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The Sopranos: Season Six, Episode 21 (Don’t Stop Believing)

A tv post by matt, posted on June 10, 2007 at 11:47 pm

Was it just me, or did anyone else’s cable go out for a few seconds right at the end of this episode?

A special bonus recap! Spoilers for “Made in America” below.

In One Word

First, in one word: disappointing.

(But maybe that was that point.)

The Sopranos versus the Fake Sopranos

The Sopranos has never been an easy show. For a lot of its run, I felt like it has existed in parallel with some alternate mobster show. In this other Sopranos, people get ‘whacked’ all the time, and the whole series centers around violence, sex, swearing and funny Italian words for things. And a lot of viewers of the real Sopranos have tended to confuse this alternate show with the real-life one, to the point where they’d watch every season of the real Sopranos and then complain, loudly, about how “nothing is happening!”

These viewers would always confuse me, because they’d never been given any reason to believe that the show should be like what they seemingly hoped it would be each and every season. This is a show that focuses on psychiatry almost as much as it focuses on mob living. And, hell, it focuses on family more than those two things combined. It was never — in concept or execution — Goodfellas on TV. But, I guess, that didn’t stop some people from hoping it some day would become exactly that.

Season Six And Defying Expectations

I say that because I imagine there’s going to be a lot of people pissed about this episode. In sixty minutes, pretty much every bit of plot with momentum behind it was silently defused through little more than conversations around tables. Meanwhile, I imagines some people’s ideas for this episode involved Furio returning and teaming up with The Russian to help Tony and his crew go to war with New York. (And all throughout we’d wonder ‘But are they really on the right side?’)

Of course, that wasn’t what we got. Because that would be stupid. But even what we did get was far removed from what any reasonable person could have expected.

Creator David Chase had a lot of fun with his audience this season. Despite constant assurances in pre-season interviews that there would not be some cataclysmic finale, he dropped enough hints in the very character-driven run-up to the series finale that, perhaps, there would be some final showdown that even the most hardened and realist viewers were probably doubting themselves.

Hell, they killed Christopher, they killed Bobby, they almost killed Syl. It didn’t seem all that inconceivable that Tony could be next. Or maybe that Tony, alone in the world, would flip to the FBI. In either case, or other cases, the series felt ripe for a big cinematic finale, the kind that wraps everything up with a nice little bow.

But that didn’t happen

Tonight’s episode was the series finale, but it wasn’t the end of anything. Chase’s chosen arc for this season was never about endings, because life is never about endings, really. It just ends, often suddenly, at some point, and people eventually move on.

Chase used television and mob movie conventions to make the viewer feel like all these threads were converging together, combining into some glorious pastiche of mob war and family strife and glorious death. When Tony fell asleep with the gun on his lap last episode, we expected that to be the image that took us to our finale, but ultimately that was a powerful, iconic image that meant almost nothing. Tony never fired that gun — or any gun — in this episode.

If the end was a let down, I’d argue that it was meant to be a let down. Because that’s what Tony’s life has been: a series of build-ups with no pay-offs, an ending cycle of violence and depression all building toward essentially nothing. His best end is a pathetic one, taken down by federal authorities, or shot in the head at a gas station like Phil Leotardo.

If that seems existential then, well, that’s The Sopranos, isn’t it?

But disappointing anyway

There was a lot about this episode that I liked a lot. It was exceptionally well written, with some conversations that alluded to all sorts of events from the history of the show. Tony’s conversation with an extremely senile Uncle Junior, in particular, was one of my favourites of the season, precisely because it hit on exactly what Chase wanted to say with this episode (and, I’d argue, the season as a whole): nothing Tony has done has mattered or will ever matter. He’s just a thug.

Kudos to Gandolfini, as well, for portraying such a tragic, pathetic yet somehow noble character. His conversation with Meadow was another great scene in the episode, as it ended with an audible silence, wherein you could tell that maybe even Tony wanted to tell his daughter that he’s not much more than just a bad guy, and that he doesn’t deserve much in the way of justice.

All that said, though, Chase’s direction in this episode pretty much sucked. The black screen at the end was cute, sure, but most of the cuts between scenes were jarring. It was very amateurish throughout, with characters seeming like they had teleported or walked at a high rate of speed in between shots. It felt rushed and awkward and did nothing to give the episode any kind of holistic feeling.

A missed opportunity

Still, though, it wasn’t bad. Looking back, I don’t know what kind of ending I would have hoped for. Going in, I was one of those people hoping for all-out action scenes. By the end, I just felt empty. The episode worked — I don’t doubt that — but it should have been stronger. With a few tweaks, and maybe another half hour or so, it really could have been something special. As it was, it was good, but it will never make anybody’s Top 10 Episodes list.

They hit the big scene they needed to hit, though. When Tony was walking out in his backyard, he heard a duck quack. And then he looked up in the sky, a little bit hopeful, but saw nothing. There’s your fucking metaphor right there.