I recognize I’m posting very late to this blog and that most of you are probably done considering new details of the final episode, especially the much discussed final sequence and the meaning of David Chase’s cut to the silent black screen to end his series. I wanted to extend a sincere thank you for the interesting and insightful commentaries many of you have posted above; this thread has truly enhanced my understanding and enjoyment of a much-loved series. I guess I could be considered, in the words of ken, a “fellow obsessive” and I just thought I’d point out a few observations I’ve made about the final sequence that, to my knowledge, have yet to be discussed, while adding to some other points that have already been made.
As it appears is the case for many of you, I haven’t dedicated so much of my time watching and re-watching each of the 86 episodes of The Sopranos only for its incredibly well-written and superbly acted narrative elements. As many of you have astutely demonstrated, David Chase and company have created a series that can be read on many different levels, hence, definitively resolving the debate concerning the meaning of Chase’s cut to silent black screen from a narrative / plot stand point (e.g.
Did Tony get whacked? Did the audience get whacked? Does Tony’s paranoid, anxiety filled life simply go on?
) is certainly not of great concern to me. In Matt’s words, “The incompleteness of that final moment of The Sopranos is a thing of beauty and power.” (By the way, a special thanks to you Matt for the great commentaries; it’s phenomenal to me how you could put together such inspired readings of each episode in such a short time).
And as Down Neck Tony (thanks for the laughs) says, it’s precisely the ambiguity of the ending that makes it brilliant, simply by virtue of all the interesting questions it has raised and all the insightful and deep commentary it has inspired. The main reason for this posting is to further address an important point that Matt brings up, saying whatever one may feel about the ending, David Chase “can’t be accused of sloppy storytelling.” Some have gone as far as calling the ending a copout and accusing Chase of terrible and lazy writing and directing (I must say such comments on this blog, thankfully, are very few and far between).
I could just hear Tony’s voice as heard in Season 5, Episode 13, “All Due Respect” – “Enough with the preamble!” OK on with the post. For what it’s worth, my interpretation of the ending falls roughly into the camp of Matt and Alan Sepinwall, that is, David Chase put the final sequence together in such a way as to visually and aurally demonstrate the constant paranoia and fear that Tony is subjected to; every person coming through the front door or getting up to take a leak may potentially be his killer or an undercover FBI agent ready to arrest him, etc.
Yes, truly the most difficult aspect of life is living. If anyone was whacked it was us the audience who at once were cut off from Tony’s world and we didn’t even hear it coming. All that being said, for those of you insistent that the abrupt cut to black screen meant Tony received an instantly fatal bullet to the back of the head there’s plenty of narrative evidence to back up your position.
As the B-side of “Don’t Stop Believin’” literally indicates it may very well have been an, “Any Way You Want It” ending. I’m not ashamed to say that I own a Journey’s Greatest Hits CD and I noticed a detail that has, to my knowledge, yet to been mentioned. The copyright date of “Don’t Stop Believin’” is 1981.
During the course of Season 6B there has been notable attention to dates and years. As you recall, the first episode of 6B, “Soprano Home Movies” Tony was celebrating his 47th birthday and the time period depicted in that episode appears to be August, 2006, which means Tony was born in 1959 (a fact confirmed on the The Sopranos official HBO website; Tony’s birthday is supposedly August 22, 1959). Therefore, Tony would have turned 22 years old the year “Don’t Stop Believin’” was released in 1981.
During the third episode of Season 6B, “Remember When”, Tony makes the point of correcting Paulie, saying he was 22 years old and not 24 when Tony’s dad Johnny Boy commissioned his son to make his first mob killing of a bookie named Willy Overall. More importantly, earlier in this same episode Paulie reminisces in the car, as he and Tony were driving south to “lay low”, that Tony’s killing of Willie Overall happened, “just a week before AJ was born”, and Tony again corrects Paulie saying no, it was just a week before Meadow was born. For the sake of being as accurate as possible, at the very beginning of this same episode Paulie urges Tony, as he is admiring his garden tomatoes, to remember back, saying “Willie Overall, the bookie, Labour Day 1982”, which means that Tony would have actually just turned 23 years old when he killed Willie Overall, his first mob hit.
And the latter point would make sense with the above quotes since Meadow’s supposed birth date is September 1982. Regardless, I think it’s important that during the episode “Remember When” Tony remembered back to when he was 22 years of age. It’s probably safe to assume that “Don’t Stop Believin’”, being a Top 10 Hit after is was released, was still getting significant radio play in 1982 while Carmela was pregnant with Meadow.
