I wouldn't lie to you and your 6 or 7 lines of unnecessary space between quotes.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Yeah, there was some dissent but most people here hated it. A weird show that was like nothing we had ever seen quickly devolved into Tango and Cash. I almost expected McConaughey to say, "I'm too old for this..."

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

redirecting this from the TD thread JORR just bumped.

what i hated most about what happened to "the sopranos" was that chase was put in a bad position for a writer. he could've owned up to that. HBO didn't want to let this show go, so they wanted it to keep it continue. then he started acting like this was his plan all along. i think it's all just a copout. he knew he had to end with tony dying, that was the whole plan from the beginning. but now that it was so painfully obvious that's how it had to happen, he tried to get cute with it. and then tried to play it off like "well, maybe that's not what happened!"

i'm sure he made enough money to not lose sleep over it, but as a writer he should be ashamed of himself for trying to cover up his own sell out.

The Seinfeld finale was fine. That wasn't a show designed for a big shocking finale. The funny thing is that people seemingly wanted the finale to be different than the rest of the show was.

The show was really about three things.
1) Mundane every day things and the absurdity of it.
2) Great secondary characters.
3) All of them being bad but not evil people.

The finale nailed those three things.

The dopes are the ones that wanted it to end with Jerry and Elaine getting married or for them to become rich tv stars.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Agreed. I wasn't the Seinfeld fan that MANY are, but I thought the final episode was very appropriate. It was a show about nothing.

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i've watched the finale 3 times since its initial airing in 1998 and my opinion has never changed. it was badly written. that's because it was written by larry david, who apparently still had an ax to grind with the show that made him a millionaire. seinfeld should not have let david come back to write it. they had taken the show in goofier directions that served the latter half better once david wanted to let the show go off the rails in the 7th season, culminating in killing Susan off.

the reason the finale was bad was because it undermined what made the show great. these characters didn't need to go through a lengthy courtroom trial to prove what we already knew about them. not only that, the ancillary characters brought back had very little to add. it was a waste of time. ending it with them in prison but acting like they were at monk's was obvious and a bit lame.

the set up was pretty good, and there were some parts that were funny. but overall it was a total missed opportunity. i will say this--it would've been hard to do a finale. you were never going to please everybody. but at least make it funny. and less heavy handed.

david made up for it with "curb" but i didn't need to see him wringing his hands over characters he already hated one last time.

That's the problem though. There was no "great finale" for a show like that.

I've never seen anyone come up with a finale that everyone would say "Yeah, that was great". The show was literally called "The show about nothing". You can't wrap up in a pretty little bow a show about that.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

that's why i would've rather it be in the hands of one of the writers that handled the last season instead of david. david just wanted to fuck the characters off.

i think even as a standalone episode it's one of the weakest. when you put the "finale" stamp on it, that's why it's under a microscope.

I'm not sure why he keeps playing coy about the ending, but that's my only issue. There could never be a sequel or future season though. It wasn't shot ambiguously and the ending wasn't open ended. It was clear that Tony was killed. There's no other interpretation of the last 5 minutes that holds up.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Tony ran away from the diner, had Jim Morrison waiting for him, and then Amelia Earhart flew them both to Paris where they're all living together in sin.
{Movie Reference}

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"This is Chicago, my friend. Anything can happen."

Yes.

They were acting shady in that meeting, too. I always assumed MOG was sent by the new power in NY.

Im unclear who is "they" and the "latter half" here

Then it is a poorly supported ending, not in keeping with any narrative theme brought up in that season or in any other. People who cling to the "But Bobby said 'you probably never hear it coming.'" are just as bad as those who think Tony would still be trudging down to get the morning paper. Picking up the thread of a single line from a handful of episodes ago is not neatly wrapping up a plot.

If even once that season they had broached the topic of a soldier not obeying orders to stand down, or New York actively subverting a freshly agreed-to truce, then I'd buy it. However as it stands, none of the MOB theories are properly supported by the narrative, which supersedes the cinematography of the ending to make it a poorly thought out, bad, ending to a drama.

They = the writers.
Latter half = post Larry David

No, the Tony might be alive people are wrong and the people bringing up the Bobby thing are just pointing out the obvious foreshadowing that Chase threw in.


You keep referring to not obeying orders. That's not what happened. You're one of the only people I've ever heard think it was an old Phil order. Most people think it was the new guys taking over the NY crew or some other living breathing enemy of Tony. THAT had precedent in the show. NY was constantly looking down on NJ and truces were broken routinely.

