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The Sopranos Ends With a ...
If you still have your copy sitting unwatched on your Tivo, I'd suggest that you stop reading before you are spoiled. The show is done at last and apparently fans are freaking out over the bizarre ending. At my house, we thought at first that the DVR crashed until the credits appeared in silence. Personally I thought that a show known for such excess tried to take an artful bow: It didn't work for me, but I get it at least. Anyway, I had a number of Sopranos submissions this morning and figured I'd just post this comment to give people who were interested in discussing the end of the show a nice place to discuss before they cancel their HBO.
It completely sucked. It left you with thinking "he either got shot.. or didn't get shot."
I guess their main objective was to leave question, but leave everyone realizing that he's got to spend the rest of his life in anxiety, wondering if he's going to get shot at any time.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
I never was an avid fan of the Sopranos. My roommate was seriously in love with it and I'd catch an episode with him. I've seen only a handful and they spread across a broad spectrum from an interesting first season episode full of mob action & scheming to a kid shitting in a shower and stepping on it. Ok, so maybe I'm oversimplifying the episodes that slowly build up family strife and psychological problems that must come with being in organized crime families.
... if they did, mobsters would have just killed each other off. But there are smart mobsters out there and what I took the ending to mean to me is that Tony is, after all, a smart mobster. He made it. Guys around him were dying left & right and his time had come but he struck a deal after holding out. I think they killed his brother or at least someone close to him but he was smart enough to write that casualty off. Not a lot of people could do that. Maybe this series chronicles the growth of an intelligent mobster? The old Tony might have made an offensive after that.
:)
Last night, it was very easy for me to accept the ending of the series finale. Because I wasn't addicted to the show. Logically, not all mob stories end in a Scarface-like explosion where everyone dies
I kept waiting for an assassin to pop out & kill Tony for the last half of the show. But, I didn't have a reason why that should have happened. Am I so trained by movies & books on endings that I can't accept one without a climax? My roommate new it was coming because he kept looking at his watch and saying stuff like "ok, shit better start happening because they've only got like 15 minutes." But you know, you're at the mercy of the writers and creaters of the show.
It was unorthodoxed for it to end that way. I'm reminded of the utter ripoff I felt when I saw the last episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. But that was due to funding, I think this was the idea of the minds behind the show. Good for them. I like seeing deviations from normality when I don't have to suffer from it.
In the end, there were a lot of things that weren't wrapped up and I think that's the big problem a lot of fans are having to deal with. I think the reason so many fans are going to feel this is that the show started off as a badass mob series that attracted viewers of a certain nature who enjoy living a vicarious life of crime. Unfortunately, the ending just wasn't juicy enough to satiate that kind of appetite and I think that's why you'll hear so much about this. Personally, I liked it although I recognize that too many questions were left unanswered, too many futures were left uncertain & too many problems were left unresolved.
But, hey, that's life, isn't it?
My work here is dung.
That sense of tension and anxiety at the end is how Tony has to lead his life, every minute of every day. He doesn't know what's going to happen next, and now you know what that's like.
It was pretty clear to me that he died. Remember the flashback in the previous episode, where Bobby says "You never even hear it when it happens, do you?" Implying everything just goes black - you're dead before you even hear the gun being fired. Well, that's exactly what happened. The last thing Tony say was Meadow walking in the door.
Earlier in the episode, he was eating an orange, which is a reference to the Godfather files that has been made before in the series. They signify death, don't they?
I thought it was an excellent episode. It would be so cliche if they just showed him getting his head blown off, or even ended with a black screen and gunshot. If you pay attention, you pretty much know what happened. But you have to think about it.
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The motto for the site is "News for nerds, stuff that matters". I think the ending falls under the second part of that
I always thought that the "stuff that matters" actually mattered - like rights, events and so on, with a tech flavor.
It is unfortunate that a TV show now comes under "stuff that matters". I'm surprised that we don't have Paris Hilton updates as well - I'm sure that matters to a good number of people.
Life goes on even though there is the impending "threat" of violence. It was an attempt to let us see through this character's (Anthony's) eyes a constant threat, similar to that of many Americans. If you let it consume you, you will end up anxious or worst case scenario, preemptively attacking another country, "God forbid."
I don't even watch that show, I just came to know what's the big deal about the ending. I do not, however, want a list of the stuff you don't care about, so STFU already.
