Soprano's 5th Season Finale (6/4) (Spoilers)

Star-Ledger "Live newslog" by Alan Sepinwall




Sunday, June 04, 2006  

Call it a semi-finale for now
WARNING: This column contains major plot spoilers for tonight’s “Sopranos” episode. Don’t think of it as a season finale. You might feel happier that way.

HBO has been careful to call January’s final eight shows “bonus episodes” for this season. At first, I assumed that was just clever language to avoid having to negotiate a new season’s salary for the actors. But the only way to rationalize tonight’s meandering, closure-light episode is if you believe that David Chase considers all 20 episodes to be of a piece.

But fact is, this is the last episode we’ll get for seven months. An eyeblink compared to the last hiatus, but season five closed with the double-barreled power of “Long-Term Parking” and “All Due Respect,” and “Kaisha” wasn’t nearly in that class. By opening the hour with a dedication to the late John Patterson, who had directed all the previous season finales, Chase and company were calling this a finale of some kind.

I’ve heard all the complaints about this season, but this was the first time all year where I felt genuinely unsatisfied. I know I’ve been writing for weeks that we were heading towards an implosion, and that I didn’t think much would be resolved before January. But it’s one thing to predict it and another thing to experience it.

Chase has always had a fondness for zagging when the audience expects him to zig, and sometimes it feels like he goes zagging off just because he can. He wants to wean viewers off of all the TV narrative traditions they’ve been suckling since birth, but some of those traditions are there for a reason, and have been since long before TV existed. Steven Bochco didn’t say that if you show a gun in the first act, you have to fire it by the third; Anton Chekhov did.

I’m not insisting we needed all-out war between Phil and Tony, or Carmela to visit the FBI offices in search of Adriana, or Paulie to die of cancer. But we needed something interesting to happen in one of the arcs, rather than the crude jokes Chase and company tried to disguise as resolutions, like Carmela abandoning the Ade search as soon as Tony revived the spec house, or Phil’s heart attack tabling the war.

The latter half of this season hasn’t had the same drive and cohesion of the first five or six episodes, but each hour has featured at least one compelling development or image: Johnny Sack, broken man; Tony finally taking a firm hand with AJ; an oblivious Carmela helping Tony get dressed for a tryst; etc.

Tonight was mostly another installment of the Christopher Moltisanti Scag Junkie Hour. We get it already: Drug addicts are among the most boring people on the planet. We got it when Christopher shot up through the Italy trip. We got it when he was high at Livia’s wake. We got it when he sat on Cosette. New punchline, please.

We know that characters on this show rarely, if ever, change (even New Tony has backslid enough that you could call him Slightly New Tony), but usually the writers manage to use that immutability in service of interesting stories. When they revisited Christopher’s Hollywood obsession in “Luxury Lounge,” at least we got to see him punch Lauren Bacall in the face. All we got here was Julianna Margulies proving that skimpy underwear doesn’t make you look good if you’re puking in it.

Even Tony had to acknowledge to Melfi how much his life is running in place - and that, since his therapy sessions haven’t done him much good in years, he just comes to see her. (Note his wardrobe for these visits.)

Not coincidentally, the only character not stuck in the mud was the most interesting of the night: AJ. Not only has his derisive nickname been upgraded from “Prince Albert” to “Working Man,” but for the first time in his life, he seems to understand about responsibility.

Falling for the right girl helps, of course, not that Carm’s prejudices would allow her to see that Blanca could be the right one for AJ. Before, he might have been dumb enough to think he could scare those guys on the stoop, or callow enough to just use them as an excuse to bail; instead, he offered up his bike to make them go away, about the smartest, most selfless thing he’s ever done. To be fair, he did get rewarded with his first sex scene on the show, but this really feels like a new and improved AJ. Even the bit where he mouthed off to Tony at the Christmas party (“I got a guy.” “And I got a job.”) felt different - maybe because AJ wasn’t taking the easy way out.

But is AJ’s redemption enough to tide us over until January? “Kaisha” didn’t change my opinion of the overall brilliance of this season, but it’s leaving a sour taste in my mouth as we wait one last time for more adventures of Messrs. Soprano, Gualtieri, et al.

