Access all your favorite blogs from myajc! Home > Channel Serf > Archives > 2007 > June > 10
Sunday, June 10, 2007
All Due Respect … Sopranos Ends in the Dark
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Leave it to David Chase not to end “The Sopranos” easily or conventionally.
Heck, he didn’t exactly end it at all.
The build-up to the series finale had been intense, with everyone from Vegas oddsmakers to the annoying guy in the cubicle next to you at work obsessing over who would live or die. And watching it felt like the emotional equivalent of being trapped in a minefield. Any time a door opened onscreen or a car drove by a key character, you found yourself tensing and thinking “This is it. This is where Tony finally gets whacked and we all spend the better part of the next few years arguing about whether it was a good or bad ending to TV’s most overanalyzed series ever.”
Instead, Tony’s archrival, Phil Leotardo, got popped. Literally. First he was shot dead in front of his twin baby grandchildren, then run over ear-to-ear by his own SUV, so that his head practically exploded under a tire. Remember, kids, mobster or no, this is why we always set the emergency brake. (And what’s wrong with me, that I actually jumped up and cheered when Phil died, figuring that, in the words of the terrorists-hunting FBI agent, “We’re gonna win this one.” Meaning, to my way of thinking, that Tony, the brutal gangster with a heart of (undoubtedly stolen) gold, would probably live).
Unless … The tension kept building despite (or perhaps because of) all the little moments. Maybe it was only going to be a matter of time before Tony went out in even more gruesome fashion. Instead, the show — and the series — ended in the most banal way possible, with the family Soprano (the nuke-lee-er one, as Tony had so aptly put it earlier to his suddenly widowed sister, Janice) eating onion rings in a diner. You’d have thought they were the Cleavers stuck in the more innocent 1950’s — until you saw all the racially diverse faces in the diner and remembered that “Cleaver” was the name of the very successful slasher flick Tony helped finance with the earnings from his various criminal enterprises.
Was Chase trying to make an ironic point here? Or a deeper one, about how we all are the Sopranos and the Sopranos are all of us? (The episode title was “Made in America,” after all). Was this all to suggest a Mob hit just waiting to happen? … Or was it about something much bigger than all of that?
And then, just like that, before these or any other questions could be answered, it was over. The screen went to black and I’m sure I’m not the only one who started cursing the cable for going out at just the wrong moment when, surely, someone important (Tony? Carmela?) had been shot, or a bomb had gone off (there was so much talk of terrorism in this episode and, indeed, the entire season) or … SOMETHING awful had happened! It took me a good minute to realize that nothing had gone “wrong” onscreen. That that was exactly how it was supposed to end, with us thinking everything was fine … except, who knows, maybe it wasn’t. Any minute now, something terrible could happen. You just never know these days.
Did the series actually end?
Will it ever really be over?
Made in America, indeed.
