Sopranos (spoilers)

[iluvlamp]

That's what I said earlier, the agent was Tony in some respects. He even had a goomah. When he said, "we're going to win this thing", what did he mean? That's been irritating me. Also, a lot of people have been saying that the cat was a reincarnated Ade. I kinda thought the cat represented death. Looking at Christopher all the time and Paulie being uneasy with his new job.

[brettac1]

the cat was a reincarnated Ade

 

Oh, dear. That's a reach. People have been looking for her to come back in some capacity, for whatever reason. I don't get it. She was a good character, and she's dead.

[danzig6767]

That's what I said earlier, the agent was Tony in some respects. He even had a goomah. When he said, "we're going to win this thing", what did he mean?

 

He had been working on getting Tony in jail for years,i'm thinking maybe he gave up Phil to keep Tony alive so he could see him get prosecuted,bring down the mob boss vs just letting him get killed.Remember that Tony was eating with his lawyer and was told that he'd likely get indicted soon,that couldn't happen with him dead.

 

Like those agents who worked for years to see Gotti get put behind bars,i doubt they would have been as satisfied if someone had instead killed Gotti before they had the chance to see him locked up.

[Fatter than Joey]

Lots of great points/ideas in this thread.

 

I never liked the "Leotardo" angle in the diner -- simply because if he was involved in sitdowns, I am pretty sure Tony would have recognized him -- as paranoid as Tony is.

 

The one thing that has stuck in my craw, is the Journey song -- which abrubtly ends on "Don't Stop" -- not "Don't Stop Believing" which I have come to interpret -- that the Sopranos should "Don't Stop" i.e. their reality continues and not their dreams. As others have pointed out -- Meadow will be tied into the mob and will not be a Dr., at Stanford, AJ as well, Carmella will continue to have her distractions but her life will not change at all. Tony will have to continue looking over his shoulder and every time he eats at a diner he will have to ask himself when a patron enters, if this is the one that is going to try and kill him.

 

I guess in some ways -- Tony getting shot may have been a merciful release to grant Tony -- however I think that Chase decided to damn Tony to more years of wondering about every person he sees, and wallowing in his paranoia.

[BrewCrewForever]

Another good point Fatter Then Joey. I love all the great takes people have had on the ending. Its interesting to read what others think.

[naivin]

As far as "We're gonna win this thing" goes, I thik it was pretty simple, the agent came to consider himself part of the family. Despite his claim in teh car that Ton was overreaching, he still made the phone call.

[dpapo]

I think people have been trying to read too much into things as well. Here is an interview Chase did before the season where he talks about the ending, among other things. I think he just left it open ended on purpose. If you take him at his word that he wasn't trying to be be audacious or blow people's minds then when he say's that "Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there." I take that to mean that there isn't anything more then what we see. Especially when the writer also shoots down the theory about the person at the counter and the two African-Americans who came in. Of course, people are going to read into the ending what they want, but it seems pretty straight forward to me.

 

David Chase speaks!

Posted by Alan Sepinwall June 11, 2007 10:50PM

Categories: The Sopranos

What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.

 

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

 

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."

 

In that scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a man in a Members Only jacket's walk to the men's room. Just as the tension had been ratched up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid song) with no resolution.

 

"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.

 

Some fans have already assumed that the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

 

"I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.

 

"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."

 

Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."

 

(Earlier in the interview, he notes that his favorite part of the show was often the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, it'll be set in Newark in the '60s.)

 

Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:

 

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

 

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

 

Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.

 

Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9.

 

"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.

 

Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath?

 

"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," insists Chase. "To me, that's Tony."

 

Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes?

 

"I'm the Number One fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"

 

One detail about the final scene that he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox.

 

"It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my god!' I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."

 

Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies.

 

"It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."

 

Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:

 

-After all the speculation that Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw that Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.

 

"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the '70s," says Chase of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.

 

-Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.

 

"This, to me, feels very real," he says. "The majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now."

 

Also, the apocryphal story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists, wasn't true.

 

"What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion."

 

-I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No."

 

-Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony?

 

"I think Butch was an intelligent guy, he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge."

 

-Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Member's Only guy had never been on the show before, Tony killed at least, one if not both of his carjackers, and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.

 

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com

 

blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/06...peaks.html

[iluvlamp]

I kind of took to mean the agent was on Tony's side also. The way the other agent looked at him made me wonder.

[homer]

This thread reminds me of a thread on another board where we discussed the meaning of U2's "One" for like 190 posts.

[TooLiveBrew]

9 episodes = Divine Comedy's 9 rings of hell

Cat = Adriana

Characters in diner = characters from past episodes

Walk to bathroom = Godfather homage

Eating orange = death of Tony

 

etc., etc., etc.

 

 

I think the great thing about a show as well-crafted as The Sopranos is that there is meaning for everyone's reading - like the near-200 posts on U2's "One." I have enjoyed the show from start to finish, and enjoy that Chase allowed me to end it in my own way. Is it wrong for me to think of a bloody end for Tony? No. Is that what Chase intended for me to think? Who knows -- and more importantly -- who cares?

