The Life & Death of Tony Soprano

It's been over four years since the above scene aired, ending the six season run of the HBO series The Sopranos.  It seems a bit belated to talk about it now, but at the time the ending stirred quite a bit of controversy (by which I mean "internet controversy", which is to real controversy what a McNugget is to a real chicken.)  Series finales have always been a bit polarizing among a show's fans.  The creators of these shows often go for something gimmicky or poignant, something a little offbeat from the normal flavor of the show.  Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't, but one way or the other, it usually gets people talking, which is the whole idea.

At first glance, it seems the The Sopranos ending is no kind of ending at all.  It randomly cuts to black in the middle of a scene.  There's no resolution, no closure, nothing.  Some have griped endlessly about this.  Others have dissected the scene shot by shot, and gone back through clues and references through-out the series, and they have reached the conclusion that Tony dies at the moment the shot cuts to black.  This seems to me to be a more than plausible explanation, and I'm quite willing to accept it.  The thing that I find interesting about it, though, is the way it has made me work backwards over the series, re-evaluating my impression and concept of it.

When I began watching the show in its first season, I felt like I had a handle on where it was going.  I felt like Tony was headed for some kind of break-through in his therapy with Dr. Melfi, specifically a moral break-through.  It seemed to me that it would be revealed that his black-outs and panic attacks were the result of some sort of struggle of conscience.  Well, as time went on, it became more and more clear that this break-through was never going to come.  Tony sank deeper and deeper into his multitude of sins, and while no one might be beyond God's redemption, things weren't looking too promising for the man.

Then at some point between moves, I lost my HBO subscription, and I lost track of the show for a while.  I picked up the show again somewhere in the middle of the fourth or fifth season, and I caught up on what I had missed in various ways.  Now a new overall plan for the series seemed to be emerging.  It seemed to me that Tony was going to be faced with a choice.  The show had always been about a man divided between two worlds and two identities, the brutal mafia boss and the family man.  Certainly the plan was to eventually bring these two worlds into an irrevocable conflict with each other.  And I could see exactly how they would do it too, Tony's son A.J.

All the signs were there.  A.J. was drifting and getting into more and more trouble.  Meanwhile, Tony had faced some hard choices, sanctioning the deaths of his cousin, his daughter's boyfriend, and so on.  What would happen if A.J. got himself into a position where Tony was forced to make that choice?  What if his role as mafia boss mandated that he kill his own son?  Would he give up the mob life for the sake of his family, or would he step completely beyond redemption once and for all?  It had an almost inevitable logic to it, and a dramatically Biblical overtone to boot.  The chess pieces were sliding into position.  Surely this is where it was headed!  But then, after A.J's pathetic assassination attempt on Junior, the whole thing kind of petered out.  Just another tantalizing plot thread that went no where.

And when it was all over, I realized that I had watched this show all these years, holding out hope for some kind of salvation for the man, or at the very least, final and irrevocable damnation.  I wanted closure.  We all did.  Christopher Moltisanti complained early on about his life having no "arc."  Unfortunately lives rarely do.  Tony Soprano's life went on for a while, and then it ended abruptly, as lives tend to do, and as mafia lives tend to do even more so, I imagine.  They don't generally end on an appropriate note, but rather in mid-song with so much left to do, so many sins unconfessed, so many mistakes uncorrected. All the while you're still trying to point your ship on its proper course, and if you'd only had five more minutes....  The Sopranos was never about any particular scheme or overall arc.  It was just about a man's life, as it went on for a while, and then it was over.  Cut to black.