New York Post television reviewer Linda Stasi is not happy with Sopranos series creator David Chase.
For those of you who didn't watch last night's finale episode of the HBO series: Tony, Carmela, Meadow and A.J. gather, perilously close to what must be the end of the episode if you're watching the time on your cable box, arriving one by one at a booth. Tony's first, and he fidgets with the jukebox console at the table, choosing Journey's "Don't Stop Believing," which forms the soundtrack as one by one the rest of his family arrives.
There are several moments that will be dissected forever by experts on the great mafia movies, which we don't have to go into here. Then the screen goes blank, the sound dies, and after a moment that had fans all over the country screaming at dad for sitting on the remote, the credits start to roll in silence.
"Tony And Gang Whack Fans" was the Post headline.
"Chase will have to live with what he did last night," scolds Ms. Stasi, complaining that there was "just one hit," by which she means only one person was murdered by the mafia in this episode. (Of course that's nothing to LA Weekly's Nikki Finke: "Chase clearly didn't give a damn about his fans. Instead, he crapped in their faces. This is why America hates Hollywood.")
The New York Post always wanted more out of the Sopranos: more mayhem, more plot twists. The newspaper's obsession with the evolving plot of the show, though, was always a bit strange given Mr. Chase's rather more subtle aesthetic. On the other side of the fence, then, here's Alessandra Stanley writing in The New York Times:
Viewers are conditioned to seek a resolution, happy or sad, so it was almost fitting that this HBO series that was neither comedy nor tragedy should defy expectations in its very last moments. In that way at least “The Sopranos” delivered a perfectly imperfect finish.
The slugfest over What David Did was, of course, as predictable as the series' ending was unpredictable.
Salon's Heather Havrilesky writes:
As the screen went black in the middle of a line from the song "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey, it was hard not to wonder, Is Chase brilliant for so thoroughly subverting our expectations, or… is he just an asshole?
And:
If we got sick of hearing about other people's speculations on how "The Sopranos" would end in just one week, imagine how Chase has been feeling for the past three or four years. Creating a cultural phenomenon this huge is an experience that can change a sensitive soul, after all, and make him act out against his fans.
But David Chase's show was never about the big moments, was it? (Even the scene containing the one hit was played to grisly comic effect, as if to say, Phil Leotardo never was the point of these final episodes.)
Not that Mr. Chase wasn't good at the big mob stuff, too. But the show begins with Tony Soprano's psychological and family problems, and ends there, too. There was closure in this episode, Variety reminds us, on the things that always mattered most to the show:
Soprano had varying moments of closure throughout the finale: a touching, silent visit to Sil's (Steven Van Zandt) hospital room; a confrontation with Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese); a hostile visit with a therapist that turns into a confessional regarding the lack of love from his mother.
But as usual, the conversations about the finale episode of The Sopranos are stuck in questions of narrative, and industrial questions about David Chase's relationship with his fans. The real success or failure of the finale can't really be measured the way it would in a high-school literature class or around a Hollywood story-development conference table. The Sopranos was too good for that.
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