The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Chase, returning to the director’s chair for the first time since the pilot, paints the closing stages of the war against New York with an apocalyptic brush to suit the end-times reference Agent Harris31 made in “The Blue Comet.” The safe houses down the Shore, Tony’s airport meeting with Harris, and the interstate sit-down at a truck depot all seem to take place in a winter designed to make humans go the way of the dinosaurs discussed in “The Fleshy Part of the Thigh.” AJ and Rhiannon listen to Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” like they’re the first people to discover it and understand its ominous message; the song serves as a fitting final shiv in the flank of the Baby Boom generation that Chase and company have been jabbing at for seven seasons. It also provides a perfect soundtrack to the fiery destruction of the ridiculous car that Tony bought AJ specifically because he thought it would keep him safe, by being heavy enough to roll right over other cars without the driver spilling his Red Bull. (Gasoline is made from refined fossil fuels, so you could see the detonation of this guzzler as the dinosaurs’ revenge.) Phil’s murder is one final bit of deadly Sopranos slapstick, as Walden pops him while he and his wife are at a gas station, their infant grandkids secure and oblivious in the back seat, the car rolling forward to crush Phil’s skull as a concluding indignity to the Leotardo line, the rubberneckers once again stand-ins for The Sopranos audience—thrilled and horrified almost within the same breath. Same as it ever was.

  Which brings us to the dinner. The last supper for the Sopranos, or maybe just for us.

  By the time Tony Soprano enters Holsten’s to meet his family for dinner, the Mob war has receded and life has begun to return to something like “normal”—whatever that means for this bunch. Tony sits down in a booth and flips through the jukebox trying to pick a song (a great self-referential joke for a show that prides itself on picking exactly the right song for a scene). He chooses Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (the refrain “Don’t stop” expressing the feelings of Sopranos fans who didn’t want the show to end); the little bell on the restaurant’s front door as Carmela enters, and Steve Perry sings about a small-town girl just as she sits with Tony. They exchange chitchat. “What looks good tonight?” Carmela asks. “I don’t know,” Tony replies. When she asks if he’s spoken to his lawyer again, he tells her, “It’s Carlo. He’s gonna testify”; Carmela’s grave expression indicates that this could mean trouble down the road.

  The bell rings again, Tony looks up, and a middle-aged white guy in a Members Only jacket (so named in the final credits, and another nice extra-textual gag)32 enters the restaurant and heads offscreen, AJ coming in right behind him. AJ sits with them. More chitchat; the Members Only Guy, now seated at the counter, looks toward their table, drumming his hands. He glances again after we watch Meadow attempt to parallel park.

  AJ discusses his new job, and Tony affirms his callback to the season one finale: “Isn’t that what you said one time? ‘Try to remember the times that were good’?” as Meadow continues desperately trying to park. The guy eventually gets up from his stool; Tony glances up at him as he passes the family while heading for the bathroom. Is he an assassin, sent to kill Tony and maybe his family as well, or is he just someone who recognized Tony from media stories? Is he pulling a Michael Corleone? Is there a gun taped to the back of a toilet tank? We don’t know. Moments later, two young African American men (“unidentified black males”) enter the restaurant. Tony was almost killed by a couple of young black men in season one; are they assassins, or just a couple of friends going out for dinner? We don’t know.

  Meadow is the last Soprano to approach the restaurant. The final scene of the final episode of The Sopranos, and David Chase is spending a solid minute on Meadow’s poor parking skills. And yet the tension is unbearable. So often on The Sopranos, when a character or characters spend a lot of screen time shooting the breeze or fixating on some mundane bit of business, the non-drama is followed by a beatdown or a bullet in the brain; your attention starts to wander and then WHAM.

  We expect the same dynamic this time. But no:

  Meadow successfully parks the car.

  She runs across the street.

  We worry that she might get run over.

  She does not.

  Cut to the inside of the restaurant.

  Tony looks up at the sound of the bell ringing.

  Cut to black.

  The sound cuts out, too.

  After about ten seconds of nothing, the credits roll.

  There is no music.

