Salon Member log in | Help
Benefits of membership

I Like to Watch

"Sopranos" finale an act of genius? Fuhgedaboudit! Great art may provoke us to the point of violence, but our favorite TV shows shouldn't.

By Heather Havrilesky

Pages 1 2

Read more: The Sopranos, TV, Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, I Like to Watch, Rebecca Traister

June 14, 2007 | Imagination cannot grasp simple nothingness and must therefore fill the void with fantasies. -- Alan Watts, "The Book"

Tens of thousands of rioters filled the streets of Jersey City Sunday night to protest "The Sopranos" creator David Chase's ambiguous ending. Rioters threw bottles and large platters of baked ziti, and then began overturning cars and setting SUVs on fire, shouting "It's all a big nothing! It's all a big nothing!"

By Monday morning, the country had plunged into a nihilistic downward spiral, and productivity was down 35 percent nationwide. "Seven years I watched Tony Soprano do his thing, and for what?" said Minneapolis lawyer Sal McAllister, "All he is to me now is some asshole bully."

Demonstrators stormed the HBO offices, looking for "that drunk" Chris Albrecht, certain that Sunday's finale was all his fault. Other angry fans read and reread David Chase's interview with the Newark Star-Ledger, looking for some hint of what he intended with such an alarmingly incomplete ending.

Meanwhile, the country's intellectual elites delighted in the outcry, since it clearly meant that they were, once again, better than everyone else. Rallying to Chase's defense, critics and know-it-alls declared his ending "brilliant in the way it captures the torturous, open-ended nature of the human condition." Janice Smellnicore of the Boston Morning Herald raved, "First, we wondered if our satellite dish was malfunctioning. Then we wanted to brain David Chase. In short, we felt exactly like Tony Soprano! Bravo, Mr. Chase! Your act of subversion is, at the very least, not lost on this perceptive critic!"

Dear ILTW,

Embarrassingly, I have now watched the episode three times. I am fascinated by the fast-growing conspiracy theories. The speculation so far:

  • Everyone in Holsten's is someone Tony beat up in previous seasons. (This is entirely fabricated, as confirmed by Alan Sepinwall in his interview with Chase in the Newark Star-Ledger)

  • The waiter who brings them the onion rings is named "Kevin Finnerty," the name of Tony's dream-identity from when he was shot, and the guy at the bar is "Nikki Leotardo," Phil's nephew. (Not true, I've now checked the credits for all of this shit -- it's invented out of whole cloth!)

  • The first episode of the season is called "Members Only" and the menacing guy at the counter is wearing a Members Only jacket. (But there have been lots of "Sopranos" characters with Members Only jackets. Remember Ralphie?)

  • Each of the nine episodes this season stood in for one of Dante's levels of hell. (Chase says not true.)

  • Tony began the episode already dead (killed at the safe house) and the first funereal shot we see of him is him in a coffin.

  • Tony was wearing two different outfits in the last scene; therefore it was a dream (Not true. He just changes out of his jacket.)

  • He was eating oranges (from "The Godfather") earlier in the episode, which means he was definitely killed at the end.

  • He had gathered them all at Holsten's to tell them they were going into the witness protection program, which is why Carm was looking at plans for a "beach house" before dinner. (Because their witness protection house was gonna be in Avalon?)

  • The episode is all a dream. Tony went to bed on a bare mattress but woke up on sheets, dreams all of the weirdness with A.J.'s exploding car and Trump aspirations, Phil's violent death, a therapist who reminds him of Melfi, and finally the weird cut of him watching himself eat at the diner. A.J.'s line "You're living in a fucking dream" is a clue, and the door chime at Holsten's is his alarm clock waking him up.

  • Tony is wearing the same shirt he did when Uncle June shot him, so he's still in his coma.

  • An image of Adriana is reflected in the eyes of the cat.

  • The other song option underneath "Don't Stop Believin'" was "Any Way You Want It," which is how Chase wanted us to conceive of the ending. (This one, I feel, is probably true.)

    • I think the end reflected the anxieties Tony feels all the time: He or his loved ones could get wiped out anytime, not just because he's a mobster, but because he's a regular suburban American guy who could get capped, or blown up by terrorists, who has kids who are bad parallel parkers and cross the street without looking. In the Star Ledger interview, Chase talked about the "terrorists" that Tony turned in and said, "That was sort of the point of it: Who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen?" -- which I thought was sort of the point of the whole last scene. Anyone you see might be a menace ... or not.

    Rebecca Traister

    Rebecca,

    Thanks for all of your legwork! I would've watched the last episode a few more times, too, but I was busy overturning cars and setting stuff on fire.

    It was a rough couple of days. One minute you're polishing off a big plate of spaghetti in front of the last episode of one of your favorite shows ever, the next minute you're out on the streets, pulling people from their vehicles and beating their faces in. I guess that's what David Chase wanted, ultimately -- to show us that a rough beast lurks within every man, not just within Tony Soprano.

    And I have to admit, once I stopped crushing things and weeping inconsolably, I started to think about how it feels to be David Chase. It can't be all that fun, creating a pop cultural colossus so impossibly huge and omnipresent that it blots out the sun. Imagine just one day of the rest of Chase's life: the jackasses and humorless mouth-breakers out there, stopping him on his way to his favorite deli, wanting, needing to know why he sent Tony to prison, or had him rat, or killed him off. Can't you feel his pain? OK, try to ignore the fact that he's unwinding in his luxurious villa somewhere in the French countryside right now. Money doesn't fix everything, people. Just look at Tony Soprano.

    Next page: The murderer in the Members Only jacket?

    Pages 1 2