Sopranos Finale

[stymie]

tony killed those black guys lol

[kaydup]

it chimed when meadow walked in..

who gives a fuck its over.. we should be more upset that the chick didnt get naked before aj's car blew up

[stymie]

it chimed when meadow walked in..

who gives a fuck its over.. we should be more upset that the chick didnt get naked before aj's car blew up

she was like 16 you diddler

[Felix_Leiter]

she was like 16 you diddler

@ Jackie

[mikdondadon22]

look who got all rattled

and i stand by my original comment as its been made blatantly obvious by your actions.....but hey, not everyone can own up to not getting the ending and discrediting it, not even you

so now if I respond with a sarcastic post that means I am rattled?

and Bella here is another "insightful" myspace bulletin from my friend...decisions decisions on who or what to believe...you people are a bunch of clowns...well not ExDJJon...he is just artistic

OK SOPRANO FANSTHERE IS A BULLSHIT THEORY GOING AROUND THAT LAST NIGHT TONY WAS WATCHING HIMSELF EAT. NOT TRUE. I THOUGHT IT TOO BUT NOT TRUE. FIRST OFF THE GUY IN THE HAT IS NOT DAVE SCATINO WHOM OWNED " RAMSEY'S SPORTING GOODS" IN SEOSON 2. THE ACTOR WHO PLAYED THAT PARTS'S NAME WAS ROBERT PATRICK. YOU MAY REMEMBER HIM FROM TERMINATOR 2 WHERE HE PLAYED THE T 1000. THAT WAS NOT HIM IN THE RETAURANT. THE TWO BLACK GUYS WERE NOT THE GUYS FROM SEOSON 1 THAT TRIED TO KILL TONY. IF YOU REMEMBER CORRECTLY THEY BOTH DIED. ONE HIT THE FIRE HYDRANT AND THE OTHER WAS SHOT. AS FOR THE GUY AT THE COUNTER, I REALLY DON T KNOW. I THINK HE MAY OR MAY NOT BEEN SOMEONE. THIS IS ALL A BULLSHIT THEORY. THERE WILL MOST LIKELY BE A MOVIE. THAT IS WHERE THE MONEY IS, AND THAT IS ALSO WHERE DAVID CHASE WILL LEAVE IT. HE COULD NOT GET A GENERAL ENDING.

[stymie]

THE TWO BLACK GUYS WERE NOT THE GUYS FROM SEOSON 1 THAT TRIED TO KILL TONY. IF YOU REMEMBER CORRECTLY THEY BOTH DIED. ONE HIT THE FIRE HYDRANT AND THE OTHER WAS SHOT.

thank you

[Felix_Leiter]

why does everyone need closure? its like you need the writers to feed you everything..

i think the tenseness of the last scene was good enough..and works better than if you had the members only guy cap him on screen..

then again, in my imagination Tony survives and lives to see another day

[mikdondadon22]

I could give 2 fucks if he died or didn't die...has nothing to do with closure with me...my opinion was it just fucking sucked but apparently that isn't good enough...I have to dig deeper and find the true meaning of what really happened in order to form an opinion.

[stymie]

I could give 2 fucks if he died or didn't die...has nothing to do with closure with me...my opinion was it just fucking sucked but apparently that isn't good enough...I have to dig deeper and find the true meaning of what really happened in order to form an opinion.

its all about mind blowing foreshadowing and genious symbolysm you moron

[bxbomb]

tony killed those black guys lol

ditsoons,shines or melanzane......... not blacks

watched it agian last night and loved it even more

wont throw the word genius around but Chase is a damn good writer that fucked with peoples heads and is still working 2 days later

i saw it as nothing really happened .....TOny is somewhat at peace even with the impending Indictments and he is enjoying a meal withi his family that makes him comfortable , in an old family style restaurant he went to with Carm back in the day. prob used to listen to that exact same Journey song there.

It also showed how he constantly is going to be looking over his shoulder the rest of his life ,evertyime the bell on the door jingled he shoot a glance up to see who was coming in

[mikdondadon22]

i saw it as nothing really happened .....TOny is somewhat at peace even with the impending Indictments and he is enjoying a meal withi his family that makes him comfortable , in an old family style restaurant he went to with Carm back in the day. prob used to listen to that exact same Journey song there.

It also showed how he constantly is going to be looking over his shoulder the rest of his life ,evertyime the bell on the door jingled he shoot a glance up to see who was coming in

You know at first I would have agreed with this right here but after soaking everything in for the past 2 days now I realize this is way to simple and unoriginal...there is DEF more to it than that

[kfitz73]

This is more or less what I felt happened...

Copy & pasted from somewhere else...

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

[mikdondadon22]

that was deep

[mfiorellino]

As the comic book guy from the Simpsons would say "worst episode ever"

[JonStephen]

that was deep

you really cant get over it

here's my theory:

"it was shit...total fucking waste...god i can't stand all of you fucking people who look so deep in to symbols and shit...david chase can suck my cock...the last few seasons have gotten progressively worse and i thank God it's finally over

THE WORST!!!"

now thats deep

[stymie]

David Chase speaks:

The Sopranos

What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to god," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."

In that scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a man in a Members Only jacket's walk to the men's room. Just as the tension had been ratched up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid song) with no resolution.

"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.

Some fans have already assumed that the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

"I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.

"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."

Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."

(Earlier in the interview, he notes that his favorite part of the show was often the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, it'll be set in Newark in the '60s.)

Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.

Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9.

"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.

Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath?

"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," insists Chase. "To me, that's Tony."

Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes?

"I'm the Number One fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"

One detail about the final scene that he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox.

"It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my god!' I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."

Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies.

"It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."

Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:

-After all the speculation that Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw that Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.

"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the '70s," says Chase of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.

-Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.

"This, to me, feels very real," he says. "The majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now."

Also, the apocryphal story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists, wasn't true.

"What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion."

-I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No."

-Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony?

"I think Butch was an intelligent guy, he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge."

-Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Member's Only guy had never been on the show before, Tony killed at least, one if not both of his carjackers, and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.

[drdoom]

way to make yourself sound intelligent

Belladonna, back off Misk. Not for nothing, she is a good earner. Do you want to be fitted for concrete shoes?

[Felix_Leiter]

Stevie, "The Ewok" Doom.. I think we should hold a sit down between Sergie "Phil Collins" Serb and Mikey "Moleface" Donn with the Greek guy from the West..

The Walrus will supply all the gabagol and sauce

[drdoom]

Stevie, "The Ewok" Doom.. I think we should hold a sit down between Sergie "Phil Collins" Serb and Mikey "Moleface" Donn with the Greek guy from the West..

The Walrus will supply all the gabagol and sauce

Ohhhhhhhhhh! Fuck that cocksucker Sergie! All the envelopes he gives me are short, and he expects me to give him a little taste now, just because his goomah lives on Arthur? If he comes to the sit down, I swear on my santo patrono, I will fucking bust his head wide open with a buttigghia of limoncello. And tell the Walrus to bring some braciole.

[stymie]

warm merlot for everyone!

[kaydup]

she was like 16 you diddler

she is 22

[stymie]

didnt he say she was a junior in high school?

[Felix_Leiter]

she is 22

".....Drew "The Saucer" Kaydup always had a thing for babies..."

[kaydup]

didnt he say she was a junior in high school?

god sometimes I forget who i am talking with

[kaydup]

".....Drew "The Saucer" Kaydup always had a thing for babies..."

dont get me started on you