  The Sopranos ending is so structurally daring and fundamentally frustrating that audiences openly rebelled against it at the time, and have argued about its meaning and intentions ever since. It aired in the summer of 2007, after three seasons of ABC’s Lost, a show that taught viewers to look for patterns and clues in order to understand or predict story elements that the writers weren’t ready to divulge. The internet therefore roared to life with theories that would account for the cut to black, explain it, diagram and footnote it, and file it safely away. True to form, much of the audience became fixated on the question of whether Tony had been shot, as if that were the be-all and end-all of the matter, and tried to “solve” the final scene as if it were an acrostic, then exclaim, “I got it!” Never mind that for every piece of evidence cited to support this idea, such as Bobby’s statement that you never hear it coming, and that first silent bullet that strikes Gerry the Hairdo, there were other moments that could complicate such a reading that had to be studiously ignored, such as Carmela’s description of, in essence, a television show of life that continues after the spectator (us, not Tony) stops watching it, or the Journey song itself, which warns of a story that never ends, but “goes on and on and on and on.”

  And to be fair, The Sopranos was dense enough in its references, motifs, and “mythology” that it was impossible not to want to scrutinize it in this manner. The series was filled with elements that could mean everything or nothing. Take the matter of the eggs, which, as we’ve noted here, feel like Chase and company’s answer to oranges in the Godfather films: Richie makes eggs at Livia’s house, in the same house where he later dies; Ralphie is making eggs when Tony comes over and kills him; Tony steps in rotten eggs right before he makes the decision to kill Tony B; a senile Junior calls Tony B “Tony Egg” while Bobby is making eggs, and moments later gets the call saying that Carmine has died; Carmine suffers his ultimately fatal stroke while eating egg salad; Adriana offers to make Chris eggs right before he leaves and decides to betray her to Tony; Valentina gets horribly burned while making Egg Beaters; Janice makes a frittata before Tony instructs Bobby to commit his first murder, and on and on and on and on.

  The number seven comes up just as often as eggs. There are, according to Chase, seven seasons of the show, one of which opens with “Seven Souls”; the names Anthony and Carmela both have seven letters, as does Vesuvio, as does Soprano; seven dream fragments expose Pussy’s deception in “Funhouse”; Gloria tells Tony she murdered seven relationships, while Amy in “D-Girl” starts to tell Chris about the hierarchy of seven needs, and the rapper Da Lux gets shot seven times. There are seven episodes dealing with Cleaver, about a murdered mobster who becomes a Grim Reaper figure, and the seventh episode of every season deals with Tony’s past and the possibility that he’s cursed by his genes. And when Dr. Krakower describes a fate for Tony (in a seventh episode, no less), it’s to be sentenced to a jail cell and made to read Crime and Punishment every day for seven years. You could make spreadsheets of this stuff and use it to prove all sorts of things. No doubt many people have. But none of that explains the

  * * *

  1 At the end of season six, a big deal is made of Tony getting tough with AJ and forcing him to take that construction job, and we’re left with the implication that AJ has finally come within spitting distance of a work ethic. So, of course, we return from hiatus and now he’s left construction to work at Beansie’s pizzeria. So much for both his maturity an
d Tony’s tough love.

  2 Always perfect with the small details, this show: in the aftermath, Carmela notices a Monopoly hotel has gotten stuck to Tony’s bloody cheek, and brushes it onto the floor.

  3 Tony sparks the fight by singing a dirty version of one Drifters song, and that closing scene is accompanied by another: “This Magic Moment,” which matches the images but not Bobby’s feelings.

  4 This scene eventually turns into a riff on the “You’re really funny” scene from Goodfellas, as an irritated Tony begins asking Janice, “I’m different how?”

  5 The Torciano hit is presented in a manner evoking Bacala’s “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens” theorizing from “Soprano Home Movies.” Silvio is out dining with the Hairdo and two women when the sound drops out, replaced by a high-pitched whine, followed by blood spraying all over Silvio’s face. It takes another moment for him to hear the sound of the gunshot and realize Gerry’s been taken out right in front of him. Even a witness like Silvio doesn’t hear it exactly when it happens.

