I find it hard to imagine there’s much to say about the final scene of HBO's "The Sopranos" that hasn’t already been written, yet one piece of information stood out during my November rewatch of the series.
Do I need to put a spoiler alert on something that's more than seven years old? I don't know anymore. Regardless, here it is. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
The scene, since elevated to TV finale lore, builds tension as the Soprano family gathers to eat dinner at Holstein's, a fictional New Jersey restaurant. Strangers filter in, including a seemingly suspicious looking man in a Members Only jacket who heads to the restroom. In the final frames, Tony Soprano looks up from the table, hears a ding and, we imagine, sees his daughter enter the restaurant. The screen smash cuts to black for 10 seconds and then the credits roll.
Show creator David Chase has wriggled like a worm on hot pavement when it comes to a definitive statement about the fate of Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, who died last year. A few months ago, Chase told Vox Soprano isn’t dead and quickly scurried back to familiar, neutral territory.
Chase's evasiveness is nothing new. However, in the audio commentary for “The Blue Comet,” the series’ penultimate episode, Arthur J. Nascarella, who played Carlo Gervasi (right, with Gandolfini as Soprano), said when the cast gathered to read the final script, Gandolfini asked about the ending.
“Why did you end it like that?” he said Gandolfini asked Chase. Nascarella said Chase wanted to avoid an ending that stated that crime does or does not pay.
That remark widens the dialogue. It makes me wonder if the collective “we” have limited our perspective by locking into a binary set of meanings: “Tony died” vs. “Tony did not die.”
For the past few years, I’ve maintained that we can only go with the evidence presented on the screen. In the final frame, Soprano was alive and well, about to eat dinner with his family.
There’s also evidence to suggest and support a death, but those tones hung throughout the entire series. Why wouldn’t they when death, especially murder, was such a part of the show?
In the years leading up to "The Sopranos" final episode, many fans wondered if Chase foreshadowed Tony's demise. In a session with his psychiatrist, Jennifer Melfi as played by Lorraine Bracco, in the season four premiere "For All Debts Public and Private," Soprano says that for a man in his line of work, the majority of the time, the story ends with either death or imprisonment.
Many fans latched onto this, thinking it was Chase laying pipe for the show's finale. That's not uncommon. With the series finale of “Mad Men” due next year, I grow weary of hearing fans’ “great idea” about how Don Draper should die in the same way a character plummets toward the ground every week in the show’s opening credits, as though that levels some cosmic scale for the bad things Draper has done. It doesn't and, in comparison to the worst acts of characters like Walter White, Vic Mackey, Dexter Morgan, Nancy Botwin and Tony Soprano, Draper is a big softie.
I’m not sure what I want from "Mad Men" or how the finale should look, but I hope for a more sympathetic ending for Draper than death and perhaps Chase hoped for the same for Soprano. The final season, more than even those that preceded it, made a convincing argument toward Soprano’s demise, suggesting his flaws fomented into unimpeded narcissism, making him an incurable sociopath. Chase said he found it "pathetic" that after cheering him on for years, fans wanted his blood.
Maybe that final scene is meant to bring back to mind the series’ pilot episode. Soprano enters therapy and spends much of the hour getting to the root of his most recent panic attack, spurred by the ducks in his backyard pool (left). The ducks symbolize his family, which the mob boss fears losing more than anything.
It’s that fear that forms his behavior for the rest of the series, even his most heinous, self-absorbed crimes.
So perhaps that final scene, instead of the tension Chase created, is meant for some other purpose entirely. Maybe it’s meant to show us that after all we’ve seen of Soprano, that the threats to his family are still there because he is the center of that family. Carmela, Meadow and A.J. live under the constant danger of familial relation to Tony.
But perhaps Chase’s point more than whether Soprano lived or died was that for all of his criminal behavior – people killed, money earned and lives damaged irreparably – this is what he did all of that work for, moments such as that final scene.
Some posited that the long, harsh cut to black was “the audience getting whacked,” something that used to make me roll my eyes. It feels like a fan theory that sounds great, but doesn’t really mean anything, much like Draper jumping out of the window.
But maybe Chase was fed up with an audience that demanded he change his vision to fit theirs, so he decided to raise the metaphorical middle finger to us all with that cut to black.
We’ll probably never know what Chase really meant. Regardless, given Nascarella’s comments, it seems chopping the conversation down to whether Tony Soprano lived or died is a restrictive way to look at the final scene of “The Sopranos.”
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