The final Episode: Sopranos -Spoilers Everywhere!

[Mr. Lucky]

Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin' anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in south detroit
He took the midnight train goin' anywhere

A singer in a smokey room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on

Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
Hiding, somewhere in the night

Working hard to get my fill,
Everybody wants a thrill
Payin' anything to roll the dice,
Just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

(chorus)

Don't stop believin'
Hold on to the feelin'
Streetlight people

 

[Dr Doran]

Wow. Did you know the Journey lyrics by heart or did you find them on the web? If the former, I am impressed. Either way, thanks. I think the lyrics support the non-assassination interpretation personally.

 

[jake_fink]

Don't stop -

 

[Mr. Lucky]

Wow. Did you know the Journey lyrics by heart or did you find them on the web? If the former, I am impressed. Either way, thanks. I think the lyrics support the non-assassination interpretation personally.

I looked 'em up. And, yeah, the song, much to the chagrin of my inner ear, certainly fits the moment.

 

[Dr Doran]

I looked 'em up. And, yeah, the song, much to the chagrin of my inner ear, certainly fits the moment.

Soon enough, "Smells like teen spirit" will seem the "don't stop believing" of the future ... if it hasn't gained that patina of utter cheesiness already ...

 

[reetpleat]

As a fan of literature I don't buy the ending for two reasons.

Fistly, to leave the viewer having to decide for himself what happened oes not work. Nothing happened because it is just a story. If they are the story tellers it is a cop out to say "you finish the story yourself." If that is the cae, we could just have stopped watching after the first episode and finished it all ourselves.

If they are telling the story, they have to tell it.

Secondly, any good story (traditionally anyway) has to have some kind of change in the protagonist. for tony to just keep going as he is does not reallly work literarily. It would be best to put him in a situation in which he has to actually make a choice, the good or the bad, and a proper ending would have him congfronted with that moment in which he must face that choice. Ideally he would choose to do the right thing which may result in his death. Or he may choose it and then die fro another reason, but die having made a final choice for the good. What is the point of him ever questioning himself with a psychiatrist if he never has to face it.

Or he could choose the bad, and have to live with that for the rest of his life.



Actually my ending has Tony getting whacked by surprise, Adrianna's mom.

 

[Brian Sheridan]

THE BEST ANSWER I HAVE HEARD:

The end of The Soprano's was YOU THE VIEWER getting whacked! The whole diner scene built up the tension Tony lives with everyday - the fear of being hit and there was a hit - on us.

While we were all watching the show, a mob hit man snuck into every one of our homes and took us out, while the Soprano's family life goes on as usual.

The TV screen went black and silent because we were dead, dead, dead.

I think that explaination makes the ending BRILLANT!

 

[Mr. Lucky]

Soon enough, "Smells like teen spirit" will seem the "don't stop believing" of the future ... if it hasn't gained that patina of utter cheesiness already ...

I kid you not!

 

[jake_fink]

I think Brian Sheridan's answer comes closest to what I think of it. The show has dealt with death for 6.5 seasons, sometimes it was handled as tragedy, sometimes as comedy and sometimes as - feh - just one of those things. The end of the series is just one more way of treating the theme of death, only this time from the inside. Homer uses darkness as his image for death - the darkness enfolded his eyes, for example, and here was a sudden darkness enfolding our eyes. And yet, frustratiingly, life is going on without us, there is an impending trial, there is a mysterious restrooom-user and there is the arrival of Meadow with who knows what news. Death is not the end - except for the guy who dies. So the end is - among other things - a metaphor for death.

I'll say that it is not as brilliant as I thought it muight be - it didn't leave me gobsmacked or pale and shakey - as I thought it might. It left me thinking though. It's the rhetorical question that throws you back into the story - so what happends to Tony? And so it avoids all of the possible trite and moralistic or morally suspect finales that we'd all expected.

As far as it conforming to some rule from the big book of literary rules, well, the first rule is THERE ARE NO RULES, and if there were it wouldn't matter becuase this is television, not literature, a different medium and a different form of narrative; so a different kind of ending is appropriate.

 

[jake_fink]

Don't Stop Believing is still one of the worst songs in the history of sound and all memebers of journey will be tortured with flaming earwigs for all eternity in payment for its creation.

 

[Dr Doran]

I kid you not!

Holy cr ...

 

[Dr Doran]

Don't Stop Believing is still one of the worst songs in the history of sound and all memebers of journey will be tortured with flaming earwigs for all eternity in payment for its creation.

Not as bad as either "The Heart of Rock and Roll is the Music" by Huey Lewis (cf the murderous protagonist of American Psycho who idolizes and glowingly reviews Huey Lewis in mid-narrative, perhaps Bret Easton Ellis' attempt to link bad taste with evil) or, worse, "We Built This City on Rock And Roll" by Starship. Those, my good Jake, are much worse, in my ever humble opinion.

 

[Dr Doran]

THE BEST ANSWER I HAVE HEARD:

The end of The Soprano's was YOU THE VIEWER getting whacked! The whole diner scene built up the tension Tony lives with everyday - the fear of being hit and there was a hit - on us.