 

(Continued)

Some other random thoughts:

Butch Deconcini, one of Phil’s sidekicks, was played by Gregory Antonacci. Nearly 30 years ago, Antonacci played a wannabe wiseguy from Newark in two Chase-written episodes of “The Rockford Files” called “The Jersey Bounce” and “Just a Coupla Guys.” The latter featured a family-oriented Jersey mob boss named Tony who was sort of a rough draft for our Tony. And the circle is complete.

I know she’s only appeared twice, but I think I hate Mrs. Phil more than any character in the history of the series. Now she feels bad that Vito’s dead?

At The Movies I: Christopher’s line about getting “the 50 Cent movie” free at the car wash was a self-deprecating joke by Terence Winter, who wrote the script for “Get Rich or Die Trying.” Also in the wheels-within-wheels category: The Christopher character in “Cleaver” is named Michael. Might the last name start and end with an I?

And now AJ has replaced narcoleptic Aaron as the guy Tony throws food at on Thanksgiving. Good times.

At The Movies II: “Vertigo,” the movie Chris and Julianna see, is about a man whose obsession with his dead lover consumes him to the point where he tries to turn his new girlfriend into a copy of the old one. When we come back in January, will Julianna have talon fingernails and an animal print wardrobe?

Maybe “The Shah of Iran” is an unfair nickname for Phil. When he lurched back into the hospital, he looked more like Frankenstein’s monster.

With Junior, it always comes back to JFK, doesn’t it? Sad, sad old man, trying to keep his dignity by regifting the Bacala money to his orderly.

At The Movies III: Why so many shots of Bacala’s son watching “Casablanca”? Will there be a scene in January where Phil and his guys start singing “New York, New York” at the Crazy Horse and Tony and pals drown them out with a stirring “Thunder Road”? Will the final shot of the series be Tony and Agent Harris walking along a Newark Airport runway, talking about their beautiful new friendship?

That’s all the mob talk until January, folks. I’m still writing about TV daily in The Star-Ledger and on our Web site (nj.com/tv/ledger/), and if you’re a fan of HBO’s other violent masterpiece, “Deadwood,” my fellow Star-Ledger critic Matt Zoller Seitz will be doing weekly Rewind columns that you’ll be able to find on our Web site every Monday. And we may have more Rewinds in store when the network TV season resumes in September. Until then, see you in the funny papers ...

Contributed by Alan Sepinwall

 

SUCKED, SUCKED SUCKED SUCKED

so tired of hearing how "man this really sets up things"

do us a favor HBO/Chase....film 2 episodes and get it over with. Dont need 8 more.

so done, bring back Deadwood

 

Big Love's finale was better.

 

at least something HAPPENED in Big Love's finale. I haven't typically watched much of that show...

but tonight I left it one.

AND DAMNIT AT LEAST SOMETHING HAPPENED!

 

Is anyone else here into Julianna Marguiles? Goodness, she's nice.

 

yes

 

For those wondering...
The song on the HBO summer preview between Sopranos and Big Love is "How to Save a Life" from The Fray.

 

What really got me about tonight's episode was watching the way that drug addiction sucked the life out of a passionate affair.

And "Big Love" was terrific.

 

I'm still mulling this episode over. My first reaction was some very good moments but somewhat disappointing for a season finale.
I'll watch the repeat tomorrow night and see if anytning comes across differently.

 

This nut graph by Sepinwall is why most people are complaining about this season.
The lowest common denominator Sopranos watcher just tunes in to see somebody get whacked. They need action. They need war.

Well, the show is more than that. It's drama. It's characters. It's a looming sense of dread that never goes away. It's being surprised.
I enjoyed tonight's episode because I enjoy the characters and I didn't know what was going to happen next. I still don't know what will happen next. That's why I like the show.

I don't need somebody to get whacked for my opinion of the show to be good.

 

And if you haven't listened to the CD of the same name...well, I'm not sure where you've been for the last 9 months or so.
I saw them in concert here in St. Louis, and they're excellent. They do a great CCR cover of "Have You Ever Seen The Rain" to throw people off a bit during shows -- I'm young, but it was funny to watch some people who were really young fumble at the beginning and wonder if it was a song off a new album.
CD is highly recommended!!

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