The Sopranos: Bada-Bing Bada-Bang!

Some thoughts about the final episode of The Sopranos after the jump. Spoiler alert, I suppose.

I was in high school when Sopranos began in 1999. I didn’t watch the show back then — probably because I was still mourning the loss of PRISM — but I eventually caught up with old episodes when I became obsessed with the show in college. A lot of people (well, those with enough money to afford a premium cable channel) watched The Sopranos, not just those who loved mob dramas or dug seeing about a murder a week acted out on television. No, a lot of people watched Sopranos because it was a fine show, a great show, maybe the best TV show ever made.

This, of course, brings us to the final episode, the one everyone talked about yesterday and the one that disappointed a bunch of people. Final episodes (at least recently) almost always disappoint people; there’s really no way to live up to the expectations of a popular show’s run. Even another decent-ish HBO show, Sex & The City, copped out and did the Friends ending. Or maybe Sex & The City ended first. I forget.

So, the ending: Quick cut to black, everyone’s calling Comcast saying the cable went out, then the credits. I had to rewind a few times on my DVR to figure out what the hell was going on. (My cable goes out for a brief flash at least 5 times a day, so I really did think this was just another Comcast fuckup for a minute.) My friend hated the ending. My mom hated the final episode altogether. I figured everyone would hate it.

The final episode was a little, well, sub-par. It wasn’t an awful episode, but it was nothing like the penultimate episode, which had about 20 minutes of the best drama rivaling any of the top movies of all time. The final episode was, actually, hilarious, and Tony appeared to be like the “old Tony” again. Sometime in the last season, Tony went from Bull Meecham — the asshole we all felt bad about loving — to pure evil. No way would Tony kill Christopher. Not like that, at least. But, in the last episode, Tony was Tony again. He was a funny, sarcastic jerk again!

There was a lot to love in the final episode: The cat that was Christopher’s ghost re-incarnated. The way Silvio Dante acted poorly even when he was in a coma. The SUV running over Phil’s head and the kid throwing up after seeing it. The exploding car ending AJ’s chance at some 16-year-old ass. Meadow being in denial just as much as her father when she says the government treats Italian-Americans poorly because Tony was arrested. The FBI agent cheering on Tony. AJ’s 75 career changes. Tony’s crack about Donald Trump letting AJ get some time off to go on secret CIA missions. The worst part of the final episode was nothing all that bad happened to AJ. (I was kind of hoping for a Janis-AJ murder-suicide.)

But the ending. It was dramatic, and I was kind of convinced yesterday morning Tony had been killed because of Bobby’s remark earlier this season about how you never see it coming and it just ends. But maybe Tony survived, maybe he’s going to spend the rest of his life (until prison, I suppose) looking over his shoulder for a Phil Leotardo associate ready to kill him. And, yeah, the Choose Your Own Adventure ending is kind of lame, but, you know what? I think it fits. Arrivederci, Sopranos.