The Sopranos Finale ***potential for spoilers*** — Page 3

The scene with Janice was great, too. Their chemistry is perfect.

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Perfect series closer.
I loved it.

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...if he lived.

The ending the classic Chase.
It was sublime.
My one and only complaint was the end of the Tony/Dr. Melfi storyline....that said....Tony turning a session to discuss AJ into something all about his bad childhood was satisfying.

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I thought all the onion rings were poisoned and meadow would walk in to find her whole family dead.

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Why was David Chase's daughter in this one? She was on the bed with Meadow.

Speaking of familiar faces - Donna Pescow was in this one! Yay - I miss her!

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Give me a break. I bet not one of you didn't say a big "WTF" when you watched the ending. I'm also betting a good number of you jumped online to see what others thought, and then after reading some of the raves,those easily swayed joined the "Chase is a genius" bandwagon. Others were so vested in the show you wanted to like how it ended. Which leaves a few of you who really did like it...

For me, my huge disappointment with the finale had little to do with closure in having to tie up all the loose ends. There's no doubt that I would have even been mad if they did tie up everything in a nice tidy package. What irks me the most about the greater portion of this "finale", especially the closing minutes, is that it really had nothing to do with character, or plot or creative writing (unless you really believe parking a car and talking about food good writing and a plot). It had a LOT to do with an egomaniac who just wanted to create controversy by manipulation..tricking the viewer into thinking something will happen, while at the same time working in these really COOLLLL song/Godfather references. You can see all the mechanics at work here and that for me proves deadly for any show. Good writing should emanate from character and plot and they instead decided to forget all that an toy with the audience. There are many other ways the story could have played out that would have been far more satisfying and still provide the kind of thought-provoking talk afterward. Not everything has to be answered..but NOTHING?

I personally thought that in Paulie's last scene the cat should have darted onto the street with a car swerving to miss it and instead hitting Paulie, pinning him against the building with his sun reflector impaled on his head.

If they had to end this in a restaurant...have the gunfire erupt but dont show who got shot or killed. Fade to black. Then as the picture comes back we see Meadow walking into the restaurant.She sees her husband with a little girl sitting at a table. No sign of Tony and family. Hubby shows her an article in the paper. From the date on the paper, we now realize its 5-10 years forward that she was responsible for convicting the then mafia kingpin. End of show. I'm sure that there's many better endings out there than that. No ending would please everyone but just about anything wouldve been better than what was shown...which really only amounted to the manipulation of a self-obsessed producer who really didnt care a rats ass about his audience. The all-time winner of pretentious garbage.

"Give me a break. I bet not one of you didn't say a big "WTF" when you watched the ending"

You lose the bet - I did not say any size WTF. To me it was quite clear why the screen went blank.

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This is how I saw it, Namo-

Because of the way he was setting up the scene, with the entire family assembled together, and the suspicious looking men who were swarming around them, I felt that the whole family was blown to bits, and the screen went blank because it wasn't necessary to see the blood bath. The imagination was enough.

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Jane, really?

Upon watching it a second time, I thought that Meadow came in through the door and they ate onion rings. No one gets whacked. No one grows. No one changes. Life continues on. The end.

mejust...the girl on the bed was Hunter. She was on early in the series as Meadow's "bad influence" best friend. I LOVED the crushed expression on Carm's face when she learned that Hunter turned out "better" than Meadow (2nd year med student).

Meadow prosecuting a Mafia kingpin? Would never happen! Do you remember the scene in the living room with Patsy's parents? She'll be doing precisely the opposite.

Updated On: 6/12/07 at 08:51 AM

Well, having started this thread with my "WTF" response, I've now watched the episode again. Twice.

Although its taken me much longer than many to absorb the episode, what I now see is that the episode is amazingly well structured, even if the initial impact left many viewers (including me) feel unsatisfied.

There is so much in there that is open for interpretation. And so many big moments hiding as small ones. For instance, when the FBI guy gleefully says, "We're winning!", does that sum up years of his stirring the pot in hopes of fueling the chaos in hopes that warring families will destroy each other. He shows he is more than capable of duplicity in the frequent "poor me" phone calls and references to never getting to see his wife and kids, when at least some of the time it's because he's shacked up with his coworker from the FBI. He also didn't want the coworker to know he called Tony with the tip of where to look for Phil Leotardo. Was that because he secretly likes Tony and is helping him, or because he's inserted himself as a player pitting one family against another, which just might be playing outside of the FBI rule book? It's open to interpretation, but it tells volumes about the FBI guy in just one scene.

When Tony walks into the restaurant and sees himself, is that a reference back to the "clarity" he gained during his peyote trip? Or an out of body near-death experience?

I'll admit that I had hoped for a more tidy ending, but I doubt that it would have stuck with me like this one did. Like the way he did the ending or not, there was nothing unintentional or undeliberate about anything in the final hour.

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Were any of you "a little miffled" today?

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