What a finale... "Is there light where you are yet?"
this episode was a such masterpiece in my view...
i love this episode so much. my favourite episode before was probably ‘isabella’, which is similar in ways & has some contrast with this one. i just don’t think i can put my love for this into words. when tony came back uo in the kitchen i just had this feeling the dream still wasn’t over. it’s almost as if ur in it urself. they fooled me w/ dr melfi though, prior to that.
it was nice to see the globe motors woman (who i was thinking of at the beginning with the burning hair), pussy, richie & ralphie of course. i’m looking forward to see the fate of tony uncle al. made me very reminiscent of ralphie’s.
this is certainly my favourite series ever (so far anyway) now.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2015-08-01T03:40:21Z
Well...that was weird. It was very cool to see the return of the various people in Tony's life who have died over the course of the show. (Livia excepted for obvious reasons). It felt a lot like the Season 7 premiere of Buffy in that way. Hell, the whole episode felt like "Restless" from Buffy in its way. I was practically expecting the Cheese Man.
But I'm not really sure how to unpack it all. There's a lot of vague symbols and callbacks and call outs to elements of the show. There's a sense that we're exploring Tony's subconscious here. When he confronts his old coach, (who, incidentally, is a big fat guy who smokes a cigar), there's the sense that he's still insecure about his position -- that he feels like he didn't live up to his potential in some way, that he could have lived a straight life and maybe been something more or better.
And there's other little moments beyond the ghost of his friends. He tells Carmela that he wants to come home in the dream (on top of, what I suspect to be his favorite horse). The scenes of Tony in the hotel are very lonely. He won't admit it, and he still gets frustrated at certain things, but he wants Carmela back in his life, and if there's a sweetness to all this weirdness, it's their conversation at the end of the episode where they sound like regular, mildly supportive, interested people for once.
And then there's the most obvious point -- that Tony S. realizes that Tony B. is going to avenge Angelo and it's going to mean that everything goes to shit in its wake. It's the realization that he's going to have to kill someone he loves, or at least see him killed, when he still has tremendous survivor's guilt for the actions that led his cousin to jail without his family and led Tony S. to such success and, from the outside at least, happiness.
There's a lot of other telling little bits there -- Tony confusing an incident with Gloria for one with his mother, his old cop "pal" playing the role of FInn's father (alongside Annette Benning, in an inspired bit of randomness). There was even some metacommentary with "I've seen your TV show" and the man whom I suspect is Gary Cooper on the TV and "it's more interesting than life" "this is your life." I don't know how it fits together necessarily, and maybe that's the point, but I was intrigued by it.