the Sopranos- Page 12

[cheezedoodle]

Posted: 6/4/07 at 6:44pm

Blue - who knew Rosalie would have been such a hottie in that bustier?

[blueroses]

Posted: 6/4/07 at 6:46pm

I know! And Furio was HUGE.

[Glebb]

Posted: 6/4/07 at 6:52pm

[blueroses]

Posted: 6/4/07 at 6:57pm

Carm should escape to Italy, shere she can rekindle her romance with Furio! He can protect her and the kids.

[Glebb]

Posted: 6/4/07 at 7:04pm

Yeah. :)

[Glebb]

Posted: 6/4/07 at 7:09pm

Furio From Naples - A New HBO Series.

[Jane2]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:13am

I almost forgot-how is it that Melfi knew that Tony was tearing pages from her magazines?

[blueroses]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:27am

She saw him. You could her her say "Anthony" when he was putting the page in his pocket.

I have to admit, I've done that before. But I'm not a sociopath, I swear.

[Jane2]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:36am

They are in different rooms with the door shut when he is waiting. She told him that he's been tearing pages out all along. Very strange.

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 12:52pm

That death gave me chills like no other tv show has.

This show is just about perfect.

[blueroses]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 1:36pm

Cruel, which death? Burt Gervasi? Bobby? The Ukranians?

[Glebb]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:14pm

Prolly Bobby.

I'm so glad Tony had 'Gabagool'. :)

[Jane2]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:24pm

What's gabagool? I know what gabadeels are.

[Glebb]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:30pm

According to Yahoo Answers it's a thickly sliced luncheon meat taken from the neck and shoulder of a pig.

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:30pm

It's Italian slang for cappicola.

[Jane2]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:40pm

I see, thanks!

And gabadeels are cavatelli!

[Glebb]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 10:42pm

"It's a simple little system".

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 6/5/07 at 11:15pm

I have an idea for the ending...

Tony gets shot. As he's breathing his last breaths, Elijah Wood wakes up and the entire show was revealed to be a continuation of Rob Reiner's "NORTH".

[blueroses]

Posted: 6/6/07 at 10:28am

And moozadell is mozzarella. And reegot is ricotta.

Get with the program, people!

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 6/6/07 at 10:31am

In Germany The Sopranos is known as Ze Highsingers. It is a huge hit there.

[papalovesmambo]

Posted: 6/6/07 at 10:33am

i still prefer

Updated On: 6/6/07 at 10:33 AM

[cheezedoodle]

Posted: 6/8/07 at 6:27pm

With the final episode looming, a thought occured. Would'nt it be interesting if Tony ended up in Italy at the end as he dreamed about in (last?) season.

The following is an article I found in our local paper - very good read.

ARRIVEDERCI

Forget for a moment the nagging cultural question of how "The Sopranos" will end, and merely consider that it's ending.

That's a lot heavier than whether Tony goes out dead or alive.

The significance of "The Sopranos" can't be underestimated. Though many people have never seen even one episode -- a pay cable channel like HBO is often a luxury -- the series has changed the whole of television. First, it made HBO. Secondly, it further legitimized all of cable television as worthy -- and with the introduction of subsequent great dramas on HBO, Showtime, FX, etc., it helped change how and what Americans watch. More people began to see cable as having higher quality fare. Expectations rose and -- more than coincidentally -- dramas on the broadcast channels also got better and significantly more adult. They became smarter and grittier and aesthetically competitive.

A masterpiece of nuance, a compunctious exploration of shaded characters, rife with underappreciated humor and laden with stark violence and the allure of criminality, "The Sopranos" changed the game.

And Sunday it ends. Forever.

There's a lot to digest in that. HBO may never be the same again. The mobster genre is virtually off-limits except to the most aggressively daring of writers (otherwise, why get killed by the pale comparison?), and Sundays without "The Sopranos" and Tony's woes in both families will be an enormous hole to fill.

Ah, Tony. What's to become of him? That is the central question as "The Sopranos" ends. Oh, sure, there are countless questions about myriad characters, but it always comes back to Tony (played so brilliantly by James Gandolfini) -- does he live or die? Does he deserve either? If so, which more? People have loved his antihero (though it has always dismayed creator David Chase and you'd be hard-pressed to make a case for Tony of late, as his sociopathic indifference to all but himself has been a stark reminder that he is, let's not forget, the bad guy).

It's easy to get carried away with what will happen to Tony (and to a lesser extent Carmela, also played with exquisite perfection by Edie Falco), and it runs the risk of proper attention and respect being paid to the vanishing of a remarkable series, not just a character. And yet, here we are, on the brink of finding out what happens to the leading character of a series in the upper echelon of any show that's ever been on television, and it's hard not to get caught up in the simpleness of the proposition: How does it end?

