Grid Effect

Alan Sepinwall has done a follow up on The Sopranos finale a year to the day after its original airing. We have nothing else to write about, so we figured why not steal the premise and offer up our thoughts.

We’ve gone through a lot this past year in the television industry. A writer’s strike, the end of The Wire, the worst of our carpal-tunnel…but it has seemed even longer as a result of The Sopranos no longer being around. In a way, the series was fairly exhausting to watch: death, betrayal, family, the individual & the American experiment were all prevalent themes; and virtually all of them were always viewed as myopically corrupted.

The penultimate episode (”The Blue Comet”) might have been the most tension filled hour of television I’ve ever witnessed. For an entire hour, the New Jersey mob is being exterminated, and we were rendered sitting ducks to see who will and will not survive. The tone, the settings, the pacing all made for an exhaustingly suspenseful episode of television.

So as its cancellation approached, one would think for a series with such a negative and disturbing world view, that finale’s airing would be not only welcomed and anticipated, but when those credits fell, it would also invoke a sense of relief.

The problem being, those credits and their abruptness became a point of widely speculated argument and theory. All of a sudden, instead of being a moment of satisfying liberation, for many fans, the finale was just a source of frustration in an already frustrating world. There would be no closure, only debate: Was Tony killed? Was he not killed? Have we seen the man in the Members Only jacket before? Have we seen anyone in Holsten’s before? David Chase, a man clearly suffering from his own trepidation about the state of the country and the globe, would provide many of his most loyal fans no joy in what he seems to believe to be a joyless world.

This guy? Seriously? You can’t be serious.

But still, a year later and many of us are still speculating. All of the completely disprovable theories have since been disproven, and the debate falls largely in the “was it or wasn’t it a success?” and “was Tony killed?” categories. There is a myriad of reasons for this endless debate. The writer’s strike may have deprived us of a deterrent, no series has been released with nearly as much of an impact, nothing as great and as popular has aired since. All of these are valid, but I would venture to argue that this seemingly endless debate is indicative of a successful series finale.

David Chase is either unwilling or unable to explain what the contents of that final scene actually entail. Instead has opted for vague, non-committal, non-answers that could basically mean anything. We’ve adamantly placed ourselves with the perspective that Tony, for all his money and capitalistic success, leads a miserable, virtually joyless life. And by that same token, his punishment is he is forced to live with his miserable self, just as we’ve seen him do for the past six seasons.

He claims he wants to live, but his entire life is one of fear and disgust: fear of execution or incarceration, disgust with himself and everything around him. So really, what is he getting out of life. At one point in season two (and I’m not going to rehash my entire argument you can read that here, here, here and here, but we’ve been rewatching some of the series and this seemed relevant), Tony is talking to Melfi, completely frightened about getting arraigned on the Bevelaukwa murder. He states (paraphrasing), “Once my kids go to college, the federal Government can do anything they want with me, lock me up, throw away the key, give me the chair, I don’t care”.

At a point where Meadow is looking at a successful career as a corporate defense attorney before turning into her mom (before then she will be her dad) and AJ looking at a career in entertainment, the above quote would seem to indicate a certain indifference to the remainder of his life.

With that aside, this finale has done something that none before it has ever accomplished: sparked argument over its meaning for a full year. And even as dismissive as we were to the argument that Tony took a bullet to the dome a la Cheese Wagstaff, this fine fellow has written over 20,000 words constructing that very point. This person could actually be a monkey chained to a desk and we’d still give credence to the other side. 20,000 words on anything even remotely coherent means there is room to ponder.

So for my dismissive tone, if anyone is/was offended, I apologize. But for a full year, we maintain the same argument as it seems the most practical. And for a series that has prided itself on a lack of sensationalism (relatively speaking), making Tony Soprano’s death a debatable point seems cheap and unrepresented by the rest of the series.