Angel

If you haven’t seen the series finale of THE SOPRANOS and don’t want to be spoiled, go away right now. If you’ve seen it but need a recap, or if you haven’t seen it but don’t care about being spoiled about the end of the HBO series, here goes. Our protagonist, New Jersey mob boss, husband, father and killer Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), looks like he’s going to be indicted on racketeering charges. He comes to a kind of peace with his formerly combative but now Alzheimer’s-afflicted uncle, sets some of his affairs in order and has an enemy killed. Then Tony meets wife Carmela (Edie Falco) and son A.J. (Robert Iler) in a diner, where several suspicious-looking characters are hanging out. Could one of them be planning to whack Tony? Outside, daughter Meadow (Jamie Lyn Sigler) is having inordinate trouble parking. Finally, she enters the diner, Tony looks up -

And the screen goes black and silent.

Reportedly, cable company phone lines lit up with calls from subscribers who thought their boxes had gone kaput at a crucial moment, but no, that was the end - The End - of THE SOPRANOS. Once the viewers had a few moments to absorb that this was the climax that SOPRANOS creator David Chase intended, there was a mass movement to the computer keyboard and the complaints, praise, analysis and infighting began in earnest. These reactions had been there all along, of course, but there’s nothing like the termination of a series to bring emotions out in full force, and there’s nothing like ambiguity to create a 52 pick-up effect among the fans. Reactions ranged from statements that the blackout was brilliant to absolute fury to enormous bewilderment. The enraged posters accused those who liked the ending of being sycophants, the happy posters accused the angry ones of having no imagination and the confused ones begged for clarification. Then there are the battles over interpretation, with some people positive that the blackout meant Tony was dead (his point of view coming to an abrupt end), others certain that we are meant to see all the possibilities that have been there all along (Tony balancing danger, dread and family life), others declaring that this is a cynical gambit to keep THE SOPRANOS on life support until a movie is made, and yet others maintaining that David Chase couldn’t make up his mind.

What’s really funny here is that the specific reactions are uncannily reminiscent to the fan responses to the final episode of another series three years ago: ANGEL. Yes, ANGEL, created by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt, about a vampire with a soul atoning for his soulless, people-drinking past over five seasons on the WB (after the character spent three seasons on Whedon’s BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER), turns out to have a few things in common with THE SOPRANOS, despite the fact that THE SOPRANOS was showered with Emmys and praise so high that absolutely nothing could live up to it (“Even THE SOPRANOS isn’t THE SOPRANOS,” one critic observed of the expectations set up by the hype), while ANGEL had a fervent following that didn’t translate to much mainstream notice, let alone reviewers’ claims that it had forever changed the face of television. The last episode of ANGEL ended with our hero - who one episode earlier had been forced to kill a friend in order to keep the bad guys fooled - in an alley in the rain with three of his friends, facing down a horde of monsters sent after them by an evil law firm (if you haven’t seen ANGEL, don’t ask). Angel raises his sword for battle -

And the screen goes black.

Interestingly, though of course the details were different, the message boards were filled with posts remarkably similar to the ones greeting Chase’s latest work. Whedon (Greenwalt had left two seasons earlier) was derided for cheating the audience, praised for letting the characters go out as they’d come in (fighting the good fight), scolded for being inconclusive and suspected of trying to leave an opening for some other medium. There was also insistence by one faction of fans that closing on seemingly impossible odds meant all the characters died after the blackout, with other fans asserting that Angel and Co. were always up against impossible odds, that the last shot left the characters doing what they’d been doing all along - fighting the good fight - and that if they were meant to be definitively dead, we would have seen them die.

While there isn’t evidently enormous crossover between ANGEL fans and SOPRANOS fans - that is, it’s not largely the same group of people applying the same arguments to a different series a few years later - the responses to the ends of the respective series suggest there are parallels in both content and the way audiences respond to it. After all, both series dealt with morally ambiguous protagonists (albeit the entirely human Tony was much darker than the vampire Angel could ever imagine being) who were in charge of sometimes fractious groups at odds with the larger world. So one wonders how much the common themes of the series themselves, as opposed to just the common elements of their endings, dictated the online posting reaction in both cases.

It is known that Chase declared last year that this would be the final season of THE SOPRANOS - the HBO network presumably was in no hurry to toss its crown jewel out the door - whereas ANGEL was canceled by the WB after Whedon et al had reason to believe that a sixth season would be forthcoming and had been writing the fifth season with that in mind. When they got the news (during the filming of Season Five, Episode 18, “The Underneath” - Whedon came on set to deliver the bad news in person during the filming of a dungeon torture scene), Whedon and the writers then shaped the remaining four episodes to come to a conclusion. Apparently ANGEL’s ending was indeed meant to be fairly open, as a sixth season in comic book form, supervised by Whedon and written by Brian Lynch, is due later this year.

It can’t be determined by someone (like this writer) who doesn’t know Chase whether he ever watched ANGEL - it’s not impossible, as he cut his teeth as a writer back on the series version of THE NIGHT STALKER back in the ‘70s - but it seems unlikely that he was influenced by its denouement. In any event, he seems to feel the SOPRANOS finale speaks for itself. “I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," Chase told the Newark (New Jersey) Star Ledger in the one interview he’s given on the subject. As for perceived ambiguity, "Anybody who wants to watch it, it’s all there."

Perhaps it’s fitting that both ANGEL and THE SOPRANOS went out as they existed - able to sustain a multitude of interpretations and prone to spark passionate argument. It sure would be fun to get Whedon and Chase in a room together to find out if the two of them believe their motives and methods in reaching their respective conclusions were really as similar as they seem from way over here, with the good-hearted monster and the conflicted mobster both going from the long gray morality of their stories into sudden black.