Fans were outraged, one critic urged viewers to cancel their HBO subscriptions, and watercoolers were the scenes of angry debate Monday after Sunday’s long-awaited “Sopranos” finale.
The saga could have ended a week earlier, with Tony alone, no wife, no mistress, hugging a semi-automatic weapon in a single bed in a house reminiscent of his boyhood home. And that would have been fine.
But, now let’s think about it again. That empty feeling of wanting a concrete finish diminishes – and thoughts of the series’ best attributes come back.
In retrospect maybe creator David Chase’s actual finale, controversial as it was, succeeds on a number of levels.
It prods us to consider the series as a whole – the last page isn’t necessarily the most important in the book.
It avoids the hail-of-bullets scene, familiar from a legion of gangster movies.
It subtly delivers, albeit offscreen, what we knew was coming. But it makes us reach. In the final moments, the screen went black for a prolonged period, and we experienced a collective national gasp. Oh no! Had the cable gone out? Did we set the DVR wrong?
Chase deprived fans of literal closure but gave us something more provocative: When the end comes, you don’t even know it has happened, everything just goes black.
And it was done.
In the finale, a sinister looking man entered the diner where the Soprano clan had gathered. (No baked ziti. Chase confounded expectations there too.) After the head of the New York mob had been murdered in a gruesome, quasi-comical way a few scenes earlier, Tony, Carmela and A.J. contentedly popped onion rings.
The heightened buildup in the final diner scene was beyond excruciating. Meadow, having trouble parallel parking, seemed destined to be saved from the family execution. In the minds of viewers conditioned by so many gangster films, the scene unfolded in an obvious way.
Imagine it in slow-motion. We see Meadow’s face as she enters the diner, then approach the table from Meadow’s P.O.V., cut to the hitman emerging from the bathroom, gun blazing, the family is gunned down, one after another, bodies riddled with bullets, Meadow is screaming, there is endless blood – it all transpires in our imaginations.
Onscreen, all is normalcy. The camera continues to “focus on the good times,” as A.J. quotes his father. You don’t even know it’s happening, everything just goes black.
Still, viewers conditioned to more literal television demand a concrete answer.
Is Tony dead? You want a replayable, “Godfather”-style whacking? You’ve come to the wrong show.
I don’t buy the argument that Chase withheld a more traditional ending for a lucrative future film project. This ending, like the entire series, was unpredictable, unsettling and oddly satisfying.
A.J., forever unredeemable, talks about the Army but falls into a cushy job with a small-time movie studio. Tony, talking a good game with his son’s therapist (“My mother was a borderline personality”), still lives outside the boundaries of acceptable human conduct. Carmela, aware of the evil that supports her lifestyle, is all about going out to dinner.
Chase carried the theme of ethical breaches by professionals surrounding the mobster into the final hour, as the FBI agent disclosed Phil Leotardo’s whereabouts to Tony.
Not that there aren’t bones to pick. Ultimately, the ending with Dr. Melfi was implausible, and Junior’s storyline seemed the least resolved. It felt too pat to have Tony accuse his psychiatrist of being immoral on the way out of that relationship.
We all have quibbles with “The Sopranos,” but it remains a landmark pop-cultural phenomenon. Some of us even liked the ending.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
