The Soprano's Finale

It was the denouement that never came. The curtain closing on our voyeuristic pleasure of watching an ethically challenged family exist in modern America. David Chase knows how to write and to create drama and subtext that both challenge and frustrate his viewers. If you watched the series from its beginning you had to realize that it could end no other way. The perfect ending is no ending. You draw your own conclusions because the show is too smart to fall into a pattern of cliched endings. No one changes on the Sopranos. If they change at all it is to obtain some transitory goal. They are condemned by their fate, their unchanging essence to become who they are. Chase must have read his Nietzsche, because the series strikes on many of the themes written of by the famous philosopher. The dubiousness of Christian ethics and moral truths, truth from different perspectives and most importantly, amour fati, or loving or accepting ones own fate. In the end, the audience could see no more. Our glimpse into this sordid world had to end and it did, abruptly and with confusion. In the end, the Soprano's is about nostalgia. In the series pilot, Tony talks about his coming in at the end of the glory days. In the final episode, he laments of the houses that have sprung up in the back of Johnny Sack's old house. His final meeting with Uncle Junior has great relevance to our feelings of loss. Junior once ran North Jersey; now, he is a mental shell of his former self. Memories are all we have in the end, and he has suffered the ultimate punishment.