Day of reckoning

As "The Sopranos" enters its final chapter, Tony reluctantly faces his past -- and we reluctantly face the end of this brilliant series.

Editor's note: SPOILER ALERT! Includes spoilers from the first two episodes of the final season of "The Sopranos." Don't read this if you don't want to know what happens in these episodes.

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: The Sopranos, HBO, Drama, TV, Mafia, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Heather Havrilesky

Photo: HBO

James Gandolfini in "The Sopranos."

April 5, 2007 | "All those memories are for what? All I am to him is some asshole bully." -- Tony Soprano

As the curtain rises on the final season of HBO's "The Sopranos," Tony is considering his legacy more than ever before, even more than he did after his brush with death. He's wondering not just how he's seen by Christopher, who portrays him as an aggressive thug in his new mob-horror movie, but how his other associates and his wife and kids see him. How will he be remembered? What will he leave behind? With all of the unrealistic expectations we each have of our lives, the big goals we want to accomplish, the hopes we have for those we love, how can we not be a little disappointed in the end?

The same questions apply as we near the end of this epic mob drama, a TV series that redefined our understanding of the Italian mob and explored the fragile nature of family -- the kind we have with blood relatives, and the business relationships that are sometimes just as intimate and as complicated. Expectations were enormous at the start of the first half of this final season. A two-year hiatus didn't help, of course, nor did the fact that television dramas in general were improving, following in the path cleared by "The Sopranos" itself, which brought a smart, imaginative, dark sensibility to the small screen and broadened people's perspectives on what a drama could be. The show set the bar so high that the low stakes of Vito's disappearance and Christopher's falling on and off the wagon felt downright anticlimactic after such a long wait.

What could we do? We expected a lot. For eight years now, Tony Soprano has been so much more to us than "some asshole bully." He's been this big, bearish patriarchal figure with a soft, vulnerable center, an angry, violent man who also loves little ducklings and frets over doing right by his men. We've watched Tony growl and sigh and snicker and gorge himself and quarrel and get drunk and tell bad jokes and become depressed. We've watched him lust after women and order hits on old friends. After years of seeing this man glower and chuckle and mope, he's become such an archetype, such a larger-than-life fixture, that it's hard to imagine him suddenly disappearing. More than anything else, Tony has captured our sympathies over the years. He may hang out with self-serving thugs and aggressive, one-trick ponies, his wife may be self-righteous and hypocritical, his son may be a shortsighted, shallow dummy, his daughter may be wishy-washy and overly dependent, but Tony, even at his most merciless, dodges our harshest judgments. We forgive him for his countless crimes and mistakes, for his recklessness and his rage. The man is full of sadness and longing and we can't turn away from him, no matter how depraved or unfair he becomes.

As the first of nine final episodes opens, we find that Tony (James Gandolfini) may not be looking back as fondly as we are. Most memories aren't welcome for him. When he and Carmela (Edie Falco) join Bobby (Steven R. Schirripa) and Janice (Aida Turturro) and their daughter Nica at Bobby's lake house to celebrate Tony's 47th birthday, Tony seems relatively calm and happy, but there's a feeling of dread hanging over the man. While the other three adults laugh and bring up old times, Tony glares out onto the lake. He doesn't want to talk about Bobby's father, because it reminds him of his own dad. He doesn't want to talk about the house at the shore that he and Carmela almost bought, because it reminds him that they almost got divorced, or it reminds him of old friends he's dumped into the waves -- the past is so littered with emotional potholes and tragic turns, it's hard to tell which one he's avoiding. He doesn't want Janice to tell crazy anecdotes about his dad "because it makes us look like a fucking dysfunctional family" -- as if anyone is under the illusion that they aren't dysfunctional. And when Janice gives Tony a DVD of home movies of their childhood, he struggles to act grateful, but you can see an uneasy look spread over his face. His childhood is the last thing in the world he wants to think about; it feels dangerous to even consider it, particularly when he's been drinking.

"I'm old, Carm. And my body has suffered a trauma that it will probably never fully recover from," Tony later says to his wife, but it's hard to tell if he's talking about his gunshot wound or the burden of so many gloomy recollections and regrets he carries with him. While it might seem odd that the final episodes would begin with a trip to the lake, for a man who works hard to distract himself from the heaviness of his past and the weight of his mistakes, vacations can be more harrowing than day-to-day life.

Next page: "It wasn't about being boss. It was about being happy"