the sopranos

Now that the final half of the final season of The Sopranos has finally aired, commentators have begun to opine on how the show will end. Here's ESPN.com's Bill Simmons's stupid take:

clipped from sports.espn.go.com

7. My Sopranos prediction for the final episode: Carmela kills Tony. Why? Because Chase has maintained from the beginning that he always knew exactly how the series would end and never wavered from that statement, not even once. And since that's the case, there are three ways it can end: Tony gets whacked; Tony goes into a witness protection program; or Tony gets killed by his wife. Given the past six seasons and the way everything has been carefully set up, I'm going with the "Carmela kills Tony" scenario. It makes the most sense. Regardless, there should be a way we can wager on those three scenarios along with "the field" of every other scenario.

Here's Slate's Timothy Noah's offering:

clipped from www.slate.com

I can't predict how the show will end, but I can tell you how I want it to end. I want Tony put away or rubbed out. I read somewhere that Chase is disinclined to "punish" Tony in the series denouement because that would smack too much of the middle-class morality imposed by Hollywood's Hays office on the Warner Brothers gangster classics of the 1930s. But the real trouble with letting Tony show that crime pays isn't that it would be nihilistic. It's that it would be unrealistic. As you point out, the mob isn't nearly as powerful as it used to be, and this decline is very much a theme of The Sopranos. In some episodes, the setting could just as easily be a steel factory or (to take a thoroughly up-to-date example) an urban daily newspaper. In the real world, the Tony Sopranos don't end up on top. They end up either in prison or sprawled across a tile floor and bleeding from the head in one of the better Italian restaurants. I'd like to see Chase honor that reality.

Now that these conjectures are flooding cyberspace, I want to get my thoughts out before I read them somewhere else:

During the fifth season, my friend JD and I would discuss each episode over the phone every Sunday night. After the one where Meadow gets engaged to Finn, good old JD called me, almost breathless. "The series is going to end with Meadow getting married!" she exclaimed. "It'll be just like The Godfather in reverse!"

I quickly realized she was right. I pointed out how Tony's anxiety attack in the very first episode-- where he falls over his pool furniture-- was carefully shot to mimic Vito Corleone's famous death in the tomato garden. Thus, in a broad sense, The Sopranos is following the Godfather story arc in reverse. The Godfather was set during the mafia's mythic golden era, so it's fitting that a show chronicling the mob's decline would describe-- symbolically-- the opposite trajectory. (That Connie Corleone married a hot-headed mobster while Meadow chooses a mawkish dental student underscores the point.)

The more JD and I think about it, the more sense it makes: The Sopranos will end with Meadow's grandiose wedding ceremony. And with it-- with the family, the wine, the aging overweight Don smiling in the shadows-- America's 35 year obsession with la cosa nostra will have come full circle.