Did anyone else catch that Chris is reduced to "that dead kid?"

Yeah, I caught that Olivant.

I think Mr Chase has a very cynical view of the aged and the dead. Cynical but realistic.

Then again it was Paulie referring to as the "dead kid"...those two never got along.

Yeah, you're right about Paulie and Chris.

I actually meant Chase really puts alot of focus on how unfair the aging process can be (Livia, Junior, et al).

But such is life.

Boy, talk about life imitating art.

Royal flush! An illegal New York poker den frequented by "Sopranos" bad boy Robert Iler and several NBA players was robbed yesterday. According to the New York Daily News, the gun-toting bandits burst into the Upper East Side spot at around midnight and ordered the club's 70 or so patrons to hand over their money.

While the cops haven't caught the bandits, they did arrest club owner Edgar Concepcion and charged him with promoting gambling and possessing bookmaking supplies. Police estimate that around $50,000 in cash was taken. Where's Tony Soprano when you need him?

I saw a clip of Robert Iler on The View promoting the finale of The Sopranos. Guest host Kathy Griffith asked him what it's liked to killed off a show. He replied, "I don't know. Why don't you tell me". This was a pot shot at them for their recent firings...hahaha. And to think it wasn't long ago when he was just known for getting arrested for shoplifting.

Telling Ralphie that he'd better take care of Jackie Jr. because of this.

You are mean to me!!! What have I ever done to you??

It was certainly one of the more unique deaths on the show.

This is sort of funny.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=BZc886eXLYE&mode=related&search=

I think that HBO played that little trailor right before the start of last week's final episode. It's pretty good.


Now what the f**k am I going to watch tomorrow night?!?!?!

Porn.

Boy ain't that the truth!!! The Sopranos made my Sunday nights so enjoyable. I suppose it might not hit us til maybe a year or year and a half from now....we were use to waiting that long between seasons. Then again, at least then, we "knew" it was coming back.

Time for a new Sunday night blockbuster show that we BBers can discuss in detail.

TIS

June 17, 2007 -- Private eye Bo Dietl badgered the producers of "The Sopranos" so incessantly for a part that they not only stopped taking his calls, but also wrote his friend, Frank Pellegrino, out of the HBO show, a source says. Pellegrino - owner of Rao's, the clubby East Harlem restaurant where Dietl is a regular - played a high-ranking FBI agent on the series. But he disappeared from the show a couple of years ago, and wasn't on stage at Radio City with the rest of the cast for the launch of the final season. Dietl, the former police detective lionized in the book/movie "One Tough Cop," admitted to us, "Anybody would have liked to be in it. I told ['Sopranos' creator David] Chase I'd play anything." But Dietl denied he was responsible for Pellegrino being dropped: "Frankie was sick and he was opening Rao's in Vegas." We tried reaching Pellegrino at Rao's, but the recording says the eatery is fully booked for 2007 and no one would be responding to messages.

Screw Bo Dietl and screw Pellegrino.

Dietl has become a media coverage whore in the last couple of years, and Pellegrino's ego has risen to unreachable heights since his early success with Rao's.

I wouldn't wait 2 hours, let alone 2 years to eat in someone's restaurant. No food could be that good.

This is just a ploy to bring attention to the fact that Pellegrino opened a Rao's Las Vegas restaurant.

John From Cincinnati

Not a mob show, but it was good last week. Have this week's DVRed and waiting to watch it.

Very interesting

I'm been in the Tony didnt die camp all along. This is the first bit of information that has made me question my stance.

Sorry if this has already been posted. I dont think it has, but there is so much on the last episode I may have missed it.

You can't trust anyone named B. Harris.

Neri - Thanks for sharing that with us. Some really good stuff in that article. Very interesting

Beth - Seems that people named B. Harris are very interesting and observant people.

Very interesting. I think at the very least, you can make a strong argument either way, which is what I'm sure David Chase intended all along.

Not for nothing, I believe B. Harris and had my own reasons prior to reading his thing, but when I eat onion rings, I tend to pop the whole thing in my mouth, too.

Why?

Because, when you try and bite a piece off an onion ring, undoubtedly the piece you bite will take the entire onion strip with it. Then you're left with just an empty shell of a ring. So, to avoid getting a mouth full of raw onion, I pop the ring entire.

Oral fixation, Buttmunker?

I want Tony Roma's onion rings.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Anyone remember Tony Roma's in Vegas?

That dipping sauce, MY GAWD!!

I absolutely LOVED their baby rack ribs.... I'd make a pig of myself and get two orders of them.

There are no longer any of them open in the area now.

For what it's worth, although I don't like them that much, I always eat onion rings whole. I noticed how they were devouring them - Carmela doing so seemed most odd, or out of character, or deliberate, or symbolic.

But let's deconstruct things a little further, here, not to demystify that incredible final scene and prove what happened this way or that way; whether Tony lives or dies takes nothing away from the brilliance of that scene, and frankly, whether Tony lives or dies is besides the point.

