In Defense of Sopranos Season 6 - Spoiler Alert

Considering how much of modern television is based on mindbending twists and oh-shit surprise cliffhangers, it's remarkable to consider how genuinely distinctive the series finale of "Sopranos" was. The door opens, Tony looks up, cut to black silence forever after. What happened? Did he die? Did we die? Did he keep on muddling through his pointless existence, and in that last close-up did David Chase suddenly hold a mirror up to society, condemning us to a life without closure? Colbert spoofed it. Hillary retooled it into a Youtube campaign ad, proving yet again that politicians (and, indeed, most people over 30) simply do not quite understand Youtube.

So attention-grabbing were those final moments that it's easy to forget how low-key the whole episode was. The penultimate episode left viewers ready for a bloodbath - Tony, all alone with his machine gun, his closest friends dead and comatose. But there was just one onscreen death in the finale - one long-expected, and handled with that precise "Sopranos" dark humor. There were no big moments. Tony didn't cry. Dr Melfi didn't even show up. The choice for "Don't Stop Believing" as the last song is like a sadistic joke - the loudest and cheesiest song in history, and it plays over quiet, bored family conversation.

"Sopranos" used to be attention-grabbing TV, but most people weren't huge fans of season 6. It was slow. The first half of the season, 12 episodes that ran in 2006, lacked any clear narrative center - whereas earlier seasons turned on Tony's relationship with his Mother, or with his cousin Tony B., or his closest friend and traitor Big Pussy, those first 12 episodes seemed to spin in all kinds of directions. Tony gets shot, has a dream of purgatory in a coma, then wakes up. Vito is gay and races off to have a romance with a handlebar-mustached firefighter-cook. Carmela, who had been such a force in Season 5 - exploring life on her own - spent the whole season waiting for Tony to lean on the building inspector so she could work on her spec house. The Spec House plot sums up most of the first half of Season 6 - lying half-finished, waiting for someone to either fix it up or just start over. What a bizarre place for the show to leave off, we all thought - the Sopranos celebrating Christmas, quietly, and mostly happy.

Yet now, with the full 21 episode expanse of Season 6 complete, the full equation becomes clear. It begins with the worst thing to ever happen to Tony - shot by his uncle, near-death. Then, magically, he is back to life - "Every day is a gift," he says. Tony is risen. He is ascended into a new grace. He stops cheating on Carmela, and seeks peace with Phil Leotardo. The end of the first half of the season is as close as "The Sopranos" has ever come to a happy ending.

Of course, it's not over. "Soprano Home Movies" was the beginning of the last nine episodes, and it provides, in miniature, a perfect signpost for what's to come. Tony, Carmela, Janice, and Bobby are playing Monopoly. They are laughing and chit-chatting, and yet the scene is fraught with unbearable tension - the camera holds just a little bit too long on Tony and Janice, sincerity shades delicately into sarcasm. Tony makes jokes about Janice's childhood promiscuity. Bobby asks him to stop. Tony doesn't. A fight breaks out - not a family scuffle, a brawl between two gigantic grizzly bears. In just a few minutes, a quiet domestic scene moves into a bloody, angry, vengeful fight.

That scene captures everything great about the final season of Sopranos, a season which had nothing left to prove and so rewrote the rules of television one last time. Because there are no commercials, each episode of "Sopranos" finds the time to focus in one quiet little moments - and no actor plays silence better than James Gandolfini, inhaling deeply into Tony Soprano's profound gut, by turns confused by and angry at the whole world. That scene set the tone for season 6 - because, by all rights, Tony should be happy, and yet he is living in hell.

The final episodes focus in on Tony's relationships with the men who should be his closest friends, and find nothing but mistrust, repressed hostility, and finally, death. In "Remember When," Tony travels with Paulie to Miami, and appears very close to murdering him - out of what appears to be sheer annoyance. His old friend Hesh wants Tony to pay off an old debt - leading Tony to make anti-semitic Shylock jokes. Tony kills his nephew - a man with whom, earlier in the season, he had shared a drunken man-hug, saying, "I love you."

Futility is the final theme of "Sopranos." Dr Melfi reads a psychiatric study which claims sociopaths do not benefit from therapy - and what a wonderful moment, for those of us who have watched the series from the beginning, when the study notes that such men often show a great affinity for "animals." Far away, the ducks quack quack quack, and Pie-O-My winnies from horse heaven. Christopher, forever fighting off his addiction, seeks forgiveness from his AA sponsor - and then murders him for telling the essential truth, "You're in the mafia." They chose this life.

The season began with strangulation - Gene, a heretofore minor character, finds himself trapped by the mob, the FBI, and his own dysfunctional family, and hangs himself. We left Johnny Sack gasping for breath out of his cancerous lungs, moments before death. Tony just covers Christopher's nose and mouth, sending his nephew into the next life coughing blood. AJ tries to drown himself in the pool. Asphyxiation is the perfect metaphor for season 6 - it is a slow, painful way to die, not fast like a gunshot, not quiet like natural causes. It gives you time to truly consider what it means to be alive - see Gene struggling with his rope, suddenly desperate for more air; or Christopher, when the shock of realization hits his eyes that Tony isn't trying to help him. When Tony rescues AJ, he cries, "My baby, my baby" - it is the last truly tender moment in the series.

One can sense that Season 6 could have been much shorter - with only 13 episodes, perhaps Vito's storyline wouldn't have been so central; Tony wouldn't have been in a coma for so long; one can see episodes like Johnny Sack's death, Tony and Carmela's visit to Bobby's cabin, the Feast of St. Elzear and Carmela's trip to Paris might have been eliminated entirely. Yet with the extra time, you can sense Chase and his writers stretching to include everything - the War on Terror, the advance of corporate America, religion, Hollywood, homosexuality, marriage, funerals, death, life. What other show would get so much mileage out of a poem by Yeats?

There's nothing more exciting than a new episode of "24," and there's nothing more boring than an old episode of "24." In this post-iTunes, post-TiVo landscape, "Sopranos" Season 6 feels like a lost relic from a television era that never really existed - a meditative TV, moving at its own delicate pace. There are stretches of episodes in season 6 that bear comparison to Antonioni - with all the positive (depth of emotion) and negative (slow to the point of insanity) aspects that comparison demands. I am reminded of something Roger Ebert writes about the closing 45 minutes of Visconti's "The Leopard" - "We have grown to know the prince's personality and his ideas, and now we enter, almost unaware, into his emotions. The cinema at its best can give us the illusion of living another life, and that's what happen here."

The latter half of the season is truly depressing TV, because we feel precisely what Tony feels - a clinical sense of detachment from the world around us. Our closest friends are our worst enemies. We just want it to end, one way or another - but it doesn't end. Death is not a swelling of the orchestral music - it is an interruption in the middle of the a cheesy Journey song, and the rest is silence.