Posted on 03/11/2019 11:40:39 AM PDT by Coleus
On June 10, 2007, less than five minutes remained in the final episode of “The Sopranos.”
After eight years with Tony Soprano, his family and the Family, viewers of the landmark series sat keenly alert to the final action as Tony waited for his family at Holsten’s in Bloomfield: The bell that sounds each time someone walks through the door. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” playing on the jukebox. The onion rings that Tony, Carmela and A.J. pop in their mouths as Meadow attempts her maddening parallel parking job outside.
Then, nothing. Cut to black.
Those final seconds hit Tony’s native New Jersey — and the entire viewing audience — like the Big Bang, especially when everyone realized the black screen was not, in fact, a cable outage. As the waves of shock expanded outward, “The Sopranos” was never really over. Since that Sunday night more than 11 years ago, fans and TV critics, including former Star-Ledger writers Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, have debated whether the abrupt end was an indication of Tony’s demise or something else entirely.
So when they sat down recently with series creator David Chase for a series of interviews about the show, they did not expect any monumental clarification. And yet, behold this sentence in their new book:
“I think I had that death scene around two years before the end,” Chase told them.
Yes. “Death scene.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
Yes, I always figured she didn't make it. Didn't the grandfather say to the parents "you'll lose him too," referring to Poddy's brother, who set off the nuclear bomb?
Did you notice that when Tony first walks into the diner, we see a shot of the inside the diner from Tonys POV.
BUT among the diner customers seated, is himself.
So, you think you die when the body does? I've never bought into that materialist concept.
A lifetime of living and learning has convinced me that we are all immortal spirits, inhabiting humanoid bodies, which act as temporary vessels.
At body death, we exit these mortal shells with full awareness of self, and complete perception of the material world around us. We do not die. We move on to the next chapter in our existence.
Exactly. And they placed them whole on their tongues, rather than take a bite. The symbolism struck me right away. The last supper for the sopranos.
I bought the complete DVD set of B5 and found it so dated, I only watched an episode or two. Shows that stood the passage of time for me are the series China Beach and the movie Broadcast News.
I hope you’re right. But for me the only rational ending is to resume the state we were in before conception. Forever.
Once you realize that the book is actually Clark's story, with Podkayne only being the narrator, her dying is the only option.
Also Heinlein had a tendency to make his “juvenile” novels kind of hard on the reader, because he didn’t think kids should be fed a sugar-coated version of real life.
The last two words of the story, “maybe everyone,” also kind of imply that she’s not with us anymore.
If the ending of that story hadn’t been so sad, I don’t think I would have remembered it more than forty years. In fact, I think the reason I do remember it is because I read the last five or six pages over and over again, trying to figure out of Podkayne survived or not.
Heinlein had a knack for creating very lovable female characters.
I always thought the ending death scene could be related back to the episode earlier when Tony and Bobby and their wives spent time together at the lake cottage - Tony and Bobby admire a moose head mounted on the wall, and later while on the lake fishing get into a discussion of what it must be like to die - one opines that you feel or see nothing - "everything goes black', and Tony ends the discussion sardonically with "Why don't you ask your friend back there on the wall"......
In my view we're always in the same state, forever. That is, we live, we perceive, we think, emote, and imagine.
We are the same before birth, and after death. We never perish, even though our bodies do. We ourselves are eternal.
criminally underrated movie...
More than once I shut the show off in the middle of an episode, hoping that my next viewing would reveal the hopelessly shattered wreck of B-5 after an enemy attack -- the most plausible end for a UN adrift in space without the protection of a superpower.
You miss the part where the Minbari offer it that protection?
Indeed. The Minbari abandoned the Battle of the Line when they realized humans had components of themselves. The Minbari partially funded B5.
Au contraire. My youth included a summer of watching Gilligan’s Island reruns on the afternoons when Florida thunderstorms chased us indoors. Shakespeare, it wasn’t, but it did help keep us from getting skizzled.
I actually thought B5 was one of the best SciFi on TV at the time. The story arc was such that the first season first episode impacted last season last episode. Very tight interwoven story. Of course we find out years later that JMS had to “loosen things” to accommodate Michael O’Hare’s medical problems. Think how much better the story arc might have been if that hadn’t happened. It blew away its ST:NG competition. You want Clintoneseque moralizing & reasoning go no further the those ST:NG shows. Some of the storylines in B5 made me think JMS was familiar with Thucydides’ “Peloponnesian War” .
I hear that. Truth or not, where I live in Florida is called the lightning capital of the world. I believe it.
Even in sci-fi, I do not see it as realistic writing to have nice, powerful aliens come to the rescue of liberal good intentions when they are in mortal jeopardy.
I loved B5 at the time, too. The special effects put Star Trek to shame, especially the notion that an ‘alien’ could be more than a human with forehead ridges. And having JMS semi-available to fans during the course of the series was amazing. I’ve only ever seen that done with Mad Men and B5.
Star Trek: NG is my favorite of the ST family, though, and holds up better in repeated viewings. B5 doesn’t show up much, if at all, on cable/streaming, which is a shame. NG seems like it’s always running somewhere, currently on BBC America.
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