Sopranos Finale Predictions; Updated Post-Finale...

[Scroll for updates]

With a little more than 48 hours to go before the finale, I'm going to go on record with a couple of Sopranos predictions.

As of the end of the penultimate installment, everything's finally falling down around Tony in a pretty irreversible way.  Dr. Melfi dropped him; nearly the entire "family" is deceased, comatose, or senile and locked away; the actual family is in crisis (courtesy of A.J. this time); Tony's embroiled in a to-the-death gang war with Brooklyn, which he now appears to have little chance of surviving, much less winning; and his FBI buddy recently tipped him that there's fresh legal trouble brewing.

I think all of this is careening inevitably toward witness protection.  Getting out of Dodge and agreeing to testify would solve just about every otherwise intractable problem on Tony's plate.  It keeps the family safe; it immunizes him from whatever indictments may be en route; and it might give him his only chance to exact revenge on Phil.  Information that can take Phil down, as the new boss of the Lupertazzi family, might well turn out to be what prosecutors are most interested in from Tony.

Playing the witness protection card might seem like an overly neat way to tie it all up, but with only one episode left, David Chase needs to act fast.  It also might seem fairly un-Tony-like to turn rat, but then again, he really wouldn't be ratting out any of his own people (since he doesn't have any people left), just helping put Phil and his cronies away.  Plus, Tony just wouldn't be Tony if he didn't have some crippling emotional conflict to dwell on for the rest of his life.  Having become a government snitch in the last act of his mafia career seems to fit that bill nicely.

What's more, it'd make a nice homage to the ending of Goodfellas, a movie with a big cast overlap with The Sopranos, and one to which the series has winkingly alluded in the past (e.g. Christopher/Spider shooting a clerk in the foot, quipping, "It happens.")

So I don't think Tony's going to die, which is one of the more popular predictions floating around.  Nor do I think any of the immediate family will die, but I'll go ahead and venture a guess that one of them comes close, as a result of the Soprano-Lupertazzi war.  Maybe A.J. takes a bullet as he's off sulking somewhere or Meadow has another encounter with Phil's (now toothless) goon Coco.  And maybe her new beau Patrick Parisi gets killed protecting her.

Paulie's prospects are hazy.  If I had to guess, I'd say he doesn't make it through the episode.  We need to go out with some kind of meaningful body count and he's one of the only ones left standing.

Final scene: Tony stepping out the door of a cookie-cutter, modest suburban home somewhere in the interior west, bending down and picking up the paper.  If I recall correctly, that's just about how the final scene in Goodfellas went and that act has become such an iconic Sopranos visual that I think the symmetry of it is too much for them to pass up.

Previously:
Violence in Baghdad, New Jersey
More Sopranos Family Politics
A Wee Hiatus (Sopranos Live Blog)
Franchising Killed the Mafia Star
Woke Up [The Echoes] This Morning
From South Park To North Jersey: Sopranos Family Politics
Sopranos Open Thread
Quote of the Day, Madon!
Woke Up This Morning

---

Also:  Speaking of homages, today's HamNation features a dynamite Sopranos opening sequence parody.  This might be what Tony's commute would look like if he'd done his semester and a half of college at Georgetown, rather than Seton Hall.

---

Update:  I've just been watching last week's episode again and I think I need to adjust one of the above impressions.  When Tony's talking with Agent Harris at Satriale's, it sounds like Harris might actually be warning him not about legal troubles, but about the looming threat from the Lupertazzi family.  (He refers to it as something like, "That Brooklyn thing, I told you about a year ago.")  Agent Harris' Wikipedia entry seems to confirm this interpretation.  So that weakens the witness relocation thesis a tad, given that Tony may not currently be in the prosecutorial scopes.  Then again, we do have this sloppy asbestos situation playing out in recent episodes, a card Chase could play to add some courthouse pressure into the mix.

I stand by the predictions, but acknowledge the supporting FBI angle as previously recounted seems to be inaccurate.

And I'll toss in this wild card for your contemplation: will they revisit the al Qaeda connection with "those Arabs... from the Bing" in the finale episode fireworks?  The ones Tony thinks are "in Jordan, getting their [unmentionables] zapped?"  The late Christopher had decided they were innocent, seeing as "Mohammed and his girlfriend have a dog.  A springer spaniel."

---

Update 6/10:  Okay, anyone that watched the finale and wants to sound off about what they think happened after the final fade out, have at it in the comments.

Diner explosion?  Shifty guy at the bar kills the whole family?  Nothing in particular, unless and until a Sopranos feature film is greenlit?