I watched the first season of The Sopranos a year or two after it had aired. My excuse was that I thought it was overrated because most of the praise I heard came from my co-workers here in northern NJ. As it turns out, that first season was fantastic. But I heard that the second season was utterly terrible, so I never watched it, nor the subsequent ones.
Still, I sat down to watch the final episode last night, figuring Amy could fill me in on any backstory I was missing. A few minutes in, it occurred to me that this episode may get higher ratings in northern NJ than either the 1986 or 1991 Superbowl games.
SPOILER ALERT (so click “More” if you want to read the rest)
In the last scene, Tony’s family joins him at a diner with an on-table jukebox. I haven’t seen one of those in at least 10 years, but I don’t eat at diners much anymore. Before his wife and kids arrive, Tony flips through the songs, drops some quarters in, and selects Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’.
Amy stormed out of the room after the final scene ended (Tony’s daughter runs in, maybe-a-hit-man walks by and enters the bathroom, the screen goes black for 5 or 6 seconds, and up come the credits), so we weren’t able to talk about the incredible surprise ending of Tony coming out of the closet.
Journey? Seriously?
Anyway: Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos.
What is more New Jersey than Journey in the mid-80s, other than the all-too-obvious Bon Jovi? Big stadium rock and big hair mullets? It’s a perfect reference.
Was she mad at the ending? Although confusing, I’ve come to appreciate it more today. Tony’s life will forever be looking at who’s walking through the door (feds, family, potential assassins), and the sudden fade to black is what Phil must have experienced in Oyster Bay. In other words, the audience got whacked! Mind you, I didn’t figure any of this out on my own, but have assimilated a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking on the internet.
I was pretty certain they would do something along the lines of what they did as this season has gone really heavy on the “you’re enjoying watching a sociopath” critique.
That was an interesting series. Gandolfini and Falco were as great as the actors playing their kids were awful. In fact, there hasn’t been a show with that many different levels of acting competency since St. Elsewhere, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen acting like Steven Van Zandt provided, at least not since silent film. The writing was all over the place, but the design was frequently stupendous: great exteriors, believable interiors.
I think the hard thing to explain to people 20 years from now is that so many people loved it so much when it first came on.
I’ve done much Monday-morning quarterbacking myself and it seems most people are satisfied with this ending. There were two scenarios I thought likely (and this “life goes on” ending was one of them), but I really, really hoped for more of a Greek tragedy.
What did you make of Meadow’s parallel parking difficulties?
As far as Journey goes, I thought Chase might be hinting at Tony’s examined-yet-unchanged life going “on and on and on and oooooonnnnn.”
Honestly, I’m just happy the Russian didn’t show up.
Since I didn’t see any of the previous episodes, beyond the first season, where there WAS a solid structure and, dare I say, “closure,” my take on all this is pretty limited.
From my literary-guy/detective perspective, I figure there’s no way that Tony picks that particular song just because he’s a big Journey fan (a San Fran band; not so much a Jersey staple).
My assumption was that “Don’t Stop Believin'” was ‘their song’ when he and his wife were dating, or early in their marriage. There’s a sorta nostalgia-joy when it starts playing, and he becomes crestfallen and ‘all business’ when Carmela pays zero attention to it after she sits joins him at the table.
(Partly, this is because I refuse to believe that David Chase would be so boringly obvious and heavy-handed as to ask us to regard this ending as a “Journey”.)
Now, when you contrast this — Tony’s musical reminiscence and Carmela’s failure to place it — with Tony’s visit to his addled Uncle Junior, who has forgotten almost his entire life, it becomes a pretty poignant moment, even if the choice of song is pretty brutal. Personally, I would have gone with Chain Reaction.
Oh, and Tom: As I said to Amy last night when Tony visited Li’l Steven in the hospital, “I didn’t know you could actually mug in a coma.”
I’m pretty sure one of the muppets was originally cast as Silvio.