 

Art is supposed to pose questions, as Chase had mentioned in an earlier interview. The joy of art for the patron, to me, is that you get to develop your own answer. Just like AJ's quoting of Yeats's "The Second Coming," each viewer is free to form his/her own rendition and ending.

 

AJ alluded to a poem written in the world-altering horrors of WWI, yet he viewed it as applicable to our modern world, almost a century later. In fact, the poem itself can help to explain Chase's conclusion. "The Second Coming" is about the end of the world/day of judgment being brought on by humankind itself, which is then powerless to stop the "beast."

 

 

Some quotes from Yeats's masterpiece that, to me, help to understand the show's conclusion:

 

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

(lns. 4-8 )

 

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" (lns. 21-22)

 

 

Obviously the latter contains AJ's excerpt, but I see so much of the show in these two specific segments. Carmela constantly grappled with her husband's (and her own) choices and lifestyle, always leaning on her religion for guidance. Although very early on, she came to terms that Tony's life will lead him down a path to hell & damnation, Carmela lacks conviction - she cannot bring herself to do anything to stop him - or save herself.

 

Her devout Catholicism truly becomes bathed in the blood she knows is on her husband's hands - and the image of "the ceremony of innocence drowned" in blood speaks to me of both their children's (& their own) baptisms, along with their other sacred ceremony thus far - their wedding. Nothing remains pure in their lives, aside from their own selves - flawed, dark, & corrupted as they may be - and that's how I see the episode ending. All they will ever truly have is each other - and even that can be taken away by a hitman (or a random event)

[TooLiveBrew]

Alright, I'll bow out and stop with the big posts after this. Yeats wrote another poem which, to me, walks in step with Chase's view on art's role -- and how others interpret, discern, and in some cases, demand, meaning...

 

 

"A Coat" W.B. Yeats

 

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world?s eyes

As though they?d wrought it.

Song, let them take it

For there?s more enterprise

In walking naked.

 

 

 

This is one my favorites, if not the favorite, of Yeats's poems. Artistic vision must take into account that others will read your work differently, often times in ways that you did not intend. However, the artistic purity of being "naked" cannot be stripped and re-designed - kind of like the ending to the Sopranos.

 

All Chase literally did to end the show was just stop -- not have a killing, or some other 'big' ending. Do we read into that? Yes - we, too, as fools, 'catch' that 'coat' and wear it how we see fit. Like Yeats here summarizes, Chase is supremely happy in that he wrapped up his masterpiece in his own way -- and if that bothers others, who cares?

[RobertR]

Something occurred to me today.

 

Tony gave AJ the life that Christopher wanted. An executive position in the film industry, money, sex, and a fancy new car. That position might not even have been open without the death of Christopher. In many ways, Tony did make a choice between his two sons.

 

Robert

[Fatter than Joey]

Steve Perry (Journey) interview

 

Short and interesting insight to the song used. I tend to agree with the conclusions drawn in the piece.

 

The only other thought that I had about the ending -- was that instead of Tony getting whacked -- we the viewers got whacked, just like Tony said in the boat to Bobby. The Soprano's life goes on, but our view into it doesn't.

[Pedro]

When he said, "we're going to win this thing", what did he mean?

 

I almost fell out of my chair when I heard this line while watching the show. In context of the show, I'm not sure what it meant, if anything. In context of real life, it was a direct reference to a current mob case.

 

Former FBI agent Lin DeVecchio is accused of assisting one of his informants, former Colombo capo Greg Scarpa, in four murders (not the actual pulling of the trigger, but information, etc. that resulted in the murders). One of the pieces of evidence against DeVecchio comes from another FBI agent who, when he informed DeVecchio of the killing of two soldiers from another faction in the family, says DeVecchio slapped the table, looked pleased and said "We're going to win this thing."

 

The other FBI agent took this to mean the Scarpa faction was going to win the war with the other faction (Little Vic's faction, if you care). DeVecchio says he meant that we (the FBI) and going to win this because the families are breaking up from the inside.

 

You can read about the case online, but I thought I'd share the parallels between real life and reel life.

[Fatter than Joey]

I almost fell out of my chair when I heard this line while watching the show. In context of the show, I'm not sure what it meant, if anything.

 

I intially thought perhaps the office had a pool of NY v. NJ, or there was some sort of internal competition in the FBI with regard to the 2 different factions.

[MKE alz]

Quote:

---

I intially thought perhaps the office had a pool of NY v. NJ, or there was some sort of internal competition in the FBI with regard to the 2 different factions.

---

 

Me to.

[RyDogg66]

Yeah, so Tony was shot. I dont know if this was posted here yet, but you have to read it.

 

www.bobharris.com/content/view/1406/1/

 

EDIT - My favorite part of the article...

 

Quote:

---

In Catholicism, administration of the Eucharist in the moments before death is known as Viaticum, derived from the Latin word for? ?Journey.?

 

 

[Loud throat clearing noise.]

---