kill someone who “deserves it,” OK to cheat on your wife, OK to steal from regular people like Cub Scouts and truck drivers, as long you stay true to the family.

The entire series has been, in essence, about Tony’s struggle to reconcile these two moral frameworks: The one he grew up in and the one that exists “out there” among the rest of us (and in his shrink’s office). The whole episode was thematically about his ejection from the stylized movie-world he’s used to and into the real world.

Examples:

[ul]
[li]A.J.'s “awakening,” now that he’s all socially conscious and wants to save the environment and fight the terrorists. Also, he loses his SUV (the official vehicle of the New Jersey mafia) and contemplates taking the bus.[/li][li]The meeting between Tony and the head of the other family. As we were watching it, I turned to my wife and said, “Funny; this could not be any less like the meeting of the Five Families in The Godfather.” Instead of being in a stately, well-appointed dining room, they’re in some freezing warehouse. Instead of wine or espresso, one guy has brought a case of bottled water. (The plastic bag from Target or some such, sitting next to the bottles, was a great touch.) Instead of a long discussion of morality and feasibility, the meeting takes about three minutes and they’re done.[/li][li]The family getting physically out of their house and staying in that crappy little place (i.e., like my house) for a while was a nice metaphor as well.[/li][li]Tony talking to the FBI guy. You could see it as he rationalized it to himself, but he was a rat just as sure as Arianna was.[/li][li]Tony’s shrink saying in the previous episode that she had to stop seeing him, and in this episode his showing a need to talk so desperate that he starts pouring it out to A.J.'s shrink. [/li][li]Junior is growing old and dying in a freaking charity hospital. This is not, in the movies, how old mafiosi die.[/li][/ul]

I’ll probably have to watch it again; I’m sure I missed a lot of things. The cat staring at the picture of Chrissie was a weird detail that’s still nagging at me. I like the theory that there was a bug hidden in the picture, and the cat could hear some high-pitched electronic whine it was giving off, but I’m not sure.

The overall theme of ejection, though, is something that didn’t become apparent to me until I thought about it afterward. Much like the brilliant last episode of Home Movies.

So: I think Tony was whacked. I think that’s how it needed to end. As soon as he confronts the real world, that’s it for Tony.

Good stuff; I’ll be chewing on this some more.

(On preview: KidCharlemagne, I had the impression Tony was facing the door. I’ll watch it again and see.)

116

You sure about that… I haven’t gone back to the ending, but I seem to remember him facing the door, watching his wife and AJ come in.

117

Ok. I just watched it again and the “Tony’s Dead” theory is definitely right. There was a series of shots of Tony looking up and then someone coming through the door which set the stage for us believing that the latter shot was through Tony’s eyes. The suspicious character went into the bathroom. Meadow comes in and “lights out.”
Brilliant.

118

It only took an hour, but I’m okay with it too, thanks to you guys.

Everyone was so themselves tonight. I was a little surprised that Paulie turned down the new position, but it was still Paulie, whining about his cancer, losing his mother, etc.

Didn’t Carm look disappointed that Meadow’s old friend turned her life around? :smiley:

119

Yeh, I thought that too… but then forgot about it. Maybe because Meadow is deciding to become an attorney, rather than medicine like her old, flunky friend is now doing.

120

I’m with the Nihilistic Bullshit Cycle Continues ad Infinitum camp. I did enjoy the “Grandpa Headshot” scene. The Foley artists did a good job with that.

The longer this show ran, the more stupid and nihilistic it got. The idea that we’re rooting for these people? Perhaps that last black scene was an opportunity to reflect on the fact that people were rooting for these idiots for something like eight years, And the blatant idiocy of the daughter railing on about the federal government violating peoples’ rights, and conflating the corrupt mafia types with “Italian Americans” … maybe she needs that to justify her family’s existence. As for AJ and Rhiannon? I don’t get it. I mean, I get AJ getting Rhiannon, but what the Hell does Rhiannon see in AJ?

Like the X Files, this thing ran about three seasons too long, and a movie now - why? At least we’re spared (hopefully) many mediocre spin-off series.