The Sopranos Finale

The thousands of imaginary people who regularly ask for my opinion on one issue or another are now demanding to know what I thought of the Sopranos finale, which apparently a lot of people hated.
I thought it was the perfect ending: Tony is a more effective sociopath, thanks to therapy; Meadow is joining the dark side and A. J. is bought out of his incoherent idealism with a job in the movie industry; Carmela, of course, has been fully complicit for a long time, to the point that many were speculating about her taking over the business after Tony; and the rest of their lives will be exactly like the last five minutes, full of tension and dread, never knowing which of several swords of Damocles might happen to fall at any given moment.

Jody reminded me of another movie with a similar ending (that similarly divided viewers): Limbo, John Sayles' slice of life in Alaska. A plane approaches; the people on board are coming either to rescue or to kill our protagonists. The screen goes white before we find out which it is. It's frustrating, yes, but that's the point: what matters is not the result but the choice they make in that moment.

Which of course takes us back to TV land, and another series finale. The latter half of Angel's final season is rushed, the plotlines unduly accelerated, a result of its untimely cancellation. The final episode, though, is great...and the ending is perfect: the surviving heroes in an alley, about to do battle with an army of demons. The result isn't what matters; it's the battle, the act of doing battle, that's the point. It's about the choices.

Which is what Angel was always about. The whole series is summed up in a bit of dialogue from the final episode, an exchange between Gunn and Anne¹:

GUNN: What if I told you it doesn't help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it's all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive, and they will never let it get better down here. What would you do?

ANNE: I'd get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here. Wanna give me a hand?

And The Sopranos, too, is about choices--destructive, life-shattering, selfish, soul-killing choices, the flip side of Angel, but choices nonetheless. (I can hear Dr. Melfi saying "we make choices".) And so it ends as it had to end, with the characters having made their choices; it's not about the result. The sardonic vision of a dysfunctional family finally united by their limitless corruption--it's a nice touch, a grotesque parody of a happy ending, but it's not the ending that matters. They die, they live with it, it's all beside the point. What matters is the choices they made.


¹Formerly Lily, formerly Chanterelle; a character who made stunningly foolish choices early on, who with Buffy's help and by Buffy's example found the strength to deal with life, who now devotes her life to helping kids who are in the kind of trouble she was in.