Let me start with a big fat “fuck you” to David Chase for ending the Sopranos like that. I’m sorry, no matter how many ways from Sunday he tries to spin it, that ending may have been the ultimate television cop out of all time. And yes, that includes the entire run of Newhart being a dream set in the reality of the Bob Newhart Show, and St. Elsewhere taking place inside the mind of an autistic kid looking at a snow globe. The only thing that may trump it might be the RDM laden BSG finale next year.
Here’s the thing. Up until that point, I thought the episode was great. It didn’t try to do too much for its finale. They got Phil, Tony made peace with New York (who were smart enough to know things with Phil had reached a point that was bad for all sides), AJ seems to be okay, Meadow is getting married (although you know Tony is sort of hurt knowing where her life is leading, I always see his desires for her to go to medical school like Vito telling Michael he didn’t want that life for him in One), Carmela doesn’t seem to want to dump Tony, and most importantly, he survived the war. Yet, that ending ruins all of it.
When you have a show like this one, you really can’t chicken out on the ending. Either let Tony get whacked, or let him get pinched, or let there just be a quiet family dinner ending, like there was at the end of season One (this was supposed to reflect that, I think, except with the updated idea of the family going about the things they do now a days). That sort of thing won’t make anyone happy, as the internets have pretty much stated.
On a side note, I loved how they ended up AJ’s character. Here he is becoming this globally aware emo kid who wants to join the army and end dependence on foreign oil, and in the end we have him just being another Soprano, driving a fancy car, and working in the Family business (albeit on the edge), happily placated, giving only the most cursory nod to his former self by rationalizing the new car being okay because “it gets 23 miles per gallon. That’s pretty good.” That is a classic ending for this show.
My idea for how it could have ended in a more satisfying way would have been to show Tony at the restaurant waiting for Carm and the kids, and as he looks around at all of the people there, he sees all of the people who have left this world sitting at all the tables around him: Christopher, Adriana, Pussy, Ralphie, Richie Aprile, etc. The last shot would be a long trailing one pulling away from the Soprano family around the table there eating as we fade to black knowing that Tony may have survived, but it was not without great cost. Tell me that would not have been so much better and more fulfilling.
All in all, I’m glad the Sopranos are done. They ran out of steam after Nancy Marchand’s death, but took the X-Files route of it and milked it for all the money they could. This ending proves that the show was ready to be put to pasture, and we are all the better for it.
