Enjoy!
My Take
(For what it’s %$*&@# worth, OK?)
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Say bye bye Pop Pop!! |
For dose
of us who watched the Sopranos’ soap opera, so well-crafted and yet so
maddening in its obtuse metaphors and innuendo (in who’s what? Whaddaya a wise
ass?) play out over its six seasons; it’s time to say bye-bye.
I’m sure youse heard by now (even
if you don’t watch) how it ended;
“David
Chase did this; he didn’t do that; he cheated us!! What happened to Tony?”
But think back, those of you who watched over the years saw happen…months went
by between seasons, “ahh, forget about
it, I ain’t watchin’ no more, too long between seasons”…
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You're only as good as your last envelope |
And then, “every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in”.
So there’s a lot of people who
think there shoulda been some closure: “Tony
got whacked, the viewers got whacked, Meadow came in, Tony had a different
shirt on, the guy had gun in the bathroom”…. Ok, stop. Think a sec, if the
guy was gonna hit Tone, why’d he need to go to the pishadoo?? He wasn’t bein’
patted down, just shoot already.
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My father told me to never get old. I should have listened to him. |
And, if they were gonna hit
him, why follow him to Holsten’s? He was by himself visiting Uncle June.
Speakin’
of Uncle June, hats off (salud to bald pates) to Domenic Chianese, how many
actors do you see that are willing to do a few scenes sans choppers? Great
stuff that.
How many shows have you seen in your life that took you through so
many emotions, brought you to tears, laughs like you never had watching TV
(especially if you’re a paisano),
made you angry, and at the very end, admit it, at the very end had you absolutely laying a yellow brick
road wondering what was gonna happen.
What more can you ask?
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They threw me away like an old shoe |
What did you expect from
a story about a guy who shrugged his shoulders and repeatedly said “Whaddya gonna do?” when his mother died?
There was no other way to end
that show than the way it ended. Think about it, if Tony got it at the end,
there would have been a major outcry; after all, he won the beef with New York . Sure, he had
plenty of people who would love to have done him in, but in the end it was all
about how a man who seemingly has everything in reality has nothing.
Even if
you delve into his family life, who seem to have given us the impression that
all was well;
Carm and him closer than ever, AJ snapping out of his malaise,
Meadow finding love and her career calling.
Yeah right. Look under the surface,
what they got? Money, yeah, but as Tony said, “Is this it?”
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Act like a good Catholic for fifteen f***ing minutes!! Is that so much to ask? |
So if you wanna believe
he gets it at Hosten’s go ahead. It was setup that way.
Me, I think Tone got
just what he had coming to him:
DOUBT
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Oh again with the 'rape of the culture'. Can we go find these Spice Girls already and get this over with ? |
Indictments hanging over his head, Paulie not too crazy about taking over a
crew with nothing but a legacy of dead captains.
Is it all worth it for Tony
Soprano in the end?
Ironically, he was saved by an FBI agent who fell into the
trap we all did: Tony’s charisma, which is why we didn’t want him to die. After
all, the mask was stripped away so many times and we still refused to see Tony
Soprano as he really is, a cold calculating killer without a trace of remorse.
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Our dads are in the garbage business, and it's always good for a laugh. |
Think about living near Phil’s
goomar and her father and hearing the gory details about their cold blooded
murder. And when Butch brings it up to Tony at the meeting, Tony channels his
mother Livia and shrugs it off, “Ehhhhh.
So what?”
When you really think about it,
the only guy he felt bad about killing was Pussy. Because he really loved him.
He felt bad about Vito but only because he earned. Look at the way he was when
he saw Silvio in the hospital, there wasn’t much emotion there. Same with
Christopher. He was just annoyed.
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Stay outta this! You Sopranos. You go too far. |
But through it all, we still wanted Tony to make it. We didn’t want him
to pay for his crimes or his sins. We thought he was deep down a good guy.
