Monday 27 August 2007

The Fat Lady sings

Tonight they're airing the last episode (ever) of The Sopranos.

I'm taping it, and it should be ending in just a few minutes from me writing this.

I can hardly wait to find out what happens.

UPDATE: Now that I've seen it, I think it's a lot less subtle than I would have expected. It's cut quite unlike that sort of scene should be, far too many reaction-shots paying attention to far too many signals. It's a pretty ham-fisted way of building suspense -- "Look! No look over there! No there!". That sort of montage is allowable only if something is going to happen, and WE KNOW something is going to happen.

But in the last episode, we don't expect something to happen. We know there's been a truce with the Little Guy. We know Phil has been popped (like a watermelon) with their tacit blessing. It doesn't make narrative sense to have Tony whacked at this point. When you put the two things together -- the end of hostilities and the protest-too-much cutting of the Holsten's scene -- it's clear to me that T lives to fight another day. All that frantic cutting is to show us how he lives every day, how he can never afford to relax. Yeah because we never got that throughout the whole six seasons. This guy's mother and his uncle both tried to whack him more than once, have we forgotten that?

How they handled the black-out here was really botched. Often TV shows will cut right off without even showing end-credits, presumably because they think the mothers and aunts of key-grips won't be watching on Flemish TV. All reports on the original broadcast of the last ep said there was a ringing of the door, then a black-out that was held just a little too long, so that people thought there was something wrong with the cable.

Never mind all that. Here, the bell at the door rings, T looks up, black-out and boom, credits come right up. Not a second to wonder. Bad.