While we were all watching the show, a mob hit man snuck into every one of our homes and took us out, while the Soprano's family life goes on as usual.

The TV screen went black and silent because we were dead, dead, dead.

I think that explaination makes the ending BRILLANT!

I am starting to buy your idea. The Homeric thing about blackness enveloping the eyes works with this ... I heart Homer bigtime.

 

[Dr Doran]

As a fan of literature I don't buy the ending for two reasons.

Fistly, to leave the viewer having to decide for himself what happened oes not work. Nothing happened because it is just a story. If they are the story tellers it is a cop out to say "you finish the story yourself." If that is the cae, we could just have stopped watching after the first episode and finished it all ourselves.

If they are telling the story, they have to tell it.

Secondly, any good story (traditionally anyway) has to have some kind of change in the protagonist. for tony to just keep going as he is does not reallly work literarily. It would be best to put him in a situation in which he has to actually make a choice, the good or the bad, and a proper ending would have him congfronted with that moment in which he must face that choice. Ideally he would choose to do the right thing which may result in his death. Or he may choose it and then die fro another reason, but die having made a final choice for the good. What is the point of him ever questioning himself with a psychiatrist if he never has to face it.

Or he could choose the bad, and have to live with that for the rest of his life.



Actually my ending has Tony getting whacked by surprise, Adrianna's mom.

But you are making excellent points too, my good San Franciscan (any chance of you coming to our SF outing soon?) We want resolution as common sense, Aristotle's Poetics, and Lajos Egri's superb masterpiece The Art of Dramatic Writing (which openly relies heavily on Aristotle) demands. Further, your point that the character needs to change is excellent. Remember in either Season 1 or 2 (cannot remember) Chris asking Paulie, "What's my character arc?" as he had been working on scriptwriting? So it's not like David Chase was ignorant of these rules. But I suppose someone could argue that Tony HAD changed several times during the series: such as the time when he refrained from having the high school soccer teacher whacked when the guy, who was married, had had a sexual affair with one of his students. At least that was what I thought was the point of that failure-to-whack.

I guess the question is whether the ending of the series is supposed to represent the end of the STORY OF THE SOPRANOS. And clearly, if the creator chose to end it without an assassination (yes, this following idea is hanging on the assumption that no assassination took place) then we must assume that Chase chose to finish the series WITHOUT GIVING US A PROPER ARISTOTELIAN ENDING, DENOUMENT, EVEN CLIMAX. So the story goes on, but we don't have filmed versions by Chase to watch. Perhaps the people who make their own Star Trek continuing adventures will finish it ... one thing for sure is, unless Gandolfini is lying about being sick of the show, or else very susceptible to bribes, Chase won't continue with him.

 

[reetpleat]

THE BEST ANSWER I HAVE HEARD:

The end of The Soprano's was YOU THE VIEWER getting whacked! The whole diner scene built up the tension Tony lives with everyday - the fear of being hit and there was a hit - on us.

While we were all watching the show, a mob hit man snuck into every one of our homes and took us out, while the Soprano's family life goes on as usual.

The TV screen went black and silent because we were dead, dead, dead.

I think that explaination makes the ending BRILLANT!

While that might be an interesting or fun way to look at it, I am sure not going to give the writers credit for it. If we all come up with our own endings and say, how brilliant of the writers to have written it just how I would have ended it is silly. They copped out.

Now if this was the last episode of the season and we have to guess what happened till next year, that would have been a great cliff hanger ending in the grand tradition. But to end it and never have any answer is different.

 

[reetpleat]

I think Brian Sheridan's answer comes closest to what I think of it. The show has dealt with death for 6.5 seasons, sometimes it was handled as tragedy, sometimes as comedy and sometimes as - feh - just one of those things. The end of the series is just one more way of treating the theme of death, only this time from the inside. Homer uses darkness as his image for death - the darkness enfolded his eyes, for example, and here was a sudden darkness enfolding our eyes. And yet, frustratiingly, life is going on without us, there is an impending trial, there is a mysterious restrooom-user and there is the arrival of Meadow with who knows what news. Death is not the end - except for the guy who dies. So the end is - among other things - a metaphor for death.

I'll say that it is not as brilliant as I thought it muight be - it didn't leave me gobsmacked or pale and shakey - as I thought it might. It left me thinking though. It's the rhetorical question that throws you back into the story - so what happends to Tony? And so it avoids all of the possible trite and moralistic or morally suspect finales that we'd all expected.

As far as it conforming to some rule from the big book of literary rules, well, the first rule is THERE ARE NO RULES, and if there were it wouldn't matter becuase this is television, not literature, a different medium and a different form of narrative; so a different kind of ending is appropriate.

While I don't get too hung up on rules, there is a reason rules exist. It is because that works for story telling. If you are going to break a rule you better know what rule youa re breaking, why, and do it damn well. Or at least have done it out of pure unthinking genius.

I think story telling is story telling, no matter the medium.

