Shannon Nutt

I keep wanting to play that song from THE MUPPET MOVIE:

"Life's like a movie, write your own ending...keep believing, keep pretending, we've just done what we set out to do..."

islandclaws

mrpayroll, thanks for the post on Journey's sales numbers post-finale. I was just wondering this morning what kind of sales increases Journey has seen since last Sunday. Pretty impressive numbers for sure.

MartinBlank

Tony Soprano didn’t just get whacked; he practically got a funeral: http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/1406/1/

JasonF

From that article:
Too late!

I especially like the multiple updates where he says, in essence, "OK I was wrong about something I described in the episode, but that doesn't affect my theory." This guy's theory is better than kvrdave's global warming model!

TGM

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,2004...042736,00.html

great article...

ten41

Fans Online Sift for Clues in the ‘Sopranos’ Finale

By BILL CARTER
Published: June 16, 2007

Nearly a week after the HBO series “The Sopranos” itself went to black forever, the debate about what its final scene — in which the screen goes black for 10 seconds as Tony Soprano and members of his family eat in a diner — might really mean has raged on,especially on blogs. Online, fans have either been railing about the “cop-out” of the ending or trying to fill in the blanks of the final episode themselves (or, often, both).

David Chase, the creator of the series, has done little to clear things up, offering only one potentially relevant comment in an interview he granted to the Newark newspaper The Star-Ledger this week. While declining to say whether the abrupt cut to black meant that Tony Soprano had been killed, Mr. Chase said the meaning of the ending was “all there” in the episode.

Quentin Schaffer, HBO’s chief corporate spokesman, said yesterday that Mr. Chase had wanted an even longer duration of blackness at the show’s conclusion. Mr. Chase had wanted as much as 30 seconds of blackness but was talked out of that by HBO executives, Mr. Schaffer said.

Mr. Chase’s silence has led theorists to sift though the episode for clues to Tony’s fate the way some people watch the Zapruder tape of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Among the wilder speculation on the Web: that the man in the jacket who enters the restaurant and sits at the counter in the last seconds is the cousin of the recently killed mob boss Phil Leotardo, and that the two young African-Americans who walk in are the same two who tried to kill Tony in Season 1.

According to Mr. Schaffer, Mr. Chase dismissed both those points in conversations after the finale was broadcast. Mr. Schaffer added that while Mr. Chase was not talking publicly, he has been monitoring the debate about the final episode closely, calling several times a day this week from his vacation hideaway in France. And Mr. Chase has not dismissed some of the Web chatter about other points in the show.

Most significant for “Sopranos” theorists is the identity of a mystery man at the counter. He is identified in the closing credits as “Man in Members Only,” even though, as Mr. Schaffer pointed out, the scene never reveals the brand name of the jacket he is wearing. A previous episode of the series was titled “Members Only.” Theorists have speculated that the brand name was meant to suggest that he is a member of the mob, and therefore a hit man.

The revelation that Mr. Chase had wanted the blackness to extend far longer would seem to further the theory that one of the apparently menacing forces gathering in the restaurant stepped up and turned Tony’s lights out.

Undoubtedly, a longer stretch of darkness would also have fed the now-growing speculation that the final scene was intended to suggest that Tony was about to experience something his late brother-in-law, Bobby Bacala, had prophesized in the very first episode this season: in a scene at Bobby’s lake house, he had speculated about what happens when you die — or get whacked, in “Sopranos” terms.

The scene was reprised in the show’s second-to-last episode, though many of the blog speculators have been getting it wrong when claiming Bobby said that at the moment of death “everything just goes to black.”

Mr. Schaffer said that HBO’s own viewing of the scene revealed Bobby’s exact quote to be “You probably don’t ever hear it when it happens, right?”

That does not undercut the overall conclusion that Mr. Chase was hinting at Tony’s fate with that final scene, which comes just as a bell rings as the restaurant’s door opens for his daughter and the background song “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” hits the words “don’t stop.”