You can't take the sky from me...
At first I was like: WTF?
But then I realized we were looking at every action around him as a source of danger... Expecting anything to happen. And for that short few minutes we knew what it was like to be Tony. Could be the FBI waiting to grab you, could be some hired killers edging their way toward your table and entire family, the whole damn place could explode, etc...
No nice tidy bow wrapped ending for us or Tony, just another rev of the same wheel.
I don't believe there is a correct interpretation of the ending, I think that's the whole point. Offer the viewer no solace, force them to think about what they have just watched, and let them decide on what that may be, regardless of what it is.
That's exactly what the series ended with. You can read into it all the "meaning" you like. The fact is, the writers, directors, producers, et. al., left it wide open. "How do we end it?" they all said to themselves. Then, HBO executives, said: "Just don't. Don't end it at all. Don't have Tony dead. Don't have him in jail. Don't have him run to his new FBI friend and make a deal. Don't resolve anything. Don't do anything that will lock us into or out of possible future revenue. Just cut to black." And the rest of them, in unison, standing their in muffled awe, breathed "Genius."
Whatever the original artistic intent of this ending was, it occurred to me that if I was going to depict a guy getting whacked who never saw it coming - from that guy's own perspective - this might be just how I'd portray that.
This probably reads like a troll, but I'm genuinely interested, because I so don't get it. Think of it as a personal failing on my part, and point out the cultural riches I'm missing out on. People have a fascination with badasses and few people have a better image of badassery than mobsters. All of us live life constrained by the rules and subservient to those with power. Mobsters take power and make their own rules. We see the danger they live in and see ourselves as too timid to embrace the prospect of self-destruction at any moment but our popular image of the mobster is that he lives and dies hard. Of course, since most of us also have no direct experience with these people, we fill in the blanks with our own romantic ideas of what goes down. I remember reading about one mobster who went with his mugs to go see a crime picture. He was very impressed with the fictional mob rites of loyalty and oath-taking. "Dis stuff is good," he said to one of his goombahs. "We need to be doin' dis."
Mobsters were simply the latest flavor of the generation. Before the mobster fascination we had cowboys and gunfighters. Before that we had romantic notions of pirate kings and exotic foreign lands. If you think the mobsters are bad, you don't even want to read about what hardcore pirates were like. The level of violence and brutality is sickening to see described in words on paper, I cannot even imagine what it looked like in person. And somehow, despite all that, we see pirates celebrated as shady but with hearts of gold.
But here's the funny part. What do you call a truly successful pirate or mobster? Your majesty. Seriously. Where do you think the ruling houses and nobles came from? Sure, ten generations down the line the House of Someguy is represented by some effete twit but I guarantee you the original Someguy was a badass you did not want to cross. And the best mobsters were the ones who figured out how to operate with the law on their side. Robber-baron was not a title of pressroom hyperbole. Where did Daddy Kennedy make his money? Rum-running. How did George W. Bush's grandpappy get rich? Doing business with the Nazis.
We don't see movies made about average joes living contented lives. We never read about the farmboy who stayed home, obeyed his fathers wishes and took over the farm. We read about his brother, the one who ran away to join the Navy, who decided to fight in some noble war in some far-flung land. We read about the man with the ambition to do something great, no matter how much blood was needed to grease the wheels. It is spectacle, it is horror, and it is a dreadful fascination, and newspapermen will continue to make money feeding that curiosity.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Lots of people used their Tivos to record the last episode of The Sopranos.
There's your tech flavor.
Now shut up.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The last show kind of spoke to me in an odd way. I mean don't get me wrong, I loved the episode before with the huge blood bath, but that is a very rare occurrence in Sopranos. Sopranos is more about the drama, and that's what we get in the episode.
That being said the ending had me hooked because every couple seconds I was saying "oh god don't do it here" and I had a feeling it was his final scene. But I believe the ending was his death, as Bobby Baccala said in the first episode this season you don't even hear it. Why else cut the music and the screen? I think the show was over and so was his life.
But that will be a series ender people will talk about for years, and as such kudos to David Chase.
So, I think the point of this is, Slashdot is "News for nerds, stuff that matters [to CmdrTaco and friends]." If you don't like it, you're welcome to go and start your own news aggregation site. CmdrTaco and company have also conveniently provided the code you could use to run your site. Have at it. But, as long as you're coming here and reading the articles on this site, realize that maybe not everything discussed here is right up your alley.
