Can't Get No Satisfaction

And speaking of closure, I am denied once again!

I swear, the final episode of The Sopranos was the absolute LAMEST series finale I've ever wasted my time on. No payoff whatsoever. What a friggin' joke.

Were they trying to be all artsy and hip by going blank at the end? Are we supposed to think that the whole damn family got whacked?

Seriously--I was so pissed at the end of it, and since the whole series went in the shitter about a year ago, it's pretty much dead to me. You won't catch me renting old episodes on Netflix, or buying the box sets. Luckily the series is over--because after foisting that crap on us, I'd never watch it again anyways.

The beauty of a show that has characters we've grown to love or hate over the years is that we find out what happens to them. Just like the X-Files, which became exasperating and unwatchable in the later seasons because no questions were ever answered, the series finale of The Sopranos did nothing to make me want to re-watch it ever again. I used to be a huge fan of the show--same with the X-Files. But if nothing ever gets solved and you have no idea whatever became of the main characters, it's like it never happened. It was just a time waster.

Maybe that's why after all these years I still watch MASH reruns. We got closure. The same goes with Friends, Cheers, and to a lesser degree, Seinfeld. We know what happened to all of our favorite characters. Sure, the shows were entertaining by themselves, and stood on their own as far as watchability is concerned. But The Sopranos episodes were all tied together. That ending was a mailed-in joke, sort of like reading a 500-page novel and then finding out that the author purposely left out the last two pages.

Maybe the idea was to get people talking about it--kind of like the "What's in the briefcase?" discussion after we saw Pulp Fiction. But the only talking I'm hearing from people is utter disappointment in how a show with so much creativity and entertainment value, a virtual pop-culture icon of the past decade, could land with such a resounding thud, like a bag of wet garbage, instead of ending with a bang like everyone hoped.

How long did it take to hack out this last episode? An hour in the can with a laptop? I invested seven years of my time, making sure I was home every Sunday night at 9 pm, and this is my reward?

Screw you, David Chase. Enjoy your legacy. I should've stopped watching that crap months ago.


Mikey