Mr. Schaffer said: “David Chase wanted that black screen moment to be really long. It’s certainly plausible to see that as a reference to death.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/ar...ref=television

Shannon Nutt

Good piece, but as someone who used to own Members Only jacket, there's NO WAY you can get ANY kind of gun into the left breast pocket (hell, there might not be enough room in the side pockets).

crankyman

ah well. there's always next season.

Ronnie Dobbs

a week later and we're still talking about it I guess David Chase is a genius.

Dignam

While I think that's the best explained theory, I think it's a stretch to think that Chase to put so many layers into the final ep and expected the average viewer to pick up on it. The mascot of the local school means something? Onion rings are orange? There were so many explanations of different references there that I'm surprised he didn't catch the man in the striped shirt. You can barely see him, but he's there. Look at his reflection in the napkin holder:

I wouldn't say that David Chase is a genius just because people are still talking about it. A week after the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, people were talking about Tonya Harding and not Nancy Kerrigan. Being talked about and remembered for something doesn't mean it was great.

PrinceTom

Well, most of us watched the Sopranos because it was UNLIKE anything we'd ever seen on TV. I know I did.

-T

boogieman03

Ooops. Never mind. I quoted the wrong post.

I really like Bob Harris' blog and that was the post I intended quote.

DVD Josh

I personally think it's ridiculous to say that anything other than the ending was Tony was wacked, but there will always be people who will say "if it wasn't shown it didn't happen" or "you decide the ending", etc.. The HBO comments above really cement that for me that he was. But frankly, I'm so disappointed in Chases' treatment of this that I'm not sure I care anymore. He's really changed my impression of the Sopranos for the worse with all this BS.

mmconhea

If the color scheme was foreshadowing a funeral, then every sceen from the Sopranos forshadows a funeral. They always wear black. There's always orange.


Also I think when you go as far as relating onrion rings to communion wafers, I think you need to stop justifying the ending.

JasonF

I think it's ridiculous to say he was whacked.

fuzzbox

Maybe I'm just simplifying it when I think this was DC's thought process in writing the ending:

Part of the audience wanted Tony to be killed, so he said "I can't do that."

Part of the audience wanted Tony to survive, so he said "I can't do that."

So he said "OK, I give up, he won't die OR survive, done."

-jason

rennervision

Maybe you need to rewatch this. The individual shots of all three of them eating a single onion ring in one bite is very deliberate and obviously shown for a reason.

Shannon Nutt

I don't think he was whacked, either. The home viewer was "whacked". If the black is supposed to be Tony's POV after being shot, then Chase would have made the final shot of Carmela and AJ, since this would be the last thing Tony "saw". But we don't get that angle. We get a shot looking AT Tony.

Besides, if we assume that no one in the restaurant but "Members Only" boy could have shot Tony, it's clear from the final frame that there's NO ONE close to him in the background. A hired gun isn't going to shoot from across the room...he's going to walk up and shoot at point blank range.

DVD Josh

We'll never know who is right. And that my friend, sucks donkey balls. I'd be just as happy to know that I was definitely wrong, FWIW.

boogieman03

But you're not.

DVD Josh

Shannon Nutt

I see Bob Harris posted today that Tony wears the same kind of shirt in the Ice Cream parlor that he did when he was shot by Junior.

The guy is definitely on to something (though in "my world" Tony lives, damn it!)

JasonF

Fixed!

Tony wears the same kinds of shirts all the freaking time. This guy is seeing things where nothing exists ("He called AJ 'The Ghost!' The proves the whole family dies!!!!111!")

boogieman03

He corrected that mistake.

Geofferson

That's the bit I can't wrap my head around. Why focus on all three of them individually eating the onion rings whole? Are the shapes (circles) supposed to represent something or the act itself?

The Harris piece offers a few good observations, but one hurdle I can't get over concerning the whacking theory is why would Members Only guy shoot Tony in the middle of a restaurant? It'd be more plausible for him to do it when Tony is walking back to his car or something (in the dark with less people around and provides for a cleaner getaway).