Therefore, at Holsten’s Tony selected the song that was popular back when he was first starting his family (i.e., he was just newly married to Carmela and awaiting the birth of his first child Meadow), and when he was getting fully initiated into his other Family (i.
e., when he committed his first mob hit of the bookie Willie Overall). Now at the end of the very last episode of The Sopranos, “Don’t Stop Believin’” is playing at Holsten’s as Tony is again awaiting the arrival of his family, and most dramatically the arrival of his first born Meadow, while also possibly awaiting the end of his ‘Journey’ (sorry!
) in the mob if we are to take the final cut to black to mean Tony getting whacked. As has been recalled by JW, it was Meadow’s voice that brought Tony back to consciousness and out of a coma in Episode 3, Season 6, “Mayham”. The anticipation of Meadow’s arrival at the end of “Made In America”, with the manipulatively edited images of her difficulty parallel parking with goings on in Holsten’s, was obviously set up by Chase to build suspense.
May we interpret the last sequence, as meaning this time Meadow doesn’t make it in time to pull her father away from death? Or at the very least, can we say that Meadow doesn’t make it in time for us the viewer to have the chance to see the Soprano family united as a whole around a dinner table one last time? In another possibly related reference in episode 4, Season 6B, “Chasing It” we witness Tony waging all his recent casino winnings (some 18 to 25 Gs according to Christopher) on a horse named “Meadow Gold” (as we know, horses represent as strong a nature / family reference in this series as ducks).
In the horse race, “Meadow Gold” just misses the finish, that is she misses out on finishing first by a nose, or by a “c***’s hair” in the more appropriate Soprano terminology of Christopher Moltisanti. Ultimately, Meadow just misses out on joining her family at Holsten’s before the cut to black screen by that same “c***’s hair”. We all know and have been amply reminded over the course of these last episodes how many expectations have been invested in Meadow by both Tony and Carmela.
The very first episode of The Sopranos revealed that Tony became depressed after the ducks left his backyard pool because it represented for him the fear of losing his family. Many of us were expecting some more telling duck references in the last episode, with some swearing they heard ducks in the background as Tony was sweeping by his pool just before paying a visit to Uncle Junior, though the sounds may have only been birds chirping. However, the name Meadow itself may be seen as at least a very indirect reference to the ducks and nature more generally.
As Maurice Yacowar has pointed out in his reading of the first episode of The Sopranos (The Sopranos on the Couch) Meadow’s name “recalls an ideal lost and forgotten in the seamy New Jersey setting – especially the landscape surveyed in the show’s title sequence…Meadow’s name suggests a natural refuge from Tony’s bleak world.” The series begins with Tony’s fear of losing his family and after eight years ends without the successful filmic evidence of his family being fully united. There has also been a lot of discussion about Bobby Bacala’s “you probably don’t even hear it when it happens” line in the first episode of 6B, “Soprano Home Movies” being another piece of evidence that the cut to black screen without any sound of a gunshot blast meant Tony got whacked.
Chase may have provided another clue to back up this interpretation during the second episode of 6B, “Stage 5”, when Silvio Dante witnesses the hit put on Gerry “The Hairdo” Torciano by Doc Santoro’s hired hit men. A lot has been written about how creatively that scene was constructed (it was truly a novel way of showing something that has been done millions of times on screen), and as I’m sure you all remember the sound fades out just before Silvio gets splattered with blood from what we soon found out came from the body of Torciano as he was being shot. Silvio obviously didn’t even hear the first shot, the blood being the first thing he notices a split second before Chase and company bring the sound back up again and reveal the multiple gun shot blasts intended for “The Hairdo”.
Had the first shot been intended for the back of Silvio’s skull, the filmic clues indicate that he never would have heard a thing. Later in the episode at the Bing, Silvio explains to Tony and Paulie, that “the f***ing scary thing was I didn’t know what happened until after the shot was fired.” So whether Tony got whacked, or we the audience got whacked there’s ample, prior, filmic evidence that we probably wouldn’t even hear it when it happens.
Then there’s the discussion about the suspicious Man in Members Only Jacket who orders a cup of coffee at the bar looks briefly toward Tony’s booth a couple of times before getting up to go to the washroom. The Tony Got Whacked Theorists have shouted, why the detail about wearing a Members Only Jacket, to the extent that he is referred to in the credits as ‘Man in Members Only Jacket.’ The first episode of this last season as you all know, was titled “Members Only” after an obscure comment made by Vito Spatafore to Eugene Pontecorvo.