I took the dude as a metaphor for Tony's lifestyle coming back to bite him in the ass. The show had set up Tony as possibly reforming himself following his coma. This is most obvious during his hiatus as Kevin or whatever his name was, where Kevin was the asshole Tony was in real life, and the coma Tony as a decent guy and salesman represented what Tony is/could be if he got out of the mob game. He recognized that a bit once he woke up but then gradually fell back into bad habits and resumed being a degenerate basically. So he's in this downward spiral after refusing to see the light and in the end, as he's said before, you either leave the mob game by being imprisoned or by being killed. So for me the details of the jacket dude don't matter. He represents the dangers of the life Tony chose so it's only fitting that he's cut down in the end by someone who plays the same game.

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Successful calls:

Kyrie Irving will never win anything as a team's alpha: check
T.rubisky is a bust: check
Ben Simmons is a liability: check
The Fields Cult is dumb: double check

2013 CSFMB ROY

What truces were broken by New York earlier in the series? To my knowledge that was the first and only time Tony was depicted in and resolving a war with another family. Phil killing Vito was not acting counter to a previously agreed-upon truce, and though it remains unsaid, it is implied that Tony was the one who gave up Vito to Phil. Blundetto killing Peeps (because Tony was keeping him on the proverbial bench) and then Billy Leotardo (in retaliation for Johnny Sack killing Angelo) wasn't breaking an armistice. In fact in the next season after Johnny Sack gets pinched, Phil tells him during a visit in lockup that he is abiding by the truce Johnny and Tony agreed to the morning Sack got nabbed by the FBI raid, and that remains true all the way up until Phil goes to war with Tony.

A lot of excuses for essenitally breaking truces there. Even Phil having to tell Johnny he was respecting the truce makes it very obvious that these truces are not rock solid.

I dont really care to get much more into it. I understand your opinion and I get it. I just saw it differently.

When I watched the ending, I hated it. Within a few days, it made more sense, but I still think it was overly artsy and too suggestive. He died. Perfectly fine and would have preferred to them showing him being shot or something and then cutting to black.

What drove me nuts (argh) about the show is how they just kept leaving open story lines. I recall reading an interview with Vince Gilligan about Breaking Bad and he specifically mentioned one of the worst things you can do with a show is leave unresolved storylines out there. The Sopranos did that for numerous seasons and it clearly showed they were milking the show to drag it out longer. Total shame....it started out as a great show.

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It might’ve been mentioned upthread already but there’s some pretty good YouTube videos breaking down the last scene in real time describing what Chase was doing and what each shot meant culminating in why it meant yes, Tony was shot at the end.

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Yeah I haven't thought much about it in a long time until this recently got bumped. The thread was pretty good and did have those links. It really does make sense how it ended. Tony thought everything was fine. Throughout the time in the diner you see what he sees especially the end. You never see it coming you just see black. The end.

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Elections have consequences.

That's not really a steadfast rule though. A lot of writers would disagree with that, obviously including David Chase. One of his writers, the guy that went on to do Boardwalk Empire, really wanted them to wrap up the Russian in Pine Barrens story line, and Chase thought the episode and story would be better if left unresolved. He was probably right. That's now one of the most famous episodes of the whole series.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Tony died,no doubt about it.
Plus best ending I seen for a series in a long time was Angel.

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When I am stuck and need to figure something out I always remember the Immortal words of Socrates when he said:"I just drank what?"

Life is full of "unresolved storylines." That's something Chase got absolutely right (along with his overarching thesis that people are virtually irreparable shitheads). The Russian coming back in the finale would have been so hokey.

And yeah, the ending was artsy. That's the point. If The Sopranos had run on CBS after back-to-back episodes of Kevin James Is Some Fat Retard or whatever, I'm sure America would have had the finale adequately explained.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Christopher: Could be him out there, stalking us.

Paulie: With what, his cock?

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That was the only good episode that season, they came back after that episode and never really followed up anything from it. That's when I started losing interest in The Sopranos

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They got cocky and introduced a meandering storyline, trying to make the show something other than it was. It was just fine the way it was.

so we will just agree Pine Barrons one of the best Sopranos episodes. I also really like the episode Tony takes Meadow on College visits.

Whether it was unresolved story lines or not, the show jumped the shark around season 4 and did not end very well. Those first 3 seasons were awesome.

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