  6 It’s a beautiful send-off for Vince Curatola, who went from masonry contractor to one of the most indelible members of the whole cast. One superb scene in particular is the first family visit, from the way Johnny gently breaks the news with an understated, “I’m very, very sick,” to the daggers he stares at that prison guard who keeps telling them to stop touching (in freer, healthier times, Johnny would have had that guy’s entire family killed), to the look of anticipation, when, after Ginny has gone, he smokes his first cigarette in a long time, because what can it possibly hurt now?

  7 Similar wisdom comes courtesy of Christopher’s new twelve-step sponsor Eddie, played by Christopher McDonald, a good actor who’s arguably much too recognizable (via Happy Gilmore and many other films) to be playing a random, never-before-seen character in an episode filled with C-listers playing themselves.

  8 The Cleaver himself, meanwhile, is played by Jonathan LaPaglia, whose older brother Anthony was once a candidate to play Tony Soprano when the show was in development at Fox. Chase insists this is just a coincidence.

  9 Including the return of Matthew Weiner’s Manny Safier.

  10 Pollack, the director of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Tootsie, and Out of Africa, began his career as an actor in the early days of live TV drama and continued acting in his own films and others’. He would die a little over a year after “Stage 5” aired—killed, like Johnny Sack, by cancer.

  11 Later, Tony attends the baptism of Christopher’s baby daughter, taking the role of godfather more out of familial (and Familial) obligation than because either man wants it. The song playing is “Evidently Chickentown” by punk poet John Cooper Clarke, one of the show’s weirder, more ominous musical selections. Legend has it David Chase heard the song only once before, while cleaning his garage in 1983, and made a mental note to use it in a show one day.

  12 Abraham and Alik Sakharov traded off as director of photography for most of the series’ run. “Remember When” was Abraham’s first turn directing any TV episode, but he’s since done that job on many prestige dramas, including Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Orange Is the New Black.

  13 Johnny Sack’s passing has no calming effect on affairs in New York, where Doc Santoro gets a Moe Greene Special, shot through the eye by soldiers working for Phil, who retakes his place as boss of that Family.

  14 Lost cocreator Damon Lindelof recalls watching “Remember When” and thinking, “I’ve got to get that guy on Lost.” Leung would spend the second half of the hit ABC drama’s run playing depressed medium Miles Straume. He’s worked steadily in TV and movies ever since, including a small role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

  15 Dominic Chianese shares James Gandolfini’s gift for conjuring great acting moments opposite essentially thin air, here speaking volumes in silence while his scene partner is a cat.

  16 Things would work out okay in the end for the hotel attendant—or, at least, for the actor playing him: future musical-theater titan Lin-Manuel Miranda.

  17 Carlo, in Tony’s doghouse for his failure to run the Family construction business as profitably as Vito, mentions an old Twilight Zone episode featuring a thug named Valentine. Tony cuts him off, but Carlo must be referring to “A Nice Place to Visit,” an episode about Rocky Valentine, who dies during a robbery and wakes up in an afterlife where his every wish is granted. Every woman wants him, everybody thinks he’s wonderful, and every bet he makes is a winner. Eventually, Rocky grows so tired of what he assumes to be Heaven that he asks to go to “the other place,” only to be told, “This is the other place.” Tony’s existence isn’t quite Rocky Valentine’s, but it’s close enough for him to sabotage it, just to make something different happen.

  18 Michael Drayer plays Jason Parisi, and Joseph Perrino plays Jason Gervasi, who join the series’ ever-growing roster of Jasons, including Dr. Melfi’s son, Jason Barone, one of Tony Blundetto’s twins, Little Paulie’s sidekick Jason Molinaro, and Lorraine Calluzzo’s partner/lover Jason Evanina. It’s like the twenty-first century version of the Goodfellas joke about all the Italian American kids of a certain age being named either Peter or Paul.

  19 Not avoiding the Bing: Georgie, who has apparently resumed working there despite swearing the place off after Tony’s beating in season five’s “Cold Cuts.” Even someone as peripheral to the life as Georgie can’t entirely quit it.

