I had just lined up my list of potential DC-superhero weddings, for a “get these folks married instead of Ollie and Dinah” post, when “The Sopranos” blew up its audience.
I stopped watching “The Sopranos” probably somewhere around the third season, if I even got that far. It just seemed to be dark and depressing for its own sake, and I wasn’t invested in the characters anymore. What with my fondness for proper widescreen aspect ratios, HBO wasn’t meeting my pay-cable movie needs at that point anyway, and dropping the channel just didn’t seem like that big of a loss.
Still, I don’t take any perverse glee in the frustrations of “Sopranos” fans, because I’ve been there before. Plenty of TV finales have left me unsatisfied, including “Cheers”, “Seinfeld”, and most maliciously, “Twin Peaks.” (I never watched “Xena”, but I understand its finale was particularly nasty.)
Indeed, what draws us fans into a show’s orbit often ends up contributing mightily to that eventual feeling of dissatisfaction. To me, an ending should ideally be an Ending! which puts a capstone on the show’s larger themes. With “Cheers”, I thought Diane’s effect on Sam’s womanizing was a big part of the show, even after she left. Therefore, when I first heard that she’d return for the finale, I imagined that they’d at last get a happy ending. Instead, Sam ultimately chose the bar over her, essentially leaving the show in the same place it was originally.
We spend so much time with these characters that we start predicting their actions. Sam must pick Diane because he’s only been truly happy with her. Jerry Seinfeld (TV version) can’t go to jail — he has to move to California for his TV show. Dale Cooper has to defeat BOB. These are the endings which make sense to us, because they come out of our knowledge of the material and our inferences about the creators.
However, making these predictions tends to deny the roles of the people actually involved in producing the shows. More to the point, it tends to align those people’s interests with our own. We identify so much with the work that we can’t imagine it doing anything to disappoint us. By speculating about its future direction, and piecing together “clues” about its ending, we construct scenarios with which we are comfortable, and discount the uncomfortable. We especially discount the possibility that there will be no resolution.
While the mainline, big-name superhero comics don’t have to consider their own final chapters, the same kind of dynamic is present between creators and fans. Clearly, DC and Marvel rely on our attempts at predictions, because they know we’ll be more invested in the story if we’ve got a rooting interest in the outcome. On some level we superhero-comics fans are as interested in being proven right as we are in story or art. I might even say that the story and/or art merely help sell the plot twists, because at the end of the day, plot is the prediction engine’s fuel of choice.
Therefore, it’s a revelation when a storyline involves some genuine surprises, and not just developments of previous plot elements. The current Birds Of Prey arc, featuring [SPOILER!!!] the revival of Tora “Ice” Olafsdotter, is a good example. Ice had been dead for over ten years, with no built-in way to be brought back, and no hints that her return was imminent. She was the sacrificial part of yet another realignment in the Justice League line (the books’ third in five years) which further cheapened the event. All of this contributed to the feeling that she was never coming back.
So now that she is apparently back, one of my first thoughts was to rekindle the romance between her and Green Lantern Guy Gardner. I want to emphasize here that I am not saying this alone justifies Ice’s revival. I am also not saying that DC Editorial okayed Ice’s return because it feeds into Countdown somehow. I don’t know why she’s been revived, only that she has been, and her relationship with Guy was one of many positive aspects of her old life. In fact, given the logistics of DC’s current superhero line, I can’t quite figure out how she’d fit into Green Lantern Corps, or how either of them would fit into any other title.
And DC doesn’t have to use her right away. It should be enough that she’s available again. I don’t want every moment of a story’s genuine inspiration to be exploited immediately for shared-universe purposes. It would be nice to see her reconnect with Guy, and especially to see how she reacts to Fire’s new role in Checkmate, but I don’t want it to be an explicit thing (“Ice’s journey through the DCU starts in Countdown #35!”). DC has done too many of those in the past few years, from Gotham Central’s leading into Infinite Crisis and 52, to Firestorm’s leading (probably) into Countdown. Sometimes it’s enough just to know that a character has reached a stable stopping point.
Again, I didn’t watch the last “Sopranos” — and I can’t remember where I saw this theory* — but one interpretation I liked characterized it as David Chase’s final assertion of exclusive ownership over the characters. By deliberately avoiding their ultimate fates, Chase was denying the fans the confirmation they craved through their predictions, and thereby denying their voice (however indirect) in the show’s direction. Regardless, many who liked the ending considered it one last master stroke from an iconoclastic creator. The black screen may Mean Something for fans to puzzle out endlessly, or it may simply be the characters’ benign release into limbo. It may also be a reference to the penultimate episode, indicating Tony’s death. Still, no definite news is good news — if the Sopranos aren’t killed on screen, they’re potentially still alive in fans’ imaginations.
With corporate superhero comics, the role of the creator varies inversely to the character’s importance to the company. Brad Meltzer’s last issue of Justice League isn’t going to close down the team for good. We take some comfort from this, knowing that we and DC have a mutual interest in the survival of certain titles. We want to buy Book X, and DC wants to make money from selling it to us. However, the more all parties — fans, creative teams, corporate owners — trust a particular creator, the wilder things can get. HBO had to know, once it saw that black screen, that the last “Sopranos” would either drive fans so out o’ their minds that they’d a) never buy another “Sopranos” DVD set and/or b) swear off HBO for the rest of their lives … or intrigue fans so much they’d gladly buy the last batch of DVDs (and remain loyal subscribers too, of course). Whether they buy the DVDs out of loyalty, curiosity, or just inertia doesn’t matter to the company. The show is over; now the fans are free to speculate. HBO just wants to make whatever last little bit of “Sopranos” money it can off the speculation.
Clearly the stakes are a lot lower with regard to DC and Ice, but again, a lot of the same issues are involved. Gail Simone’s last issue of Birds of Prey is less than a month away. Most of this post has presumed that she (or another writer) won’t kill Ice again so soon after this revival, but I’ve been wrong before. Ms. Simone gets to make the rules where her titles are concerned, and I’m just trusting in her apparent lack of cruelty. I’d like to see Ice’s reunions with Guy, Fire, Booster, et al., but I’d be just as happy if Ice were cut loose, safe and stable, into that benign limbo where favorite characters wait for (theoretically) good ideas.
[* Yesterday, the Boston Globe's Bob Ryan said something similar to Tony Kornheiser on the latter's eponymous radio show. That wasn't where I heard it first.]
June 14th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Conversely, one could say that by blacking out without a more traditional definitive resolution, Chase keeps alive not merely Tony, but every possible ending for the show. Tony’s death, survival and every other ending imagined by fans are now equally valid. By this way of looking at it, Chase couldn’t have been more inclusive. He may have just let every single viewer write his or her own preferred ending.
June 17th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I think it’s a cop-out whatever way you look at it. “Everyone gets their own ending,” but the fact is, no imagined ending is canon and thus there is still no ending at all. I never watched Sopranoes, but I we were given a similar ending in Angel where the finale ended with Angel and his team beginning a battle then the screen goes dark. Sure, many people thought it was a great ending. But still those like me are left to speculate whether they all died or whether Angel did indeed triumph. Sure it’s the artist’s prerogative, but it’s also a little disrespectful to fans who have dedicated their time.