The line to cancel HBO starts here. What a ridiculously disappointing end lacking in creativity. . . . There’s even buzz that the real ending will be available only on the series’ final DVD. Either way, it was terrible. . . . Chase clearly didn’t give a damn about his fans. Instead, he crapped in their faces. This is why America hates Hollywood.
The ending to The Sopranos was arguably the most controversial series finale since Who’s the Boss? For the record: I thought it was brilliant. Fans who wanted to see Tony get whacked or enter the witness protection program, fans who wanted to see Tony kill Paulie, fans who wanted some kind of big shoot-out or “twist” ending—what show were they watching all those years?
Of course The Sopranos had some stunning plot developments over the years, with major characters getting killed off in the blink of an eye. But it was never a prime-time soap opera, and it was never a twist-and-turn jigsaw puzzle like Heroes, for crying out loud.
If one of those vaguely menacing characters in the diner had pulled out a gun and we had seen Tony, Carmela, A.J., and maybe even Meadow laid out in pools of blood, you’re telling me that would have been a great ending?
Come on. That’s B-movie stuff.
The fact that people were still dissecting and arguing about The Sopranos in the days and weeks after the show ended says much about the genius of series creator David Chase, who made the decision to end the run on a somewhat ambiguous note. (It’s not as if nothing happened in the last few weeks of Tony Soprano’s life leading up to that family dinner. Most of his closest associates were either dead, in a coma, or, in the case of Uncle Junior, living in the Twilight Zone.) Five minutes after most series draw to a close, people stop talking about those shows. JAG ran for 10 years, but when was the last time you heard anyone talk about the series finale of JAG? Ever?
When a series finale packs in all big-ticket items such as weddings, births, deaths, resolutions of long-time conflicts, the closing of the business where everyone worked, etc., it feels rushed and gimmicky. Everyone on Friends finds love and/or happiness; the gang on Seinfeld gets sent to jail; Bob Newhart’s second life was only a dream; the entire run of St. Elsewhere took place in the mind of an autistic kid—give me a friggin’ break.
So what exactly did happen in the last moments of The Sopranos? That’s where all the conspiracy theories kick in.
There were literally hundreds of Sopranos final episode conspiracy theories put forth on the Internet. Perhaps the two most well-known are the infamous “Nikki Leotardo” e-mail and an incredibly detailed analysis written by a former TV writer who began his fascinating essay with, “OK, here’s 3000 words about five minutes of TV. I must have no life whatsoever.”
In the days after The Sopranos finale, I must have received the Nikki Leotardo e-mail 100 times. Usually the subject header said something like, “THE SOPRANOS—YOU HAVE TO READ THIS!!!!!”
An excerpt:
In the last scene we are seeing through Tony’s eyes. Remember when he was speaking with Bobby, basically saying you don’t see it happening [when you’re killed]?
So here is what I found out. The guy at the bar is also credited as Nikki Leotardo. The same actor played him in the first part of Season 6 during a brief sitdown concerning the future of Vito. Apparently he is the nephew of Phil. Phil’s brother Nikki Senior was killed in a 1976 car accident. Absolutely genius!!! David Chase is truly rewarding the true fans who pay attention to detail.
The trucker was the brother of the guy who was robbed by Christopher in Season 2. Remember the DVD players? The trucker had to identify the body.
The Boy Scouts were in the train store.
The black guys were the ones that tried to kill Tony and only clipped him in the car.
Thank you David Chase for making it so obscure. I feel bad about hating you at first. Absolutely amazing!!!
If this had been a deleted scene from the movie Crash or it had been inspired by a flashback in Lost, maybe half the customers in the diner would have had some connection to Tony Soprano.
Problem is, not one of the assertions made in the e-mail is true.
The guy at the bar was not credited as “Nikki Leotardo.” There never was a Nikki Leotardo on the show.
The Boy Scouts in the diner are not the same kids who were in the store when Bobby got whacked.
The actor playing the trucker had never been on the show before.
The two black guys in the diner were not the same two guys who tried to kill Tony. How do we know? Well, at least one of the two would-be assassins was killed when the attempt was botched.
However, the e-mail did get one thing right: the name of the show is The Sopranos.
Probably the most comprehensive and captivating dissection of the final scene was written by Bob Harris, author of a book about his experiences on Jeopardy! and a former writer on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, among many other credits.
Harris penned a lengthy, labyrinthine, and well-crafted essay about the final scene in The Sopranos and posted it on his blog, where it soon became a huge Internet hit. I received at least a dozen e-mails directing me to his site.
In meticulous detail, Harris notes myriad examples of symbolism run amok in the final episodes. He points out that in the opening moments of the episode, Tony is filmed from above, making it appear as if he’s lying in a coffin; he explains why the color orange is a direct reference to The Godfather; how Tony Soprano is framed in a Last Supper motif in one shot in the diner; how Tony, Carm, and A.J. gobble their onion rings as if they were communion wafers; and much, much, more. (You can read the entire essay at www .bobharris.com/content/view/1406/.) Harris makes some keen points and takes some wild leaps of faith, but as interesting as the essay is, it doesn’t “prove” that Tony was killed or that he’s still alive.
Other bloggers compiled lists of the music selections on the tabletop jukebox. Before Tony settles on “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey, he flips past a number of selections that seem to have added significance, including:
Then there’s the Washington Post article noting all the biblical references in the final episode. And the theory that the ubiquitous cat is the spirit of Adriana, reincarnated—which explains why the cat was fixated on the picture of Christopher, who gave up Adriana to be whacked. Not to mention the significance of the Twilight Zone episode playing on the TV in one scene. And the comments of a tour guide about how Little Italy is vanishing. And so much more.
David Chase commented cryptically to the Newark Star-Ledger, “Anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there.” In an interview for The Sopranos: The Complete Book, he elaborated: “If people want to sit there figuring this stuff out, I think that’s just great.” But “there are no esoteric clues in there. No Da Vinci Code. . . . I’m not trying to be coy. It’s just that I think to explain it would diminish it.”
In the same interview, he marveled, “We didn’t expect [some fans] to be that pissed for that long. . . . There was a war going on that week and attempted terror attacks in London. But these people were talking about onion rings.”
There are more theories about the last episode of The Sopranos than about any series finale in the history of television. Some say Chase will one day do a movie version of The Sopranos; I say you’d have a better chance of getting James Gandolfini to play the mom in a Broadway revival of Hairspray. We’ll never know exactly what happened after the screen went gray, because we’re not supposed to know. Maybe Tony got whacked. Maybe Meadow joined the family for an uneventful dinner. Maybe 10 years past that moment in the diner, Tony would be in prison, Carmela would be divorced from him and married to someone else, Meadow would be an attorney representing shady clients, and A.J. would be in Hollywood, working as a producer and snorting his way to self-destruction.
Or maybe they’d be back in the diner for another meal, still a happy (if highly dysfunctional) family.