Sopranos 6/10 -- THE END

No doubt. The e-mail exchanges they did every Monday and Tuesday during the season were a weekly must-read for me, along with Sepinwall at NJ.com and Matt Zoller Seitz's blog.

 

To clarify, I just think the song is cheesy. Certainly could have been Tony and Carm's song, and clearly people have gotten into the lyrics and explained how they applied. It's just a personal thing with me with that song. I like it, but in a drunken karaoke type way, and not as the final song to such a powerful show. I'm not saying it was right or wrong, but to me personally it didn't resonate as well as another song may have.

 

Boobie --

If you didn't get this by the Pine Barrens episode, you should have after the finale:

The plot doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what happened to the Russian. If it mattered, it would have been resolved in that episode.

This show is famous for introducing and killing off characters in the same episode. They are usually stand ins for other characters. In this case, the Russian served as the impetus to comic relief and perhaps a deeper understanding of both the wedge between Paulie and Christopher and the incompetence of all of the gangsters.

That's it. He was a plot device for a show the doesn't put much stock in plot. Nothing more.

 

This isn't necessarily directed at you, but I think the biggest reason people are harping on "Don't Stop Believing" is they have a hard time believing such an oft-maligned band could provide the soundtrack to the final scene in the greatest, most literate, brilliant TV show in history.

It's cool to love The Sopranos. It's not cool, at all, to love Journey.

Yet Journey provides the fade-out for The Sopranos.

 

Think about this too, Boobie (I'm piggy-backing off Zeke's post): The power of that episode (Pine Barrens) is that WE DON'T KNOW. We don't know if the Russian is alive, if he's dead, if he's got a gun, if he's going to stab Chris and Paulie with a tree branch. And that fear of WHAT IF? is far more important to the psychology than finding out if he's dead or alive. If you say he's dead, it diffuses all the tension. If you say he's alive, then it's like AH HA! I knew it! It's the same psychology that's used in The Blair Witch Project in a way. What you don't know is more scary than what you do know. That episode, as Zeke pointed out, is about Chris and Paulie being so scared, stressed out, and pissed at one another that their relationship is forever strained. It's not about whether the Russian comes back.

And to add to that, Chase isn't fucking with people. He is, in a way, pointing out that it's a cheap writer trick, in a way, to have the long thought-to-be-dead character jump out at the end of the movie with a knife. That's what we, as viewers of movies and television, have grown to expect, and in some ways, demand. So the tension is better and bigger if it's never revealed what happens. Plot, to Chase, isn't as important as how people interact with one another. That episode is self-contained in the same way "College" is self-contained. It's a study in who Paulie and Chris are, not necessarily a larger part of the plot.

 

Or, less successfully, the episode about Columbus Day. But yeah, DD, exactly.

 

As proven by 25 pages of discussion.

If Tony gets capped in the skull, or eats an onion ring with his family as the credits fade, this thread is half as long, at the most.

 

Good points like always, DD, but let me ask you this: Why kill Phil? And why so early? That diffused the situation for me early on in the episode and is the reason I think Tony survived the diner. There was no reason to believe someone was set to kill Tony.

And to sort of answer my question while agreeing with your above post: If Chase really wanted to fuck with us he would have left Phil alive.

 

But then we would have missed his head getting popped by the SUV and the world would be a poorer place without that image.

 

I agree with that. One of the coolest scenes ever.

 

I haven't seen anyone else mention this, so I will:

We've already gotten that image from Six Feet Under. Season Five, Episode 2. It's almost exactly the same image, except the Six Feet Under victim was alive when the SUV rolled over his head.

I'm sort of sorry I know this, but I do.

In fact, it felt oddly familiar...I mean, that shot from Six Feet Under was EXTREMELY memorable, at least for me. I thought it was strange that Sopranos did it again...seems unlikely that it was accidental, though maybe I'm off base in expecting Chase to be as familiar with the rest of the HBO ouevre as I've become.

 

Here is the thing though: There will always be a Phil.

There will always be that tension in Tony's life. Over the course of the show, we always wondered if someone was going to take out Tony. Junior, Livia, Carmine, Richie Aprile, Little Carmine, Johnny Sac, Phil, Butchie. Nothing has changed, except our window into Tony's world is over.

Phil, in the end, was really just a minor character. His death doesn't mean that Tony is safe, and that he has nothing to worry about. It just means that the cycle continues. Someone rises to take his place. And that person will still have territory disputes, and still want a piece of the HUD action and asbestos action and the no show jobs, and Tony will still have to negotiate and deal with them. Over the course of six seasons, the tension would build and build and then be deflated. Either the problem would be negotiated or mediated, or someone would get taken out. Tony's greatest asset as a leader is that he knew when to fold 'em, hold 'em, stand and fight, cut a deal, or when to run and hide. In the end, he either ends up dead or in the can.

I think Phil dying the way he did was part comedy, and part of what Zeke said, a take on the obsession with automobiles and dead babies. Having the car run over his head was no different that having Chris put Ralphie's head in a bowling bag. Just a funny way to kill a mobster.

Also, isn't it funny that Phil died because he had to rely on old technology? That he was the one bitching about Tony not being old school, never having spent time in the can, but he died because only so many gas stations have pay phones, and he had to keep going to the same one to use it to call Butchie?

Also, the Harris stuff, I still think, is in part about how irrelevant the mob is now to the Feds as they worry about terrorism. Yes I think Harris liked feeling like part of Tony's crew. And maybe it was about getting closer to nailing the NY crew or the Jersey crew. Or maybe it was sort of Agent Harris' Mission Accomplished moment. Yippie! We scored a major victory because a boss is dead even though, in the end, it means nothing! There will always be another Phil. Or Tony.