Best Ending Ever
by Bryan
Point the first:
The oft-quoted line from Bobby Bacala: “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” and his follow-up about how everything just goes black. Well, everything went black Sunday.
Point the second:
I’ve read other interviews in the previous days where David Chase seems to be angry that fans either mishear lines of dialogue or misread parts of episodes. Everything is meticulous, and everything is there.
Point the third:
Chase’s said that the ending was meant to be “entertaining,” not audacious.
Point the merely anecdotal evidence:
The actors seemed pretty content with what went down. Chase probably explained it to them. Michael Imperioli was particularly supportive. That probably wouldn’t be the case with a completely ambiguous finish.
Add them up, and I think Tony is dead and that it is clear. I hope I worded that right this time and the substance of the argument comes through.
It was the perfect ending. Chase has been excoriated for insisting on doing things “his way,” and breaking conventional TV storytelling rules by letting Tony live, but he is anknowledged student of the well-defined gangster genre in which the boss dies. In an interview with NJ.com, he writes:
I’m the Number One fan of gangster movies. Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice.
Chase did things “his way” not by flipping the script, but by tweaking it; he bypassed the Scarface/Sonny Corleone “hail of bullets” scene for something worthy of his show. The (anti-) hero died in silence, just like everyone else. You don’t end the best TV show all time without a bang. But who says you need to show the bang?
What finally convinced me — and it took awhile — spurred from my initial reading of Bill Simmons’ thoughts on the show: he had no problem with an ambiguous ending, he wrote, but he thought that there was a better way to execute the ending than to make everyone think their cable went out. Which we did.
I agreed with Simmons right up until I didn’t. It would have been less confusing for me in the short term if the screen went blank for merely two seconds, but there was a reason it didn’t: the black screen was the final shot of the series, not the absence of a series. The blank screen was the absence of Tony; millions are screaming that they “don’t get it” straight into that void, but Tony can’t hear you. He’s dead. The construction of the entire scene was perfect, and will be studied in film schools starting yesterday: we’ve seen bloody murders before and we didn’t need to see them again. If you needed a resolution, the void was it. If you needed to see it, you’ll never be satisfied. But either way, he’s gone. You can sleep again.
Bryan Joiner 
I can’t think metaphorically either because I hated the ending as well. Sorry, Bryan. A good ending shouldn’t build up tension for no damn reason and then make me panic that the cable went out. Now if you want a good ending for a series, let’s talk about Six Feed Under’s finale.
seeing the blood, seeing the shots would have provided yet another television distraction of the type that Chase excoriates in way or another during the entire show. The ending is a commentary on a society that searches for the false spectacle through the medium of television and entertainment.
Do you think it is a coincidence that AJ’s new job is one of making movies? To distract him from the real shit (the War, all that shit about food that he was spouting off about, the real depression of the average american?)
Tony’s murder would have been yet another clip in a long line of retarded spectavles that this country gorges itself on daily in order to not deal with the reality of its government and their complicity in destroying the planet.
It was a fucking awesome ending. The conclusion IS clear to those who can think metaphorically, not all boring and linearlly. Bryan: 1 Ryan: 0.
It was a minor distinction but an intentional one.
I realize that I did not see Tony get shot. In that sense, I believe the ending was ambiguous. I would probably have been helpful if I had written that, so I’m sorry if you were confused. I obviously just believe that if you put some thought into what happened and what came before it, those who are arguing that Chase “copped out” or was “lazy” in his story construction are dead wrong. Chase made the rules, and told us what a quick cut to black meant, and then it happened. So you can choose to follow those rules or not follow them.
I think the greater issue here is the anarchy of storytelling — insofar as the cut to black could have meant our time with The Sopranos was up, instead of Tony dying, but at that point The Sopranos would have been a real family that finished its dinner and sauntered off into the Bloomfield, N.J. evening. That’s not the case. I don’t begrudge anyone for accepting the ambiguous ending, as I believe it’s just as plausible as the “he’s dead” ending, but I don’t think they’re really mutually exclusive. I look at the ambiguous ending and I ask myself, “In what ways is it NOT ambiguous?” and in every way it’s NOT ambiguous, it points to Tony’s death, and sometimes I, like millions of others out there, are looking for some closure on the whole thing. It’s there for the taking.
When I hear people write things like “Things don’t always work out nicely in real life like they do on TV,” I want to punch them. No, they don’t always work out. But sometimes they do. If someone’s argument against Tony dying is that “things don’t always work out nicely,” they can cram it. My sense is that your argument is “I didn’t see it, so it didn’t happen.” My counterargument would be that just because you saw it, it doesn’t mean that it DID happen. It could have been a dream sequence for all we know. (Hey, they happen.) We can only work with the information we have. Did Adriana die? By your argument, the answer would be “no,” and I understand that: we didn’t see her die or even get shot. But on the HBO page for that episode, it says:
“Silvio drives Adriana to a secluded spot in the woods and fires two bullets into her as she attempts to crawl away through the leaves.”
Really? We never see the bullets get unloaded “into her.” We just see him firing. We generally assume Adriana’s dead, but we don’t know, and this sloppy recap doesn’t help. The broader point is that this is all an imperfect science. Given that it’s imperfect, our conclusions are ambiguous from the beginning. What really happened in Newhart? Nothing, apparently: it was all a dream. What if they make a Sopranos movie and we learn something crazy, like Tony was Kevin Finnerty the whole time? (A not-very-popular message board theory about an episode-long dream in which he was a salesman.) How does that change the conclusions we’ve already drawn? My belabored point is that everything is fluid, everything is ambiguous, and we can only work with the info we have to draw conclusions. We may not want to draw conclusions. I did and I found mine.
I don’t want to get in a long comment war (particularly when the other person can decide to delete my comment), but I think the distinction between “I think the conclusion is clear” and “the conclusion is clear” is minor. Obviously, we’re discussing opinions and either way you write it, your opinion is that the conclusion was clear. I acknowledge your right to have an opinion, but I disagree with it. My opinion is that the conclusion was ambiguous.
I wrote “I think the conclusion is clear” not simply “The conclusion is clear.” And I never said it wasn’t ambiguous. I said it wasn’t completely ambiguous.
It’s a logic puzzle, not a legal argument (see: “If you needed to see it, you’ll never be satisfied.”), because television has no defined rules. “Tony Soprano” is not alive or dead because he is not real.
On the bright side, I thought of all this as I was writing and tweaking it because I wanted it to be as provocative as possible without leaving me in the wrong.
But you’re wrong, nanny boo-boo.
Who said Simmons was an intelligent mind?
The conclusion isn’t clear. If it was clear, all (most?) intelligent minds would agree. Simmons watched it eight times and concluded that he was “certain he didn’t get killed.”
According to m-w, the definition of ambiguous is: “capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways.”
Actually, that’s one of two definitions of “ambiguous,” so I guess even ambiguity is ambiguous.