Look
where he came from, his parents, a tough street guy like Johnny Soprano who had
a reputation for being a brutal headcracker and his mother whose only joy was
knowing her man took from somebody to give to them, it’s no wonder Tony has no conscience.
And the focus of the show was him struggling
to deal with whatever it was that he thought made him pass out and have panic
attacks like his father.
In the end, his psychiatrist rightly or wrongly turned
him out because she was led to believe she was being played.
Sorry, the highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive. |
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Is it permissible now? Is it enough of a sad tragedy that you can join the rest of the douchebags? |
And once he realizes
it’s over with her, the man without a shred of principles cries out:
“I think what you’re doing is immoral!”
That’s the dichotomy of the show, all wrapped up in the character Tony Soprano,
but we want to forget the transgressions and we want believe the con, because he had
that “something” that attracted us, one and all. Hook, line and sinker.
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So what? No f***ing ziti now? |
We see him making sure
that his loathsome sister doesn’t get any money from Bobby’s death as she tries to snooker her senile Uncle Junior. And Tony uses the excuse it’s for
Bobby’s kids. Hey, not for nuttin’ T, but Janice ain’t gettin’ her taste, eh?
There was always something behind
every move. Remember Dr. Melfi asking him what attracted him to Gloria Trillo?
She had him pinned down and he wriggled off the hook by downplaying his
attraction to her poison personality. And even Dr. Melfi characterized their
mutual attraction as amour fou or
crazy love.
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I never should have taken your prosthesis, but it did bring me back to the Lord. |
In the end Tony was always going
to be haunted by the specter of his mother and the realization that his father wasn't the man he thought he was growing up. He finds out along the way that
the great Johnny Soprano was vulnerable too. After all, he didn’t beat cancer.
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I figure I'm gonna have to do 6,000 years before I get accepted into heaven and 6,000 years is nothin' in eternity terms. I can do that standing on my head. It's like a couple of days here. |
His closest link to the truth of who
his father really was, was none other than Paulie who tells Tony that his
father loved him very much which seemed to make Tony recoil. Possibly the
thought that tough guy Johnny Soprano was a loving father repulsed Tony. Maybe
the messenger was not the right one to bring that to light, but it was Paulie
nonetheless.
After all, it was in the episode
Remember When (“the lowest form of
conversation”) when Paulie made that revelation. Remember when? Tony was
toying with the idea of taking care of motormouth Paulie on the boat ala Pussy.
Well, the Russian never came
back, Furio stayed in Italy ,
and nobody
in Holsten’s was anybody’s brother, cousins, failed assassins or that
degenerate gambler with the sporting goods store. It was all a plot device to make you sit at the edge of your seat.
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I ordered something for the table. |
So no matter how you saw it or
wanted it to end, you got what was comin’ to you. They delivered in the
end. For six seasons we lived inside and walked where we dare not go. And it
became a sport, who was gonna win over who. In the eighth inning it looked
pretty bleak for our hero Tony and who saves his hide?
An eager FBI agent and a
surprise ally in the New York
family.
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Who loves ya Butchie? |
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He's here for the rent! |
Just like those public pay
binoculars you see at scenic places, the quarter ran out and our glimpse into
the world of Tony Soprano abruptly went dark.
We’ll miss ya T.
Oh and for those of you who didn't like the ending, Livia Soprano has a message for you from beyond:
Oh, poor you!
Wow, this was great. I have been saying all along to people "What happens after every crisis during the show?" Everything always goes back to the boring, humdrum life of Tony Soprano. I know the final episodes were really big events but Tony and family were doing the normal stuff at the end. It was just another evening at the diner with the family. No way did Tony get shot. In our imaginations, right now, Tony and both his families are dealing with all kinds of challenges this very moment... Meadow has graduated college, A.J. is working in the film industry, Silvio is completely healed up, Uncle Ju has passed away, and Carm and Tony are always fighting and making up. Anyway, great writeup and tribute the the greatest of all: James Gandolfini.
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