The Good
The more I think about it… this show went out the way it had to go out.
The Bad
I would have liked a little more of an explanation about that Season Finale.
The Sopranos: Season Six - Part 2 does its best to tie up a lot of the loose ends between Tony and the rest of the characters that inhabit the world of this show. Chances are if you are reading this review you have either A) Been following the show or B) You have an interest in The Sopranos and you know what’s going on without having to have the character’s names and stories gone over a billion times. Let me just say for the record that I go back and forth about how I feel about the finale, however, I am leaving those thoughts for the Final Word section of this DVD review.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
I must say that like all the seasons The Sopranos: Season Six - Part 2 is filled with its fair share of surprises. Granted, I could have done without multiple episodes of red herrings in regards to whether or not Paulie Walnuts was going to get popped. At the same time, I feel that Christopher’s demise was something of a shock, even though I do think that the seeds had been planted for some time now. I feel that Tony making something that resembled peace with Junior was an interesting way to go (especially in the final episode calling their work, “This thing of ours”), but I am not sure that anything got truly resolved for characters such as A.J., Meadow or even Carmela. However, something tells me that that was in David Chase’s grand design that everything work out this way.
So what will happen now?
Will we see a movie based on this show? Will it eventually come back to HBO or some other network (lord knows that HBO would love it to come back)? Or, in the world of you can never satisfy anybody media, is The Sopranos destined to be one of those shows that represents just how brilliant imperfect art can be?
Features
There are four commentary tracks on this release. Each of them features an actor and after looking over the names I decided that I’d most like to hear from Robert Iler. Talking about “Episode 7,” I must admit that what he had to say left me a tad disappointed. I understand that he’s an actor and that working with these other actors for all these years has provided him with a tremendous amount of experience (not to mention a great deal of street credibility), but nothing he had to talk about really went far beyond the surface level. I was hoping to hear him discuss things that happened on the set, or what his mindset was for a particular scene but he never seemed to move beyond the periphery of the work and telling us things that we could figure out for ourselves.
Making Cleaver
The Music of The Sopranos
In this featurette we get to find out more about the music that made up this show. This is one thing that I have to give David Chase credit for, like Scorsese before him, he really has a way with placing audio. Sure, one could talk only about the opening song to the show and the use of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” to close it out, but there was a lot of music used throughout its 6 year run that made The Sopranos rise above merely being a show about organized crime. It seemed to date David Chase and the characters in such way that it made this show and it’s inhabitants look like sorely missed products of a bygone era.
Video
Widescreen - Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1. Having watched most of these shows on their original HBO run, I didn’t really notice anything that different. I also watched these DVDs on the same TV so that probably wasn’t helping things. Also, it has only been about 4 or 5 months since I last saw these things in their analog form. On DVD the compression seemed to be pretty sharp. This show always had a lot of dark colors, especially black, and because of that there was also a harsh, somewhat downcast feel to each episode. This worked well in creating the ominous feelings that came up and also seems to have held up in their transfer to DVD.
Audio
Dolby Digital. Close Captioned. English, Spanish and French. The audio for this release was also pretty good. I know that this is probably going to sound redundant but I didn’t hear anything on these DVDs that sounded that much different from my initial viewing experience. Sure the audio was crisp and certain sounds like gunshots and whatnot resonated nicely, but there wasn’t too much about the audio that stood out. Perhaps things are different on the Blu-ray version?
Package
Tony Soprano is shown on this gray slipcase cover with an image of the Statue of Liberty behind him. The back portion of this cover presents a description of this volume of the show, a Special Features listing, a credits list and technical specs. The discs inside this collection pull out of this packaging and we are presented with even more artwork and episode information.
Final Word
Okay… the Season Finale had everybody up in arms but anybody who has watched this show should have seen it coming a mile off. Why do I say this? Well, if you recall the Second Season where Tony puts together that Big Pussy is talking to the FBI by having a fish tell him that in his dream, then you should know that even though this show tries to present gritty reality it is also steeped in certain aspects of fantasy. Or, if you don’t want to be kind you can call it a cop out. The big question that people really need to ask themselves is:
How should this show have ended?
If Tony gets whacked that makes sense but it’s really typical and ultimately not the most plausible way to go. If more people in the family get killed that’s okay but it doesn’t tie up the inevitable loose ends by not having Tony die. If the show goes off in a different direction then maybe it will come back or lead to the aforementioned big screen debut. The point that I am trying to put across is that there really wasn’t going to ever be a satisfying ending. Not when you have a show that is this loved and that has been on the air for as long as The Sopranos was. The ending as it was seemed to say that no matter what happens we are looking at the story of a family. Warts and all.
Regardless of how you feel about this show now, if you have been collecting it on DVD then not owning The Sopranos: Season Six - Part 2 would make about as much sense as the finale in question, right?
The Sopranos was released .
