On Countdown tonight, Keith Olbermann suggested that last night’s show may actually be a flash forward to the end of the series, and that the next 12 episodes will go back and catch us up on everything that happened in the year or so (in the Sopranos world) since the end of last season.
In other words, although we’re all assuming that Tony has to live because there are so many shows left in the season, we won’t know for sure until sometime early next year, when we see the next eight episodes, which Chase insists are absolutely the last ones.
That would be pretty cruel to us fans, but it would be an amazing dramatic tactic.
About AJ, there’s no way he’s ever going into the family business. I can imagine Meadow becoming capo before AJ. (And wouldn’t that be a cool, Godfather-like twist?) The bit about his “illegal party” was intended not to show that he’s moving into the world of crime, but to reinforce the fact that he’s a loser and a wimp. He went over to confront the crashers, but he didn’t have the cojones to get into the tussle himself, he let his friend fight them and just watched, grinning. He gets off watching other people fight, but would fold like a cheap suit in a street fight.
And then when his mother threatened to take away his allowance, he was dumb enough to tell her it wouldn’t work, 'cause he had his own money.
AJ is a spoiled wimpy idiot. Tony knows he isn’t Mob material, hasn’t made the first effort to get him into the business, and isn’t going to. My prediction: at some point AJ will try to get into something crooked and will be killed.
Maybe Finn is gay. Maybe seeing Vito made him confront his feelings.
Anyway, I agree with the hypothesis that Tony will go into a coma and there will be a power struggle. I think the recent deaths reinforce this point: the potential rivals have dwindled and the viewer can concentrate on a select number of guys in the political arena. Vito’s big talk was no joke. His ego has swelled up and he has gotten too big for his britches (figuratively). He will undoubtedly make a power play. I wonder how New York will figure into it.
I seriously doubt AJ will throw his hat in the ring. The party was typical kid stuff. More likely that plotline was there to show AJ’s future moving away from the family business & into party planning.
They seem to have taken the approach that, since it has been so long since the previous season, it would be weird to just pick up at the instant the show left off. I guess the writers felt it would be more realistic for us to feel that the Sopranos world has been continuing all this time - just not shown on HBO
The “last episode first” idea is bizarrely brilliant.
The rest of the season could explain exactly how Cristopher became a captain, among other things. Then the last 8 bonus episodes would let us know which of Tony’s souls were truly immortal. I’m betting against this idea, but I think it could work well, given what the writers have proven themselves capable of.
(And yes, that was Vito blowing the guy. That occured in the episode “Unidentified Black Males”, which is probably my favorite episode of Season Five and in the running for my favorite episode of the series thus far.)
I hope it’s not true, and if so, I’ll have wished you hadn’t “spoiled it”.
Not that you are at fault in any way, I’ll just wish I hadn’t read that tidbit.
Hell, I was one of the eight people who didn’t get “Sixth Sense” until the end.
The show is not about the New Jersey mafia, it’s about Tony Soprano. It wouldn’t really make sense for the writers to put him in a coma and turn their attention somewhere else. Maybe their’ll be some kind of power struggle, but if there is, Tony will be conscious for it.
And it would just suck if this was, temporally, the last episode in the season/series. It doesn’t seem like anything of much consequence has happened in the past year. Sure, some little things, like Christopher being promoted, and AJ going to college, but other than that? How would they fill up eleven episodes with that? We wouldn’t even get to wonder about who gets whacked, because we’ve seen most of the major characters alive already. There wouldn’t be any real suspense.
The “last episode first” idea would be brilliant in many ways, though it might be dramatically unworkable. I guess we’ll find out in the first minutes of Sunday’s episode - damn it, that’s still almost six days away!
My guess is that it’s not a “last episode first” thing at all. There are definite beginnings, threads left dangling, and going back to fill in the space between the last episode of the last season and this one would serve no purpose apart from blowing any dramatic tension. Who cares what happens if we know that no matter what Tony does, he’s going to end up getting plugged by a demented Uncle Junior?
There’s definitely a bigger gap in the diegetic time between the end of last season and now, but I think that’s purely practical – the actors have all aged twice as much more than they did between any other two previous seasons – and many of them are at ages where that really shows. They simply couldn’t pick up from the day after the end of last season for this episode, and they’re not going to be able to go back there for next week’s episode, either.
Anyway, the William S. Burroughs opening was fantastic – especially with the little pause for Carm’s dream. Brilliant editing, right down to her eyes opening in time to that little flourish.
Wait, what? A couple things. First, I clearly remember an episode devoted to Christopher being made a captain. Several posters have even mentioned that the guy who hung himself could be seen in the scene where he was made.
Much of the final episodes with Ade involved her being annoyed that Christaphuh was still having to do menial tasks even though he’d been made a captain.
Also, remember that every single season has been set in real time, regardless of how much time has passed since the previous season. This was most noteworthy in the season after 9/11.
And finally, I don’t know if Jamie Lynn’s eating disorder has kicked in again or not, but whatever she’s doing, it’s working for her. Yummy!
