Last night’s "Sopranos" turned on the famous line from Wordsworth: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours…" Young Anthony Soprano reads the line on a college blackboard. Then his father realizes the same lesson at the end of the show, outside Las Vegas, tripping on peyote. He’s just walked away from giant roulette-table winnings and is beaming at the sunrise. "I get it!" he cries.
I don’t know that I buy it. Characters are morphing too much, in and out of each other. The son’s insight becomes the father’s epiphany. But I suppose Sopranos has earned it. The show seems to have established its valedictory tone: plenty of violence, mixed with high-falutin’ literary values. They’re trying to do Shakespeare for New Jersey dinner theater. I expect that the ending will be Shakespearean, plenty of bodies heaped on the stage, and the last lines delivered by the survivor of highest rank. Carmella.
