Spoiling the Sopranos

A good ending isn't everything

On a random evening in 2016, I made a spontaneous decision that in hindsight was a little dumb. Well, it’s complicated.

My boyfriend at the time (we’ll call him Joe) invited me to hang out in his dorm. He was my downstairs neighbor, so these hangouts were a regular occurrence during my sophomore year of college.

Anyway, Joe and I were talking about TV shows or something, and he brought up the classic HBO drama The Sopranos. I’d never seen it, nor had I any intention of watching it. I knew it was an extremely long series, and that it was about some guy in the mafia, which didn’t really interest me.

“Do you know about the ending of The Sopranos?” Joe asked. “It’s one of the best final scenes ever made.”

That sounded intriguing enough, and I wanted to know more. Joe explained that The Sopranos has a famously ambiguous and shocking ending that infuriated some viewers when the show originally aired on TV. People weren’t sure what to make of it, and it led to all kinds of theories about how the story really ended.

“So can I … show it to you?” Joe asked. Show me the ending of The Sopranos? Sure, I was curious about what made that final scene so good, and I didn’t plan on watching the series at all.

Joe asked several times if it was okay for him to spoil the ending for me, but I insisted. There was little chance that I’d commit the time and energy to watching this particular TV drama. “I doubt I’ll ever see it otherwise,” I said. Famous last words.

Reader, I’m sure you can guess what eventually happened. Almost a decade later, I not only watched The Sopranos but finished the entire series. And this past weekend, for the second time in my life, I watched the final scene.

I could rave about so many different elements of The Sopranos — its complex characters, social commentary, and how the writers managed to keep the story fresh through all six seasons — but I’ll save those thoughts for another post. What’s been on my mind most is the ending; not because of its ambiguity or shocking nature, but the fact that seeing the final scene years ago spoiled virtually nothing for me about the rest of the show.

You’d think that seeing the end of a series before the beginning would at least ruin something for the viewer. It’s like reading the last page of a book before you start it, putting yourself at risk for accidentally discovering a major plot spoiler. Plus, knowing where the characters end up makes the journey seem a little less interesting, no?

Apparently not all stories can be ruined by watching the ending first. The Sopranos wasn’t, as least for me.

About six months ago, Ryan and I started the series after a we went on a gangster movie kick. We saw The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. Those were all great precursors to The Sopranos, especially Goodfellas, since a lot of the same actors are in both.

My dad’s Sopranos boxed sets.

It also helped that I’d recently inherited my dad’s boxed sets of Sopranos seasons 2 and 3. I was too young to remember when he’d watched that show, but knowing that he bought two seasons on DVD was enough to convince us that it must’ve been good.

So, we decided to give Sopranos a shot.

***Fair warning: there are some pretty big spoilers ahead. Skip ahead to the next bolded section to avoid them.***

At the beginning, I worried I’d ruined the show for myself because I’d seen the ending already. Vague details stuck with me from watching it in college: the final scene happened in a restaurant, and the main character, Tony, was watching the front door as people filed in. Then he looked up one last time and the scene suddenly cut to black.

Knowing nothing about the characters, their relationships, or the circumstances that led to those final moments, I had so many unanswered questions as Ryan and I got sucked into season after season. Eventually, I stopped thinking about the ending. Being immersed in the story was adventure enough — I didn’t have to understand its final moments to thoroughly enjoy the journey.

But once we got to season 6, the final one, I found my mind wandering as we neared the end. I came up with all kinds of theories about how we’d reach the final scene. I’d already made up my mind that Tony was shot by someone in the restaurant, and that’s why the screen suddenly went black. Would someone in his gang turn on him — maybe Paulie or Chris — and confront him at the restaurant? Perhaps a rival gang member, like Phil Leotardo? Or even his own son, AJ, after some kind of altercation?

Well, as season 6 unfolded, I realized that so many of my ideas were not gonna pan out. Phil and Chris were both killed off, and nothing ever happened between Tony and AJ or Paulie that warranted the kind of anger needed to shoot a guy.

Also what restaurant were they in? Satriale’s? Vesuvio? I wondered where the shooting would happen — it had to be one of Tony’s regular haunts, right?

The show writers kept me (pleasantly) guessing, all the way up to the final five minutes of the series. Once I saw Tony step into the restaurant, Holsten’s (which was mentioned for the first time in the entire show), I knew that was it. We were in the home stretch.

Tony’s wife and son joined him at the table, and everything seemed completely normal. Life appeared like it was about to take a turn for the better — the gang war between Tony’s crew and the Brooklyn mob was over. And while there were some troubles in the family after recent deaths, the atmosphere at the restaurant seemed uplifting, like everything was going to be okay. “Don’t Stop Believing” played brightly in the background.

There was a guy acting slightly suspicious at the restaurant bar, and Tony eyed him a few times while waiting for his family. But we never learn who this guy is or if he’s connected to any of Tony’s rivals. We just know that he goes into the bathroom behind Tony’s table at one point.

Then, just as Tony’s daughter steps in the front door, he looks up and everything goes black and silent.

As the viewer, you’re left to decide what ultimately happens to Tony. Many people, including me, think the guy who went into the bathroom came back out and shot Tony in the back of the head. There’s a flashback in the final episode to support this theory, as well as many other hints that the show writers seemed to plant for us to understand the ending.

When I saw this scene the first time nine years ago, I could tell it was a structurally solid ending to a show, but I missed so much context that could only be gained by watching the series in its entirety. It wasn’t just the shocking fade to black that made the final scene so memorable, but the contrast between an optimistic sense of life and the suddenness of Tony’s death. Plus that fact that his entire family was present to witness him get shot in a restaurant. He had showed so much cruelty to others throughout The Sopranos that it only made sense for his murderer to put him in a similarly cruel situation.

And yet, as the viewer, you’re only left to imagine these things after the screen goes black. Tony’s story might end with the final scene, but the stories of the other Sopranos characters could theoretically keep going on and on and on.

***Okay, spoilers over.***

While I may have seen that end scene before the rest of the show, it didn’t spoil anything for me at all. What made the ending great was the tension that the writers built over 86 episodes, or eight years of television. You can’t pack a great story into just the final five minutes; it’s something that you have to slowly build up to. In more cliched terms, the journey matters more than the destination.

What The Sopranos revealed to me is that the ending is only one little nugget of an entire tale, and doesn’t hold all the weight in a story. You can have great endings, sure, but they can’t be the only great thing about a story. Building a world the sucks the viewer in is more important than the final sendoff.

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