As far as death enfolding tony, we already have a precedence of tony approaching death and going into a house towards the light until meadow's voice calls him back. Why should that be different now?

 

[Dr Doran]

good points, good points... you are on the verge of convincing me.
further, as a fan of sociobiology and more importantly evolutionary psychology, i agree with your insistence on rules ... all folklore that we know of now survived through a semi-Darwinian process. Why? because it resonated somehow this means it stuck to the rules that describe human resonsiveness to narrative ... the stories that stayed, stayed because they struck us. they struck us for a reason. unless most of us (i.e. the New Yorker) can agree that the end of the sopranos, with the blackout, was somehow meaningful, it won't stay with us.

 

[jake_fink]

While I don't get too hung up on rules, there is a reason rules exist. It is because that works for story telling. If you are going to break a rule you better know what rule youa re breaking, why, and do it damn well. Or at least have done it out of pure unthinking genius.

I think story telling is story telling, no matter the medium.

As far as death enfolding tony, we already have a precedence of tony approaching death and going into a house towards the light until meadow's voice calls him back. Why should that be different now?

I agree witht the first paragraph and argue that Chase knows exactly what the rule is and why he's breaking it. the story has been long and in it's comings and goings it has been not unlike life and an ending in that context, where strings are tied up neatly, may not have been appropriate. it also leaves us (and Chase) ambivalent about Tony. He does not go out in a blaze of heroic glory nor does he fall into a moralizing wreck ("is this the end of Rico?")

A story is not a story no matter the medium, becasue different mediums make the story differntly. Novels use language, films use visuals, dialogue and sound within - roughly a two hour frame work. The Sopranos was told over an extended period of time, with frequent stops and starts, and told in visuals and dialogue and with a rare impportance placed on music. I think the "sudden" cut to black with the music cuting off wher it did - Don't stop - wass really effective.

Finally about death. I would not argue that Tony died, but that the ending created the effect of death for the audience. Whatever happens next, violent or not, long and legal or whatever, is beyond our view. We have been violently removed from teh narrative, not Tony.

 

[Dr Doran]

I agree witht the first paragraph and argue that Chase knows exactly what the rule is and why he's breaking it. the story has been long and in it's comings and goings it has been not unlike life and an ending in that context, where strings are tied up neatly, may not have been appropriate. it also leaves us (and Chase) ambivalent about Tony. He does not go out in a blaze of heroic glory nor does he fall into a moralizing wreck ("is this the end of Rico?")

This is pretty convincing to me.

A story is not a story no matter the medium, becasue different mediums make the story differntly. Novels use language, films use visuals, dialogue and sound within - roughly a two hour frame work. The Sopranos was told over an extended period of time, with frequent stops and starts, and told in visuals and dialogue and with a rare impportance placed on music. I think the "sudden" cut to black with the music cuting off wher it did - Don't stop - wass really effective.

I agree, esp. about the song. However, a story is still a story ... film and the novel have more in common than otherwise ... the length of a long TV series makes it the odd man out.

Finally about death. I would not argue that Tony died, but that the ending created the effect of death for the audience. Whatever happens next, violent or not, long and legal or whatever, is beyond our view. We have been violently removed from teh narrative, not Tony.

I am not sure how I feel about this argument.

 

[Mr. Lucky]

While I don't get too hung up on rules, there is a reason rules exist. It is because that works for story telling. If you are going to break a rule you better know what rule youa re breaking, why, and do it damn well. Or at least have done it out of pure unthinking genius.

Actually, in terms of the television narrative, Chase shattered the rules, shuffled the pieces around and came up with a whole new set! It's a whole new ball-game now. Look at Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, Deadwood (RIP) and the new batch - they all use the Soprano's structure and hyper-reality as their starting point and go from there. David Chase has kicked in a door that has blocked many a new/old voice from exercising their creative muscles that has existed since shortly after the dawn of the medium! The moment TV went from live to film/tape, all the high-stakes were off the table and middle-of-the-road entertainment was the norm. Now, I love(d) the Quinn Martin/Stephen Cannell school of wrap it all in a pretty bow in 48 minutes and four acts - it was fun! But it wasn't challenging. I wasn't compelling. Neil Simon is entertaining. Shakespeare is entertaining AND challenging. Euripidies is challenging. We have gone full circle, in the terms of the above mentioned shows - we are back to those that created the concept of drama and storytelling! What was Nate's dead father in Six Feet Under if not Hamlet's own? What was Swerengen's conversations with the head of the Indian in the box if not a device modified from the masters? Hell, I personally would love to come up with a show in which I could use a Greek Chorus!

David Chase took the original lessons of drama and storytelling and applied them to a media that had yet been exploited in such a manner! And he did so wonderfully and with the Rod Serling, another man who brought a new form of the old 'morality play' to the medium, Rule" in place.

As a writer from the NY Times said, quite succinctly: "It wasn't a finale; it was an ending!" And I believe he's right.

"Rod Serling Rule - When you write, whatever you write, never think your audience is any less intelligent than you are".