by David Holtzman
The last episode of the terminal show of the final season of the Seasons played on Sunday and upset a lot of people.
SHOW SPOILER COMING UP
The viciously crazy Phil Leotardo finally gets whacked at a gas station, ending the short-lived gang war. Tony visits the completely senile Junior at the asylum then sits down at his favorite restaurant as his family comes in one at a time, sits and munches on onion rings. As the last one, Meadow, comes in, Tony looks up, the camera cuts to a number of suspicious people milling around the restaurant and then the screen goes completely black. Was Tony and family killed? Were they about to be picked up by undercover FBI agents? Was it a dream? Was it just another normal dinner presented in a surreal manner? I have a theory, which I'll toss out in a minute.
The media-interesting part of all this is how upset Americans are at a lack of closure in this 7 year series. I've been reading numerous blogs and news articles and there is a river of anger flowing at David Chase, the series creator, because of the ambiguity.
Who cares? Life isn't neat, plays don't end neatly nor do many great movies, so why must television show wrap up in a ridiculously tidy way?
I thought the last episode was brilliant and intellectually responsible. It would have undermined the integrity of the whole show to have the last episode devolve into a treacly, good-natured, end-of-MASH finale type show ("Ah Paulie, I'll miss you too...write me once a while, capisce?")
My theory(s). The likeliest one is that Tony was just killed. Someone walked behind him and put a bullet into his head and the black is what he would perceive, as Bobby speculated in the boat to Tony several shows before.
My more complicated theory is one that I haven't read anywhere else, but here it goes. The wonderful Sergio Leone movie, Once Upon a Time in America, ends in a very similar manner. Robert DeNiro, as Noodles, the Jewish gangster leans back at the end of the movie on an opium bed and laughs. Was he about to be killed as there were armed men nearby trying to do exactly that? Or was it a signal that he was dreaming the last half hour of the movie in an opium dream (he smoked some earlier in the movie in the same den). So, what if the Sopranos ending was the same kind of thing? Three episodes before, Tony went to Vegas and ate peyote with one of Christopher's ex-girlfriends. Perhaps everything after that was a hallucination. A supporting thought is that in the last few episodes, Tony acts likes a surprisingly nice guy (by his standards). He doesn't get mad, is supportive of his family while those around him act like fantasy satires in Tony's mind. Dr. Melfi drops him because she sees him as a criminal sociopath, Carmella becomes a shrewd self-serving harpy, AJ gets his life together over night, Meadow decides to go back to law school. After Bobbie dies, Tony is a supportive brother to Janice, which is a series first. Paulie returns to being a lovable kook as Tony sees him instead of the volatile psychopath that we all see. So maybe it was a peyote dream, full of wish-fulfillment and triggered by lingering guilt over his killing of his nephew.
Posted on June 13, 2007
The Sopranos is finishing up its sixth and final season and it's riveting television. It grabs you because the plot is completely subordinate to character. The web is full of speculation about who gets whacked, but everyone is arguing within the framework of the Soprano's World. It takes some pretty fine writing and directing to get millions of viewers to buy into this setup...like a Godfather or Apocalypse Now movie that keeps going on beyond the first three hours.
