I'm being fascinated by the entire range of reactions to this, from the opposite of yours, to yours -- and I fall more on your end of the spectrum. After it stopped, I sat and blinked, and then went back and watched the whole cafe scene again, and yeah, it really, really worked for me, in part because it did just stop -- and we have no idea what happens next. Do things go on as they have, we leave them as we came in, living their lives, fucked up as ever and just moving on with everything? Or is one of those people that the camera lingered on, who seemed a potential assassin, an assassin in truth, and the next moments are nothing but blood? One of the things I thought was very cool was that that scene seemed so very strongly in Tony's PoV, how he watches people, the never knowing, the not trusting, and the lingering looks that I don't quite understand, because I'll never really understand him.
Yeah, I thought it ended the best way possible to avoid the potential pitfall of going for a big climax and missing.
Any big climax, I think, would've been a miss, because this has been a show about small moments. Even the end of S1, where Tony tries to whack his own mother, he can't because Fate has intervened.
I really thought, before tonight, that it would end with a treaty that left Patsy Parisi in charge in Jersey as Phil's man, Meadow more deeply entrenched in the mob as Patsy's daughter-in-law/source of his claim to the throne, and Tony alive but totally irrelevant and powerless. But in the end, I think Chase's ending did a better job of being about both of Tony's families than anything I could have come up with.
My reaction to this episode is, at the moment, somewhere between glee and heart attack. I really do hope I can be far more coherent tomorrow because boy, do I want to post about it. I have Many Thoughts. Including Schroedinger's Cat, the flashback in last week's episode to Bobby in the boat talking about how he thinks you never hear the shot that kills you, that there's nothing afterwards, just silence and blackness, that the cafe scene put us, for the first (and last) time in the entire series viscerally into Tony's existence: anyone could be the one. Any moment could be the moment. And that we are given visions of all three options for Tony's future: instant death, like Phil; arrested by the Feds, as telegraphed by the near-impossibility of escaping the coming indictment; or the long, slow slide into death, like Uncle Junior. And the family, in the end, cannot escape the gravitational pull that is being a Soprano. AJ has become Tony (coming down the stairs in a white bathrobe, wearing a gold medallion), Meadow is going to
( ... )
The scene with Paulie out in front of Satriale's was also a call-back to the pilot, with him sitting out there sunning himself -- except everyone else who'd been at the table with him is dead now.
I love the whole sub-theme of the cat, and what a digression it was, and yet how telling.
That was the most awesome non-ending in the history of overhyped endings, and it worked -- because this has never been a show with a straightforward narrative arc.
I saw a movie over the weekend called CAche that pulled a similar non-ending and that one felt like a cheat to me and yet, with The Sopranos it totally worked.
Interesting! Do you think that was because The Sopranos had a longer narrative history to work with, more than just two hours to gain your trust, or just because the movie wasn't so good? *g*
Do you think that was because The Sopranos had a longer narrative history to work with, more than just two hours to gain your trust, or just because the movie wasn't so good? *g*
It was defintely due to The Sopranos having so much more time behind it, the movie couldn't build up enough of a universe in two hours to justify a snap ending.
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Yeah, I thought it ended the best way possible to avoid the potential pitfall of going for a big climax and missing.
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I really thought, before tonight, that it would end with a treaty that left Patsy Parisi in charge in Jersey as Phil's man, Meadow more deeply entrenched in the mob as Patsy's daughter-in-law/source of his claim to the throne, and Tony alive but totally irrelevant and powerless. But in the end, I think Chase's ending did a better job of being about both of Tony's families than anything I could have come up with.
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I love the whole sub-theme of the cat, and what a digression it was, and yet how telling.
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I saw a movie over the weekend called CAche that pulled a similar non-ending and that one felt like a cheat to me and yet, with The Sopranos it totally worked.
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It was defintely due to The Sopranos having so much more time behind it, the movie couldn't build up enough of a universe in two hours to justify a snap ending.
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