Sopranos
I caught the finale of The Sopranos Sunday night. Eh. About what I expected. This whole season has been long and boring, and the finale didn’t break the streak. Like the last four seasons, it was overhyped and failed to live up to expectations. And like the last four seasons, I watched it anyway.
I think I know why they ended it the way they did. David Chase loves to defy expectations and throw curveballs at viewers. Everyone who watched the show had an expectation. The most common was Tony getting whacked, followed closely by Phil Leotardo getting whacked and Tony resuming life as usual, and either way that would pretty much wrap it up. There were a few more (Tony ending up in jail) but what nobody expected, other than me, was for there to be no real resolution at all. Nobody thought they might do that because, well, it would be retarded. And it was. That’s precisely why I saw it coming.
Still, for some reason, though it was obviously left vague by design, everyone tries to ascribe meaning to the ending. The most common theory is that it harkened back to Tony’s previous conversation with Bobby, in which they said “you probably never hear it coming” or something like that, and therefore conclude that Tony dies at the end. Still other people said that the guy who went into the bathroom was just staring at Tony the way any random guy would stare at someone who was regularly pointed out as a mob boss on the evening news.
Me personally, I’m just angry. I was watching it on my Xbox courtesy of the newest beta of Transcode 360, and I’d already had a few technical difficulties. I thought the screen going black was just something wrong with Media Center. John said “what just happened there?” and we both agreed it must have been a bad file or something, because there was no way the show’s writers could be that dumb. After a brief search on Digg we found out we were wrong, they were.
So just to be part of the gang, and despite the fact that it was intentionally left unresolved, I’ll give my account of what probably happened at the end.
The thugs who came in towards the end put some Jay-Z on the jukebox, probably the song 99 Problems. The strange guy comes out of the bathroom wielding a gun and pointing it at Tony. Unbeknownst to him, AJ, who had taken ninja-therapy at the hospital he was recuperating in, has a katana sheathed on his side. He pulls it out and slices the guys forearm clean off, which, along with the gun, clatters to the floor. The guy collapses, crying and looking at his bloody stump, in a pool of his own blood.
Meadow shrieks when she sees it happen, but then suddenly Eva Longoria comes in and consoles her with a very long, very hot make-out session. Tony has a heart attack and collapses into some lasagna, but nobody notices because there are two hot chicks getting it on and obviously nobody is going to be looking at a fat guy with that stuff happening. Also, a law is passed that makes old people stop being allowed to drive.
That’s my dream ending. What’s yours?