Well, this much we do know, not necessarily in order of importance (and, if you need to be told, there are spoilers from past episodes coming):

-- Despite his seven years of therapy -- and a mobster in therapy was the keen premise to it all -- Tony is really no closer to understanding who he is or why his mother didn't love him (she tried to have him killed, after all) than he was when he first walked into the offices of Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco).

-- Though Tony and Carmela are still married -- their marital woes provided the backbone to the series -- they are barely better off than when we met them. He's still philandering, though he did stop for a while. She's less in denial about what Tony does and where her spending money comes from, but still a long way from enlightenment, acceptance or repudiation.

-- When it looked like daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) would be the most significant sibling, A.J. (Robert Iler) has now far surpassed her in relevance (and could conceivably still play into Tony's demise).

-- The New York family, led by Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) is moving on Tony's New Jersey-based family (derisively called "a glorified crew" by Phil), and the results as of last week do not favor our hometown boys. Tony's right-hand man, Silvio (Steve Van Zandt) is shot to pieces, barely holding on in the hospital. Bobby Bacala (Steven R. Schirripa) is dead. Tony is in hiding at a safe house with the remainder of his crew (he's upstairs, sporting Bacala's automatic weapon on his chest, a handy birthday present from earlier episodes). This brings up a question of some importance. After every possible theory about what will bring Tony down -- some cheap mistake, unknowable moment of familial retribution or even sharp detective work by the Feds -- will it really be something so pedestrian as a turf war that does him in? It seems so ... predictably mob-like. And "The Sopranos," though often misunderstood as a whack-of-the-week mob drama, has never been about predictability.

Of course, that leads back to Tony. Chase has made us believe that killing Tony is not only the right thing to do, it's a moral necessity (especially after he snuffed out Christopher, who was like a son to him -- so long Michael Imperioli, you were superb), plus all this chatter from Melfi and her psychiatrist friends about how therapy only emboldens true sociopaths. All signs say Tony's got to go. But with our antihero literally having his back up against the wall (fully armed though he may be), wouldn't killing him now be so predictable as to be partially offensive?

But wait, we're not done with what we know so far:

-- With only an hour to go, countless story lines will be left undone.

-- The Russian will not come back from the woods for his revenge.

-- It's probably too late for Carmela to step up and run the family.

-- Theories about what will happen to every character have now officially missed the bus, and all the red herrings have swam out sea.

So here we are. At the end. What to do with Tony?

Well, the smart money is on him surviving (but there's never any smart money in trying to outsmart the whims of Chase). Historically, the penultimate episode to each season has something terrible happen -- and it did last week. The final episode is often about dealing with the fallout, emotional reverberations and a surprising nothingness.

But those are season finales. This is a series finale. And Tony's fate is still undecided.

Is that such a bad thing? The static, Chase-esque, unrequited climax always seemed romantic -- have the series end with nothing happening, as if the camera shut off while filming, as if Tony and his two families went on with their lives, but our little glimpse ended.

We're way past that now. There's a turf war, main players are dead, the Soprano family is itself in flight. There is a call to action, Phil has put a war in motion. And so you'd expect Tony to either be killed or kill Phil in the process. Except there's still a chance for the critically-wished-for nonending to be in play. Tony could still rise up and kill Phil. That would satiate a lot of viewers. But in so doing, Tony lives. That, too, might please a lot of fans. Their hero -- whoops, antihero -- alive when the curtain falls. But what if Tony then turned and looked into the camera and that was it? We never know another thing about him?

Yes, a possibility. It could even be less defined, more murky, less aesthetically pleasing. Tony could live, but flee (emasculating, plus not very theatrical). He could rat out Phil (on the asbestos deal?) or simply roll over to the Feds, perhaps saving his family in the process -- and this is a show about families. He could be turned in or even killed by his own son, A.J. His wife, Carmela, could kill him. His sister Janice (Aida Turturro) could kill him. Hell, Artie Bucco (John Ventimiglia) could kill him. (There's something about chefs and grudges.) There could be a terrorist angle. A lot of people believe someone from inside his own crew could kill him, though Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico) is the only one left that audiences have an emotional connection to (or even could pick out of a lineup).

But what if Tony doesn't die? What if Phil doesn't die? What if there's a stalemate, or a truce, or something equally minor or inconsequential in its true-to-life scale, that sends the storytelling reeling (limping?) in another direction? What if we never find out about Carm or A.J. or Melfi or anyone else who has ever mattered?

Would that, in turn, matter at all? Maybe the living or dying or understanding of one character in one episode is less important than the emotional wallop of the entire series. Maybe everything, as a whole, that has come before in "The Sopranos" is infinitely more important than what is about to happen on Sunday.