Firstly, if Chase intended all of those things (which, for the sake of argument, let's say he did), the colour palettes, the food references, that Tiger, the bulge in the guy's jacket, the cut to black, the flashbacks to Tony's conversation with Bobby, AJ's entrance, everything - and so it's so fucking "obvious" to us, right? Yeah, of course: Tony dies, deal with it.

Well, no, not exactly.

Before I go on: that oepning shot of the episode, which shows Tony lying possibly at a wake - I don't think Carmela would have agreed that he's dressed like that at his own wake - he is, after all, Head of the Family.

My first point of contention, then, is that this guy Bob Harris is writing as if the symbolism is obvious (a "two by four over the head", he calls it). Symbolism is obvious, otherwise it's abstract - it needs to be obvious in order to be extracted and understood - and Chase and the other writers and directors have been very obvious in their meaning and signifiers throughout the show; I've nothing against that at all, by the way, it makes for sophisticated narrative threads, and it reached its peak in season 6 part I. But if this is so obvious, if everything points to Tony dying, then why is it even a point of discussion? Why is it even open to debate? It is symbolism, but it's not symbolism to infer something in one way, it's suggestive symbolism, to suggest something in one way only to manipulate and offer an opening in the other way, the other possibility (and hence the question "Is He Dead?")

Secondly, Harris's whole argument amounts to, "I'm either right on this, or I've been undone by a massive, massive coincidence". Riiiiiight. Like we don't already know. (Actually, forget that sarcasm, the majority of people actually don't know, that the entire mise-en-scene in that scene was deliberate, was intended, and that's why it's such a fucking tense scene, and why it's ultimately a brilliant one.)*

So, because of this, I'm not disputing that everything which happens in the scene is deliberate - Chase knows what he's doing, he's well aware of the psychological manipulation of an audience that mise-en-scene is capable of, and responsible for. But coming back to my first point of contention: my favourite novelist John Fowles once said of the climax to my favourite novel The Magus that, "They never saw each other again". He said this years after telling a dying man who wished to know that, "Yes, of course they saw each other again."

My point isn't merely to remind us of the ambiguity of the final scene of The Sopranos, but it is to lament how curiosity leads to reductive demystification. I realise sometimes the need to find out, to prove something this way or that way, to wonder what happened or what happens. At the end of the second season of 24 I was like WTF? I couldn't wait for the third season to start, to find out what happened. Why couldn't I wait? Because I knew that a third season was being made and going to be released, so I was in the hands of an artificial show, and was happily going along with it.

Now, The Sopranos is finished (for now, at least), with that finale. It's final. Furthermore, like my 24 example, it is a product of artifice. We all know this, of course, but to follow the insightful Bob Harris's line of thinking, Chase not only was deliberate in including oranges, onion rings, references to Catholic death and "The Last Supper" in that scene, but was also deliberate to include a narrative thread in season 6 I and II with Christopher making movies - we see an artificial work inside an artificial work, and Tony and Carmela drawing up different interpretations as to what Christopher intended or didn't intend with his portrayal of Tony in Cleaver. That's as much a stroke of genius as is that tiger on the wall of the restaurant (a big stroke or a little stroke, I don't know).

And so if I've gone along with the show and been happily manipulated by its fine acting, writing and directing (despite irritating moments), then I can do nothing but go along with the ambiguity of the finale.

A profound scene? A cop-out? I don't know, but what I do know is that I could easily (as I did by pointing out Tony's clothes at that possible foresighted wake) get onto issues as to who, of all the remaining characters, would want Tony dead, and furthermore, why? Bob Harris might answer, "But that could be anybody, that's the whole point", in which case I'd answer that that final scene was indeed lazy.

But I don't think it is.

On top of this, hasn't anybody heard of subjective verisimilitude. For an example, watch David Fincher's recent masterpiece Zodiac, and see the scene in which Jake Gyllenhal enters a basement of a benign man who suddenly turns into prime suspect for serial killer. He isn't, of course, it's just Gyllenhal's paranoia - and, more importantly, our paranoia, as an audience. Just because Tony's paying attention to AJ doesn't mean he's oblivious to Members Only guy; it's because, in light of what's happened, we as an audience are entrenched in his way of thinking. It's a very expressionistic slant on dramatic irony.

But coming back to withholding some sort of integrity and respect for ambiguity. I'm the kind of person who, as you may have gathered, so long as it doesn't strike me as contrived pap (which, had that scene gone on for three seconds later than it did, would have), goes along with a narrative's ambiguity. To me, it's not even a question of whether or not Tony Soprano died, it's a question whether or not the scene worked.

Which it did, because I'm going to watch it again in a minute.

* Mise-en-scene is that inside the frame, or inside the narrative - it includes props, positions of actors, relationships between characters implied by those positions, the use of music, the lighting, the colour palette, etc.

ive already been on the boat, after reading that i think im staying

Brilliant, Capo.

As far as the scene going on 3 seconds longer, have you read that Chase wanted 30 seconds of the black-silent screen at the end? Apparently, HBO talked him out of it.

Speaking of "Cleaver," I wonder if they filmed an entire movie starring Baldwin as Boss - something that will be released to DVD sometime next year?

I think 30 seconds would have been nice at the end, PB. When I first saw it I thought my download was incomplete, and I was like, "Fuck!"