My wife refuses to pay for HBO (it’s a weird, grudge thing from her youth) so I have missed the prime time for a number of cultural touchstones. We have, however, watched the entire series of the Sopranos on DVD, ending last night. My question is not about the ending, for which I think much was made about nothing, but:
Why did they never tie up the storyline about the Russian (?) killer that escaped from the Pine Barrens? Why let him escape if he never shows up again? Bugs the crap outta me.
The mystery of the Russian, too, was another cultural touchstone. Some predicted that in the last episode, he would reappear to kill Tony.
Well, according to the guy who wrote the script:
That sonnuva… Ok, I get what he’s saying, but if I remember correctly, he wasn’t just “some Russian,” he was a world-class killer (someone who probably wouldn’t just “let it go”). Am I misremembering?
He was an interior decorator who killed 17 Chechoslovakians. 
When the Russian comes up in conversation I like to think about the controversial cut to black at the series finale. Never knowing where your death begins, who delivers it, how it ends, etc.
Really? His place looked like shit.
David Chase loves to piss off his audience. The missing Russian is just the tip of the iceberg.
What I always wonder is – what happened to the lamp? Did Meadow keep it? Did she give it to Finn or one of her roommates? Do the FBI sometimes listen to it hoping they get lucky?
Someone in her dorm probably turned it into a bong.
I’d read that interview with the screenwriter before. Who knows what happened to the Russian? Not me, but I love that kind of little ambiguity. He was a former Russian Interior Ministry badass - had fought in Chechnya, IIRC.
Not just the russian, there were many loose threads purposely left. It may have been a writer’s option to pick it up or not just as long as the central plot lines continued.
Now go back and listen to any audio comentaries too. Drea DeMatteo’s (Adrianna) is a hoot to listen to, nice gal.
And the ending? My gut feelinng is he is starting over, going legit. His “family” is dead.
I always thought the story was tied up, much like the publicist said. Ex-soldier gets on mob bad side, escapes, and goes to ground and stays hidden forever. Or dies in the Pine Barrens. Either way, Paulie and Christopher give up and don’t care anymore, more worried about frostbite. Makes sense. Makes much more sense than any of the action hero scenarios where he straps on a shitload of weapons and takes on the mob. Terence Winter is right - too many impossible movie plots have really spoiled viewers, so when something far more realistic happens, people complain.
They definitely liked to leave things unresolved - I was really sure something about the Adriana thing was going to come back to Tony at the end of the show - but the Russian thing never struck me as an attempt to piss off the audience. That whole episode was obviously a one-off, never-gonna-be-connected-to-the-rest-of-the-show kind of deal. That was its charm. It was a diversion with no pretense to greater significance. So it’s one of my favorite Sopranos episodes.
Chase’s attitude toward his audience really bugged me. I don’t mind loose ends, and I think it was actually a good idea to leave the Russian story with no resolution. But I think that as the series went along, Chase became more contemptous of his audience, and more of his creative decisions became based on pissing off his audience rather than just telling a good story.
I think the finale was the ultimate expression of that contempt. I don’t think it’s unreasonable as an audience member to ask for an ending, and I think any ending that causes the immediate response of “wait, did the cable just go out,” should be classified as a failure. That’s why I never got into those “what do you think happened? Did Tony live or die” discussions afterwards. If Chase hates his audience so much that he’s gonna give us a big F U as an ending, then I’m not gonna spend any more of my time thinking about his show.
I think – in fact I will go so far as to say I know – that a big part of Chase’s motivation in creating The Sopranos in the first place was his contempt for the idea of television as routine comfort food, a medium that deliberately eschewed anything challenging or confrontational. And I imagine that as the show became more popular, Chase felt that, despite his best efforts at creating a truly transgressive television series, he had failed: people came to look on The Sopranos as comfort food, albeit unusually rich comfort food. His show had become reliably satisfying – and Chase hates that.
So the whole final season – from the dream sequences that everyone hated, to Tony’s increasing callousness and rapacity culminating in the murder of Christopher, to the non-ending ending – was designed to wrench people back to what the show was always supposed to be about: a bunch of vain, ruthless and frightening people with whom it was impossible to identify without a fair amount of moral compromise. So I don’t think Chase hates his audience – I’m sure he’s grateful to the people who allowed him to pursue his vision so rewardingly – but he does insist, as true artists do, that his work be appreciated as much as possible on his own terms.
I generally agree with all of this, but the problem for me is that his attempt to challenge and confront his audience overwhelmed his story, and ultimately made the show much weaker. For example, I don’t think any of the final season episodes were more challenging than the college trip episode from the first season.
I kind of feelThe Sopranos was never really about the plot anyway. It’s a character study. The plot is useful only in how the characters respond to it and how it influences them. “Pine Barrens” shows how Christopher and Paulie react to a stressful, dangerous situation. They like to act tough, and are quite brutal to unarmed or nearly helpless people. The Russian beats them up and gets away. Then they lose their car, start whining like children and nearly come to blows (don’t pull guns on each other?) when forced to spend the night outside. Also in this episode, Bobby shows himself to be useful (for the first time, I think?)
I’ve actually come around on the ending. I now think it was about the best option. Tony getting killed would open up and leave unresolved as many questions as anything. Who did it? Why? Why now? How does it affect the rest of the family and the Family? Does it start a new war?
That would also seem like too much of “wrap it up” ending. There was no point for Tony to be killed at that time, the war with NY was over. I suppose someone else could have done for other reasons, but then you’re back to all the questions above.
Lastly, there’s really no reason we should get an ending. We never got a beginning. We just dropped in on these characters lives one day, with most of their history, relationships, and motivations already developed. In fact, given how they play with the truth, we really can’t be sure of too much of anything, except what we’ve seen for ourselves. Much of that history could be false or exaggerated. The last show was just us dropping back out of their lives.
Well, yeah, but did you see the window treatments they ordered?! They had it comin’!
Eh, I still think the ending was botched. What you’re suggesting could have been accomplished much more successfully if the show had ended with the next to last episode, with Tony in the room by himself, in hiding, with the resolution of the NY war still in doubt.