Irresistible by Adam Alter

Author:Adam Alter [Alter, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

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When David Chase wrote the eighty-sixth and final episode of The Sopranos, he posed a question that he refused to answer: was Tony Soprano dead? For eight years New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano evaded death while ninety-two of his enemies and friends faded away. They died from gunshot wounds and beatings and drowning and natural causes; from stabbings and heart attacks and strangulation and drug overdoses. Their deaths captivated viewers, but nowhere near as much as Tony’s purgatory absorbed them.

The scene is legend. On June 10, 2007, twelve million Americans watched as Tony Soprano and his family gathered at Holsten’s diner. A man in a brown leather jacket enters the restaurant, and sits at the counter. He glances back at the family, briefly, and heads for the restroom. In the show’s final seconds, a bell on the front door dings, Tony looks up toward the door, and the screen cuts to black. For eleven seconds it remains that way, eight years of action reduced to a profound quiet. Many viewers wondered whether their TVs or cable boxes had cut out at exactly the wrong moment, but this was Chase’s vision.

Fans of the show were perplexed, so they took to Google. The search engine hosted a flood of searches for “Sopranos final episode” beginning at 10:02 P.M. on the East Coast, which continued well into the night. In their desperate search for some kind of resolution, viewers hoped someone out there on the web was more sophisticated than they were. (Eight years later, Serial fans would do the same when they took to Reddit.) Media critics either loved the episode or hated it, and without fail saved most of their energy for its closing five minutes. What had happened? Why had Chase cut the story short?

Two competing theories surfaced. On the one hand, perhaps Chase was trying to suggest that life for Tony and his family would continue beyond the show’s end. Early in the final scene, Tony had popped a couple of coins in a small jukebox at his table, and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” began to play. The last thing viewers heard was singer Steve Perry launching into the song’s chorus, “Don’t stop . . . !” Chase refused to let Perry complete the phrase, and perhaps the two words that closed the show served as a message: the show had ended, but the lives it depicted wouldn’t stop.

On the other hand, many fans were convinced that the silent black screen signaled Tony’s death. Since Tony wasn’t alive to experience the world after his death, viewers were treated to the same abrupt end. His wife and kids would live to hear Steve Perry sing the final word in the song’s title, but it might be drowned out by the gunshot that ended Tony’s life. According to this theory, the man in the leather jacket was Tony’s assassin; in an homage to Tony’s favorite scene from The Godfather, perhaps the man had gone to the bathroom to retrieve a gun.

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