What a cop-out! Today media and fans clog the intertubes with clues and theories and Easter eggs to prove whatever theory you prefer, but what the finale actually did (irrespective of all the extra-textual bullshit David Chase decided to build into the episode) was to revoke the whole premise of the show. Mob boss sees shrink. In the episode before last, when Melfi shows Tony Soprano to the door (evoking the end of The Godfather) we know that this bodes poorly for Soprano, who has wrestled with panic his entire life and career. Chase exited Melfi in an inexcusably clumsy way (a colleague at a dinner party Googled a study, a study, singular?), it set up Soprano's fall by taking away his crutch. The viewer could only expect the burden of his childhood and his lack of an heir apparent to come crashing down on him.
Instead: Having achieved total victory by following Phil Leotardo's risky proposition of war, the entire New York crew decides to join up with the shambles of the wrecked New Jersey family (whose business New York had already assumed!), thereby leading to the Leotardo's demise. Having never proven suitable to take up his father's work, A.J. Soprano finds himself taken with another category of crime (terrorism!: why else his professed obsession with the car's explosion, his alternating invented justifications for joining the military to get to Afghanistan?)—only to be dissuaded from this path when Soprano Sr. flashes a shiny object in front of him.
The season-specific conflicts all tidied up, the messiest bit comes in at the end. Chase chooses not to conclude the show, but that, of course, isn't an option for a media-heralded conclusion of an epic series. The show tells us with its ambiguity that Soprano keeps on keeping on: Maybe, in the end, he's pinched by the testimony he describes or someone finally pops him or he just lives his life with his family, and all of those things in their copotential possibility are suggested by this Schroedinger's cat–foreshadowed dinner, but none of these foreseeable endings speaks specifically to the premise of the show: Mob boss sees shrink.
SHORTER POST: Tony Soprano's dead, and David Chase killed him.
Posted by Kriston at June 11, 2007 2:23 PMI'm already arguing with you about this in at least two other places, but I'm game for more: I don't think it was a bad ending. And I think that "Mob boss sees shrink" is a little too reductive. The shrink was always just a narrative device. "Mob boss is both monstrous and human" is less snappy but closer to it, I think. The shrink just provided a convenient way for the writers to explore that conflict.
But then it turned out that although this contradition is complicated to untangle, the end result is pretty simple: Tony's a monster after all. Melfi cutting him loose seemed out of character, but its lack of effect on Tony was the real point. Those studies were right. Tony's a sociopath and therapy wasn't doing anything useful for him. He went right back to navigating the same terrain of brutality, melancholy and mundanities that he always has. Then it rose up and swallowed him, the way it was always going to.
As for AJ: I just took his joy at the car's destruction and his dismay about the state of the world to be his way of subconsciously expressing discomfort with his father's business (which he only really began to understand when he saw his friends engaging in it). Meadow went through the same thing a while back. But they both got over it: AJ, being the little prick that he is, was convinced by a new Beamer. And Meadow just eventually reconciled herself to it -- she now wants to defend the trampled rights of mobsters.
Posted by: tom at June 11, 2007 4:35 PMSpeaking as someone who's only, at this moment, up to "Pie-Oh-My", I have to say, I don't think the premise of the show is "Mob boss sees shrink." I don't even think that's really the hook of the show. I think that a lot of critic, in coming to grips with what the show was about, fixated on that, but to me, the show sort of is all about imploding the mobster mythos by presenting Tony as a man adrift in the same America as the rest of us: a life that's largely unfulfilling and packed with mundanity. Through Melfi, you can see what makes Tony tick, that's all. Of course, Tony is never helped by the therapy because he's never truly honest with Melfi, or himself. So the cycle spirals downward.
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