Forget politics. All anyone is talking about is the Sopranos ending. Everyone seems to be kvetching about it but I thought it was great. Anyone who expected a neat and tidy ending, with plot resolution and music over the credits that would tell you what to feel, wasn't paying attention to a series where frayed ends abound. The Russian never came out of the woods. Nothing was ever resolved with Julianne Skiff, the 12-step love interest of Christopher and Tony. Carmela never figured out that her husband had whacked everyone from Ralph Cifaretto to Adrianna to Christopher. The idea that Tony would get whacked himself or imprisoned or manage to shed the "gun charge" or the "RICO preidcate" that had been haunting him all season was a misnomer. The series ends with real life's unresolved moments. Critics this morning seemed to have expected a tidy ending and resolution where there was none.
I agree with Brian Williams that the cat was a bit much, an echo of the ducks that began the series. Remember the mallars that landed magically in Tony's pool were a none-too-subtle symbol of unconditional family love, they triggered Tony's elated joy--he walked into pool in his bathrobe to see them--and the first panic attacks that sent him to Dr. Jennifer Melfi. The cat was solitary, creepy--introduced heavy handedly at first with The Twilight Zone in the background and then with an eerie air as the reincarnated Christopher. The cat was a reminder, I thought, of how alone we are, family or not.
The last episode, critics seem not to have noticed, was titled "Made in America" and there was no specific reference to the title in the episode the way there was with, say, "The Blue Comet", the penultimate episode where Bobby Baccalieri was whacked while buying a handsome model train by the same name. It's telling that the story ended not at Vesuvio's, that ghetto restaurant of Italian American culture, but at Holsten's, a real life Bloomfield, New Jersey institution that I went to as a kid, although in my part of Essex County we were more partial to Grunning's. Instead of being surrounded by Italian Americans--in the last Vesuvio's scene, Jets head coach Eric Mangini and his wife made a cameo--they were in the ultimate American diner with a slew of multiethnic characters walking on screen, the heartlandish lookiing guy with the baseball cap, the black guys by the juke box, the ambiguous fella in the Member's Only jacket who looked, at first, like he might be readying to whack Tony. The scene was an homage to the universality of the show. As departed HBO head Chris Albrecht told Vanity Fair. "I said to myself, This show is about a guy who's turning 40," Albrecht recalls. "He's inherited a business from his dad. He's trying to bring it into the modern age. He's got all the responsibilities that go along with that. He's got an overbearing mom that he's still trying to get out from under. Although he loves his wife, he's had an affair. He's got two teenage kids, and he's dealing with the realities of what that is. He's anxious; he's depressed; he starts to see a therapist because he's searching for the meaning of his own life. I thought: The only difference between him and everybody I know is he's the don of New Jersey. So, to me, the Mafia part was sort of the tickle for why you watched. The reason you stayed was because of the resonance and the relatability of all that other stuff."
Was there something frustrating about where the kids and the marriage ended up?
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Sure. Meadow stood with one foot in the family business, married to a Parisi and stuck on the rights of Italian-Americans, like Melfi's ex husband and one foot out, on her way to a Jewish law firm. There was A.J., echoing Christopher's run in the movie business, shacked up with the willowy and underage anorexic, Rhiannon Flammer, definitely not a pisan. Tony's complaints about his mother which so animateds the series had become by the end, so self parodying, that Carmela could only roll her eyes when Tony brought it up with A.J.'s therapist. Frustration is a part of the Sopranos, as life.