“The Sopranos” — Soprano Home Movies
via HBO.com
So this is it, kids. This is what we’ve all been waiting for! Right?
First and foremost, Sunday’s Sopranos was great. As a single episode of television the narrative was artfully constructed. Every moment seemed to foreshadow scenes coming up later in the episode or possibilities for the series down the road.
What’s interesting about watching a group of episodes that have an absolute end point is how every little thing impacts your preconceived notions on “the big picture.” At the front of this week’s episode we were led to think that Tony, unhappy with Christopher’s trajectory, was considering Bobby to be his number two. By the end of the episode Bobby had lost a little of his innocence, but it’s hard to say if it will ultimately help or hurt him in the family.
What’s brilliant about The Sopranos is its a show that happily embraces loose ends. In a way its the polar opposite of Lost. In The Sopranos we’re left wondering about the Russian in the woods, the fabric torn from Bobby’s shirt in the laundromat, the buried head of a mob captain in an area set for urban development and will never be told about their fate because the series, like life, isn’t tidy. Though that isn’t to say things don’t come back to haunt us — like the hand gun thrown in the snow three years ago. What’s fun is you never know what might suddenly mean something (my favorite throw-away moment from the entire series came in the otherwise unliked season four in which Ralphy makes an off-hand comment about Johnny Sacks wife, only to have that comment propel the next eight episodes worth of action).
The Sopranos is back, and it’ll be an absolute thrill to try and guess over the next eight weeks which ends finally get tied.