Sitting outside Satriale’s Ray Curto made fun of Vito’s new fashion sense to which Vito shot back to the lower ranking Eugene Pontecorvo, “Look at this guy, Members Only? How long have you been wearing that?” If we believe the Man in Members Only Jacket (from now on referred to as MO) kills Tony then it would plausibly be a fitting way to end the season.
Furthermore, as I believe was briefly mentioned somewhere above in this thread, if we assume MO kills Tony after exiting the washroom, as in The Godfather, then the fatal shot would have been administered from Tony’s three o’clock position. In episode 9, Season 2, “From Where To Eternity”, Christopher regains consciousness after being clinically dead for a minute or so with a message for both Tony and Paulie that he claims he received during his trip to hell: three o’clock. More interesting for me is the fact that MO walks into Holsten’s just ahead of AJ so that he at least partially obscures our vision of AJ until he makes his way to his left to the counter fully revealing AJ right behind him.
In other words, behind ‘Tony’s killer’ is the “Second Coming” A J. I share the reading of the “The Second Coming” episode as seeing the title referring to not only the Yeats’ poem AJ learns about in class and later re-reads, but also as seeing Anthony Junior (the name though obvious is significant) as the ‘Second Coming’ of his father Tony. The images of AJ’s attempted suicide were very revealing.
The rope tied to the cinder block at the bottom of the pool (no need to discuss the significance of choosing the pool for his attempted suicide), as AJ frantically tried to stay above water, may symbolically be interpreted as an umbilical cord. Was this AJ’s second birthing? After Tony pulls AJ to safety he sees his son wailing like a newborn in a fetal position and he repeatedly refers to him as “baby”, trying to calm him down and comfort him.
The episode ends with Tony visiting his son at the hospital where AJ is receiving treatment; as he enters the patients’ ward, we hear a ‘Nina Nana’ (for those not familiar with Italian, Nina Nana’s are traditional Italian nursery rhymes) sung in a distinct southern Italian accent (I believe Sicilian, though I may be wrong and the Sopranos’ ancestors come from Naples), for me one of the most touching and appropriate uses of music ever in this series, and as we all know there are many other great examples. I think it’s clear that AJ will never climb the ranks of the mob like his father, however, throughout this series, and especially in these last episodes, we have witnessed the many Tony-like characteristics AJ has adopted. We saw back in Season 2 and 3 AJ’s panic attacks, and that he may possess those “putrid Soprano genes”.
In these last episodes Chase and company revealed just how much AJ is like his father, with his depression and his self-pitying (“Why can’t I ever catch a break” to his psychiatrist and “I was having so much trouble maintaining” when learning the “depressing” news about his Uncle’s Bobby’s death). Chase left little visual doubt about this in the last episode in the scene where AJ comes down the stairs with bathrobe, white undershirt, and gold chain alla typical Tony Soprano to hear of his family’s film business bribe. The self-loathing Tony gets especially angry with AJ when he gets overly depressed, emotional and self-pitying not because he sees his son as a cowardly crybaby, but rather because he sees himself.
If MO kills Tony then he reveals the second coming to whom the torch, in many character-centered ways, will be passed. At the booth AJ remembers Tony’s old advice about the importance of trying “to remember the times that were good,” first administered by Tony to his united family in Artie Bucco’s restaurant during the last episode of the first season, “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano”. Also, and here I recognize I’m stretching the age references too far, it appears that at some point in 2007 AJ will be turning 22 years old (in the first episode of The Sopranos AJ was celebrating his 13th birthday and I believe the year being depicted was 1998 since Season 1 first aired in January 1999; and, during the episode “Walk Like A Man” Tony says to Carmela that AJ will turn 21 in a couple of months in what I believe would be still be 2006), the same age Tony remembered back to as being the time when he committed his first mob hit and hence became fully initiated into the Family of the Mafia, just a week before the birth of his first born Meadow, which initiated the beginning of his actual family.
So much for lazy writing and directing! Just some long-winded observations to pass along; I certainly have overstayed my welcome. Thanks again to all of you for posting such brilliant comments on this thread.
I recognize I’m posting very late to this blog and that most of you are probably done considering new details of the final episode, especially the much discussed final sequence and the meaning of David Chase’s cut to the silent black screen to end his series.
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