I personally haven't watched a single episode of the Soprano's. But, I came in here to read the comments because enough people have talked about the show over the years, and the build up to the final episode, that I was interested in hearing how it ended (especially in light of CmdrTaco's description of it).
IANAL... But I play one on
Stop wasting yours, and slashdot's resources on your shit. Go out and do something worthwhile, instead of trolling the net, telling people that what they like is not good.
You can't take the sky from me...
Sounds like the words of someone that never gave the show a chance. It's called entertainment. If it brings a little pleasure, then it's done its job. If it challenges our minds to think in slightly differnt ways, then all the better for us. But let's keep perspective here... it was a fictional TV show designed to entertain. It's not like all of the actors are going to join the crusade to fight poverty, hunger and AIDS now that they're done working on The Sopranos. They're going to do their best to get another job in the entertainment industry. Nobody's forcing you to watch The Sopranos or Friends. You can always change the channel or turn off the TV entirely.
There is *no way in hell* they would ever release something like a Sopranos Collector's Edition exclusively on BlueRay. *None*. The market for BlueRay is plain and simply dwarfed by DVD, right now, and the minor losses to piracy aren't enough to justify throwing that market away. It just ain't gonna happen.
What, and let mediocrity win? Allow people like you to turn Slashdot into a poor parody of Digg? Let people like ESR and CmdrTaco think that they're some sort of political activists who have interesting and insightful commentary to make? Allow them to make people think that geeks should think like them and share their opinions?
Apart from which, I have nothing better to do from within the heavily fire-walled fortress that is the company I work for. Even half of Slashdot is blocked from here (Happily including yro.slashdot.org & politics.slashdot.org. Sadly hardware.slashdot.org, too).
It's amazing to me how many people really just didn't get it.
The ending left a lot open to speculation, but one thing that it didn't leave open (IMO) is Tony's fate.
Tony is dead - if you watch episode #78 "Soprano Home Movies," while Tony and Bobby are on the lake they are talking about what happens to people like them, and specifically about what it's like to get killed. Tony says something along the lines of "you don't hear the one that gets you," and Bobby asks "what do you tin happens when you die," to which Tony replies "nothing, everything just goes black."
Then, in last week's episode, "#85 The Blue Comet," Tony flashes back to this scene while he is lying in bed "everything just goes black."
Even David Chase said in an interview that the key to how it ends is in that first episode (Soprano Home Movies), and to make sure people would remember this he put Tony flashing back to that moment at the end of "#85 The Blue Comet."
On top of all of that there was so much death symbolism in the episode...I definitely had to watch it twice, but he definitely got clipped - and I think the finale was awesome.
In addition to the death symbolism and foreshadowing, the show made a lot of points about America - hence the title.
He's alive. And not just to leave it open for a movie or new series, but because the entire show was about this same cycle. The show was never about closure, or redemption, or the hero's journey. It was about making you sit in his seat for awhile, and see the world through his eyes, not a glorified "Top of the world ma!" go out in a blaze of glory type thing. It was an "end up in a wheel chair unaware of who you are" sort of thing.
The break away to black was a crescendo to the tension they created with the folks walking in, looking shifty. "OMG, that guys gonna whack him!", "OMG, that dude is gonna shoot AJ", "OMG, Meadow's car will blow up."
Why kill him? Why not show him being killed if he is? What lesson would we learn from that that we don't learn by him being alive, but trapped. By the life, the fear, the machine. He's not afraid to die, he's afraid of that senile old man in the chair.
"This thing of ours, once you're in, there ain't no gettin' out." Which is a fitting prison for Tony, locked in a life of his own making, nostalgically trying to reach out for the "old days" when his Dad and Uncle June ran N. Jersey. But those days are gone, if they ever existed. There are no good old days, just days, and life goes on. Let's get some onion rings tonight, b/c there's a good chance we'll all be dead tomorrow.
People had been complaining a lot for last few seasons about not enough whacking, so the creator gave the audience the ultimate whack - he whacked them. He set up a lot of tension and put you in the moment, while distracting you at the same time, and then whack - everything goes black. You never saw it coming.
The 2nd to last episode was a trick to make people think they he had given in to the complaints and was going to have a whack-fest, but it was just a diversion. He was just setting the audience up to make the ultimate whack even sweeter.