FlyOnMelfisWall wrote:Not in the pilot, no. In the montage to start season 2, she was hitting some orange cones while trying to parallel park, I think. It could have been something else, of course (including nothing), but I took it as an indication that she's not that different from the struggling teen she was when the show opened, trying to "park" in a very tight spot, the spot between idealism and loyalty to her family.



To expand on this, the faint sound of ducks are heard right before or as he looks up at the sun. There's a palpable feeling of attraction on Tony's face, not of peace but of something alluring to him, something he wishes for. Kind of like the wind in his post coma days.

I read this as alluding to the "there's something after" comment in Melfi's office. His elusive desert revelation came from the sun and from observing a roulette ball that orbits until it collapses toward the center (sun) of the table. He wants and yearns for a life of infinite gravity, to be pulled towards an eternity with his ducks in the warmth and love and light of one mammoth sun. He doesn't want Livia's nihilistic "it's all a big nothing", "everything is black" ending. Which is another reason that I choose to believe that he didn't die when the screen went to black. When Tony dies, he will become part of an infinite, warm light, not an infinite, cold nothing.

Of course you could just as easily say that he did die and he simply got not what he wanted but what he deserved, which was that very black, infinite nothing we glimpsed.

At considerable risk of appearing more insane than I may already appear to many:icon_biggrin:, I must say that I have intuited and known for years that God was speaking directly through this series in some very profound ways, ways that I'm not even sure David Chase knows or appreciates. I think his talent and creativity have been utilized in aid of something that God wants us, the audience and/or Chase himself, to understand about ourselves and our universe and about "good" and "evil".

For those that scoff at the notion of divine inspiration or agency (conscious or otherwise), consider the very mystical, ineffable, indefinable nature of inspiration itself. Speaking from my own experience as a person who's undertaken a number of creative projects in life (I was a musical composition/arranging major in college and am now a video producer), inspiration just comes or doesn't come. There's no way to wish it, to quantify it, to imitate it, or capture it. It just comes and goes in its own time. The best you can be is always open to it and allow it to enter when it visits.

When it does come, it's exhilaration like no other, a fleeting feeling of insight and truth that I've never known from anything else in life. I have on a few occasions been essentially a person taking dictation when I've written certain things, including several posts over the years concerning the Sopranos. In those rare moments, the insights came not from my intellect or reasoning but from a spiritually-imparted truth that my consciousness seized.

Multiple times in writing the thread starter, I experienced that same tingling exhilaration, and I'm recognizing that, for me, the ending Chase gave us is to help me with my personal struggle in understanding the nature of God and free will and the co-existence of good and evil. And the personal truth that's emerging for me is that we all write our own endings. We determine whether we stay in a circular orbit of perfectly counterbalanced forces or break free, aided by external forces but not bound to them. We decide whether we will be sucked into the infinite light or cast into the infinite dark. God is neither good nor evil but is simply everything, of which I am a part. And so it is not the will of some individual force that determines "the end times" or "rapture" (as Detective Harris mentioned) but it is the collective will of "us", who comprise God, as to when we turn the Big Bang around into the "Big Suck" (pardon the expression:icon_wink:). He's not some independent entity who can write our ending for us. "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

I THINK Chase may be conscious of most of this, as the scripts, particularly from 6A suggest it. But it doesn't really matter whether he is or isn't from my perspective. It doesn't alter the personal truth I derive from the show or from the ending in particular.

It's as if Chase constructed a matrix of pixels or tiny colored dots using millions of different colors. He had to fill in every single row and column intersection with a color. Many of them he filled in with conscious intent and design while he filled others with what, to him, seemed random color choices.

Then we, the audience, each lay our own color filter over the result and see a slightly (or perhaps hugely) different image. The dots that make our final picture are all there and certainly do not seem random to us even though another person with a different color filter might see an entirely different picture.

Applying this analogy at the cosmic level, when the dots of our universe (including us) align such that every filter yields the same image, we will be ready for the Big Suck. The "everything" of the universe will collapse into what is described as the "final singularity" in quantum physics.

And, now, we leave the snake pit and return you to regularly scheduled posting.

Johny Foulmouth wrote:so david chase is not a nihilist? or an atheist? cause I can't help but read the ending as "it's all a big nothing". feeling like that's what DC tried to tell us

Lawguy wrote:If you want to know what the meaning of all of this is, I think that you need to check out the writings and philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. When you see things through this prism, it all makes a lot of sense, including the final scene and much of the series. It is not necessarily all a big nothing, at least it doesn't have to be.

ChristophersRelapse wrote:This show would be very less in my eyes if not for this site and the sites that preceded it. Fly your post was all i was expecting it to be. Chase < FLY :).

FlyOnMelfisWall wrote:I'm not much of a reader, so I've not ever read Kierkegaard. But my mother was and was just flat turned on by knowledge. She carried a clipboard with her everywhere and was always writing out little nuggets she'd gotten from books, whether it was Thorstein Veblin, Einstein, or Mark Twain, or someone in between. There was a long period of time that I recall her carrying around a Kierkegaard book with her.

I may have vicariously absorbed some of his philosophy through her because she always wanted to talk about what she was reading, though none of us ever wanted to listen. RIP, Mom.

ETA: Hope I didn't convey that the Big Suck represented "a big nothing". Quite the opposite. I see it as a black hole, a star so infinitely dense that even light can't escape. You are inside the light, part of the light, infinitely fused with "everything". It's the antithesis of "it's all a big nothing".

chaseisgod wrote:I like your theory, Fly, about God working through Chase, but it's a little hard to see the possibility of redemption in the portraits he (Chase, not God) painted of the Soprano family. "Everything turns to shit" seems more plausible, and that doesn't feel very spiritual to me.