Serious Zen

I should be engaged in much more important matters right now, but I can’t stop thinking about the final episode of The Sopranos, “Made in America.”  The blogosphere is currently flooded with theories about the episode, particularly the last few minutes, and I suppose I’ll add mine, but as a devoted fan I’m just not sure how I feel about the way David Chase decided to end the show.

If you haven’t seen the final episode, it might be best if you stop reading now.  If you have, however, I assume you know what I’m talking about.  On the whole, the final episode seems to clean up (or, in this case, make a bloody mess of) only one major plot point, Phil Leotardo.  Of course, it’s not as though we didn’t expect that Tony’s crew would eventually find and take care of the Phil situation.  At the same time, we did expect that the show would offer some kind of closure, presumably in the form of Tony’s indictment or death.  On the surface, that seems to not be the case. 

Despite Agent Harris’ proclamation, after learning of Phil’s death, that “Damn, we’re going to win this thing,” the possibility of an indictment in light of what would be an obvious case of entrapment seems unlikely.  As for Tony’s death, well, that’s a bit more ambiguous.

In the last few mintues of the episode, we find Tony arriving at a family diner, Holsten’s, for a sit-down family dinner.  The first one to arrive, he takes a seat in a booth, flips through a few possible song choices on the tabletop jukebox, finally deciding on Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and watches the door in expectation.  As you can imagine, the tension, at this point, is almost unbearable; these are the last few minutes of the last episode of the show, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine that Tony, or at least someone close to Tony, is not going to get it.  As he watches the door, a suspicious-looking truck driver enters and takes a seat in a booth.  Nothing happens.  At the same time, given that it was not one of Tony’s family members who entered, the suspicion that something might have happened to one or all of them becomes a concern.  However, this tension quickly fades as we see Carmela enter and take a seat across from Tony.  They share a bit of conversation, and shortly after A.J. arrives, behind another suspicious-looking character who takes a seat at the bar and suggestively glances over at Tony’s booth.  Needless to say, we are led to believe that this could be the guy who’s going to take out Tony, if not his entire family.  As the family talks and waits for Meadow, who is having a difficult time parallel parking outside the restaraunt (is she going to be saved by a twist of parking fate?), the shady character at the bar walks by the Soprano booth and into the bathroom; tension is high.  The show now cuts back to Meadow, who has successfully parked her car and is now crossing the street to the diner.  The next shot is of Tony looking up at the door, and then a quick fade to black.  That’s it; that’s the end.  The 86th episode of an eight-year show about the New Jersey mafia ends with a family meeting for dinner.

So what are we supposed to make of it all?  Well, unless we’re avid Italo Calvino fans, we’re certainly bound to be frustrated by the lack of apparent closure. Or maybe this is simply David Chase’s way of offering his devout fans their own sense of interpretive closure.  Without a clear-cut ending, speculation is the only thing left.  So, let’s speculate.

If there’s a key to the last few minutes of the show, it certainly seems to be directed by the song–Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”–that plays in the background.  If we assume that the lyrics of the song are directly related to the action of the story, then there are, at least, a couple lines worth drawing attention to:  “Don’t stop believin’ / Hold on to that feelin’.”  Needless to say, the predominate “feeling” during this portion of the episode is that Tony is going to get “whacked.”  So, perhaps Chase is, after all, suggesting an end to the series.  Perhaps we should believe that the shady looking character who entered the bathroom is going to return with a gun; perhaps he was simply waiting for Meadow’s arrival.  Of course, there are other portions to the song that seem to suggest that nothing is going to happen, particularly “Oh, the movie never ends / It goes on and on and on and on,” and maybe we should should just assume that the characters, and in a sense the show, will continue to exist but outside of our view.  In either case, I guess we’ll never know.