  20 It remains, surprisingly, Winter’s only directorial credit. He’s also the only Sopranos writer other than David Chase to take a turn in the director’s chair.

  21 Tony finally smothers someone to death, and unlike his attempt with Livia, he doesn’t even need a pillow.

  22 In this episode, AJ reverts to his depressed state after brief improvement, driven there partly by news of his cousin’s death and everyone’s reaction to it. “You know, people walk around like this is all something,” he tells his shrink. “They’re fuckin’ laughin’ and nobody takes even one second to think about what’s really going on.”(Moments later, considering all the meaningless violence in the world, he quotes Rodney King’s “Can’t we all just get along?” like it’s the most profound thought he’s ever had. In fairness, it probably is.)

  23 Does anybody in the business play grief better than Edie Falco? Carm’s reaction to Chris’s death is almost as devastating as her hallway crying jag in the first Costa Mesa episode. Almost as brilliant, in a different way, is her delivery of the line about Julianna—who reeks of mistress to Carm—being a good-looking woman.

  24 At the time, Shahi was best known for her work on Showtime’s lesbian relationship drama The L Word. She’s since become a familiar TV presence, with regular roles on dramas including Life, Person of Interest, Reverie, and Chicago Fire.

  25 For a few days, Tony gets to become Christopher, taking drugs and sleeping with one of his lovers, when he could never seal the deal with Adriana or Julianna, for one reason or another, while Chris was alive.

  26 In an earlier scene with the crew, we see Silvio reading a book called How to Clean Practically Anything—both an incredibly useful text in their line of work and a reminder of how much wreckage they leave in their wake.

  27 Tony, Sil, and Bobby are so overconfident about their ability to take out Phil that they playfully shadowbox after Tony makes the call, in a moment presented in slow-motion and scored to Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana—famously used in Raging Bull, which happens to be the movie where Frank Vincent first made a name for himself.

  28 Rhiannon (introduced in season six as Hernan’s girlfriend) was Wickersham’s first significant screen role. She has since spent 100-plus episodes on NCIS as investigator Ellie Bishop.

  29 His first assignment: Anti-Virus, a script Cleaver star Daniel Baldwin gave Tony, involving a detective who “gets sucked into the internet through his, uh, data port” and has to “solve some murders of some virtual prostitutes.” Too bad JT Dolan’s not available to punch it up.

  3
0 Have some pity for the poor Baccalieri children. At least Bobby Jr. and Sophia will remember their biological parents, where Nica will grow up only knowing this narcissist.

  31 The Sopranos’s final belly laugh: Harris, having already crossed several ethical lines in feeding intel to Tony, gets much too excited to hear about Phil’s murder, cheering, “Damn! We’re gonna win this thing!” Now that he’s no longer working directly against Tony, he’s become a Sopranos fan, just like everybody else.

  32 “Members Only” is the title of the season six premiere, in which Eugene Pontecorvo—who wore a Members Only jacket himself, and bore a passing resemblance to this Holsten’s customer—hangs himself because he’s unable to escape Mob life.

  The Debate: Don’t Stop Believin’ You Know Exactly What Happened at the End of The Sopranos

  After several unsuccessful attempts to reconcile our many contradictory feelings and theories about the final scene of The Sopranos, we decided to talk it out.

  ALAN: Tony Soprano is dead.

  MATT: Wait, what?

  A: He’s dead, Matt. It’s obvious.

  M: Well, this isn’t how I thought this would go. To quote Tony, the floor is yours, senator.

  A: “Made in America” opens on Tony asleep in the safe house. His eyes are closed, he’s not noticeably breathing, and the camera angle makes it look like he’s lying in state at the funeral parlor, waiting for his friends, family, and viewers out here in TV land to pay our respects. He jolts awake within moments, but we begin our final hour in Tony’s company with this image of him suggesting that he’s already dead, and that he just—like Silvio watching the Gerry Torciano hit—needs some time to catch up with the finality of the situation.