"What You're Doing Is Immoral"

The smart money was always on The Sopranos going on with a sigh rather than in a hail of gunfire. But this conventional wisdom, based on the assumption that series creator David Chase would break with convention and refuse to give audiences a slam-bang ending, seems to have gotten to Chase, who has chosen to subvert expectations by taking the show more-or-less exactly where you might have expected a conventional mob show to go.

Except, of course, that, in Chase's hands, the Big Showdown becomes something far more grand, more personal, and more affecting than it ever could've been on any typical gangster drama.

Tonight's penultimate episode of The Sopranos, which featured the death of Bobby Baccalieri and the potentially fatal shooting of Silvio Dante, was almost certainly the season's best episode (so far), and included several scenes that should go on the series' all-time best list.

Bobby's death was poignant, tragic, heartbreaking, and, in keeping with the cruelty and cynicism of the show, entirely undeserved. Yes, he's a killer, a cold-blooded criminal who commits murders and robberies for money. But of the Sopranos crew, he's also the most sympathetic, a gentle, even soulful, simple family man who, after losing his own wife, took on the burden of Janice as a wife and put up with her, even tamed her--or at least soaked up much of the waves from her self-absorbed behavior. So of course, by Chase's rules, Bobby has to die.

And then there was Sil. Not all gone yet, but not expected to regain consciousness either. Sil was always the trusted adviser, the likeable, sensible number two that helped stabilize the family under Tony's mercurial leadership. You might have expected Paulie Walnuts, the bug-eyed, violent-tempered psychopath who failed to have Phil hit at the show's beginning, to be the one to get hit (certainly if anyone deserved it, it was him). But The Sopranos never takes the easy or pleasant way out. So Paulie comes out unscathed while Sil and Bobby take the bullets.

There was a big showdown with Phil's crew tonight, but there was another major confrontation as well, one that, at least for the moment, actually interests me more: the exchange, probably the final exchange, between Tony and Dr. Melfi. Melfi has always been the show's audience surrogate, the sole character on the show who is something like good, decent, and normal--except, of course, that she, like all those of us in the audience, is fascinated by Tony's violent, hedonistic, criminal lifestyle. The show has long given Melfi to guilt for continuing to see Tony--and by doing so, subtly forced the audience to face up to its own pleasure in watching him. But in tonight's episode, there was nothing subtle about it. It made its audience surrogate, (and by extension, the audience) realize that not only has she not been helping Tony, she's been enabling him the whole time.

This was Chase's way of telling his audience (who he's never really been kind to, at least not with his show): "You've got to give this up. It's wrong, and it's unhealthy, and you've enjoyed it for too long. It's time for this all to end." It gets to the point where even Tony confirms it. "What you're doing is immoral," he says, and he walks out the door of her office for the last time, leaving Melfi to bear the weight of the guilt that, for seven years, she not only made no difference, but made a murderous thug's life easier.

Addendum: Over at the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz brings up a lot of the same issues I do with the episode, but smarter, better, with more nuance, and generally in a more readable manner.