Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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81 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quite astonishingly brilliant - gutted it's over, 21 Aug 2007
After the slight drop in form in Season 6 Part 1, the nine episodes that make up Part 2 are all of astonishingly high quality. Whilst there were a couple of episodes in 6.1 where you sensed a degree of drift and inaction, each one of these episodes is so packed with various plot developments they all merit repeat viewing. I'm very conscious of the need to avoid any spoilers but I think I can get away with saying that there's a real melancholic "end of empire" mood across this entire strand, a sense that as Tony himself once observed - the good times are in the past and as in real life - they start to turn on each other. Added to that, Tony's health is failing, the feud with Phil Leotardo intensifies and AJ in particular causes Tony and Carmela serious grief. The humour that was also missing in 6.1 returns here, particularly with Paulie and AJ's storylines. If you're a big Sopranos fan you've probably been unable to avoid all the moaning about the final ending. Well again, avoiding spoilers, I can assure you that it is by a long shot the finest final episode of any long running series I've ever seen and if you expected a clear Hollywood wrap up then you clearly don't get what makes the Sopranos so uniquely outstanding. Enjoy.
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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow - but no more Soprano's!, 3 Oct 2007
I watched this via satellite television from the USA as it was aired over there. Having been desperate to watch this I was not let down. It is a brilliant, crowning glory to a superb television series. In an effort to not spoil anything I can say that the issues between New York and Jersey get worse and the odd behaviour of AJ causes more concern for Tony. Perhaps most odd of all is that the penultimate episode was meant to be the last. You will know what I mean when I say it would have been a brilliant ending. The episode that became the final installment.....well lets just say you probably won't believe it! James Gandolfini is brilliant as ever as Tony and with a host of tremendous actors and actresses around him the series finale oozes class. The only thing wrong with this series is that it has ended. It is such a shame as life was much better knowing another series of this was in production. Enjoy it whilst it lasts!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
There will never be enough superlatives for the Sopranos, 11 Aug 2008
This last (half) series of the finest TV show ever made is actually one of its best (semi) seasons, so it makes some sense to review this masterwork from the (hopefully now spoiler-proof) end. The Sopranos finishes, indeed, as wonderfully as it began and carried on: constantly complimenting the viewer's intelligence, right up to the bitter-sweet dénouement.
Yes, the penultimate episode is the proper narrative/dramatic "end," with its stunningly-staged assassination of Baccala and the calamitous (and, typically of the show, almost hilarious) near-fatal wounding of Silvio (to the sound of Nat King Cole, the sight of naked Bing bystanders and with hideous collateral damage to a passing motorcyclist).
But the actual finale itself had to, er, not happen; in that typical Sopranos life-goes-on manner of astonishing observation of, and pleasure in, the less extreme, often seemingly mundane, and frequently drop-dead-laughing details of "family" life. (Examples, I'm sure, will crowd in on everyone who knows the show: Junior getting the hump with an unflattering court artist some series back; Junior's conviction, in this series, that his will-executor - an unseen character we know, only from Janice's brief reference, to have an artificial larynx - is from outer space; the ketchup bottle in the last ever episode... there are so many.)
Individual episodes in this last set are also quite outstandingly brilliant. For me, number three ("Remember When"), is perfect Sopranos. It has an exquisitely-constructed counterpoint between a trip wherein Tony basically confronts Paulie with the problem of his trouble-making indiscretion about three series back, interspersed with the unfolding Cuckoo's Nest tragedy of Junior's inglorious "rule" of the mental health facility that is now his domain. The build-up of tension in these parallel worlds is breathtaking. Even as Tony finally asserts his scary authority over Paulie on an extremely uncomfortable boat-trip, Junior's "career" is meeting a sticky, violent end at the hands of a disturbed youth whose worship he has cultivated. The last shot of this episode, a track across one of those outdoor "pet encounter" sessions for Corrado's fellow-inmates, finishes on one of the most poignant images I've ever seen on TV, a devastating pan from the disfigured cat he's vacantly cuddling to the lost, toothless, living-dead face of Junior. Beautiful, dreadful.
So: the final episode has a deliberate, but no less entertaining, sense of bathos to it. And this is Sopranos "anti-climax," remember, so it was always going to be a cut above. Indeed, to echo the quite credible references from other reviewers to its Shakespearian level of attainment, I have to say that the Sopranos' ending certainly puts it amongst the greats for all time - with no small hint of the Existential playfulness we've all come to treasure.
In fact, this last series ends with the most vivid illustration of quantum physics since Schrodinger's Cat - really! Without getting into "spoiler" territory, I think we can confidently say (or not) that what happens "next" is entirely up to you/us. Or not: it's the audience ourselves who can most reasonably be considered to get "annihilated" in the series' last split second. Tony's "fate" won't be resolved until we reopen the "box" and look inside to see whether that Sopranos cat is alive or dead. The Uncertainty Principle in a nutshell - only the box gets switched off for us before we can look further.
Mischievous David Case would probably deny it (just as he playfully pleads ignorance to the significance of all those oranges and eggs), but there is some exceptionally witty referencing going on. As Tony's fellow-patient Schwinn (the great Hal Holbrook) says early in the first phase of this final season, "reality" is only a perception of wave-forms and "we're all connected" (this in an episode that also features some Creationist nutters getting roundly satirised).
So: that very last blip-out shot of Tony in the diner marks our own "disconnection" from the Sopranos' universe, an untidy switch-off that marks a proper anti-climax, weakly rhymed with the HBO "click-off" logo or the "stylus yank" cut-off at the end of every opening credits). It's that deliberate, that random.
Maybe they all go to Paris, as Tony did in his near-death experience (the Eifel Tower beacon tantalisingly visible from an "American" hotel window) and as Carm actually does (only to encounter dead Adriana in a boulevard... and elsewhere ask Ro whether the place really exists when they're not there). The last episode even playfully gives us a supernaturally "aware" cat to plague Paulie in our last glimpses of him!
Fantastic stuff - and all this in a "gangster" show that, during its time with us, has given us some of the funniest, most violent, tender, groovy and jaw-droppingly original moments we've ever had the pleasure of witnessing in a TV programme! The whole thing on box set - get it. Watch it. And, if you care at all about the cultural future, keep it as a bequest for your kids, along with all the other great complete works of which we might avail ourselves.
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