Schroedinger's Cat = Tony Soprano

And so, after eight years, it's over. Not even fade to black--cut to black. Not with a bada-bang, but with a bada-whimper. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Anyway, I'm not going to add too much to the millions of words being generated right now about the Sopranos finale by the critics (which, in 2007, means anyone with a blog), or join the firestorm of arguments over whether the final scene was:

1. A pantsload cop-out;

2. A brilliant ending, because it took the show's refusal to obey the conventions of TV drama to the extreme;

3. A poke in the audience's eye by David Chase as punishment for its eight-year obsession with characters who were almost all essentially disgusting sociopaths;

And so forth and so on.

But I know better. I, LIFSOS readers, have figured it out.

It came to me as I was running through the final scene in my head over and over as I tried to get to sleep last night.

David Chase deliberately framed that final scene in the form of the Schroedinger's Cat Paradox.

(Actually the name's spelled "Schrodinger" with an umlaut over the "o" but I can't figure out how to do an umlaut in TypePad.)

If you're not familiar with Schroedinger's Cat, there's lots of stuff about it on the Internets, but here's a brief description:

It's a "thought experiment" that Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger came up with in the '30s after hanging out with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. His intent was to show just how wacky the then-newfangled field of quantum mechanics was.

Rather than trying to explain it myself, I'm cribbing a very clear description from a Cornell University website:

A cat is placed in a box, together with a radioactive atom. If the atom decays, and the geiger-counter detects an alpha particle, the hammer hits a flask of prussic acid (HCN), killing the cat. The paradox lies in the clever coupling of quantum and classical domains. Before the observer opens the box, the cat's fate is tied to the wave function of the atom, which is itself in a superposition of decayed and undecayed states. Thus, said Schroedinger, the cat must itself be in a superposition of dead and alive states before the observer opens the box, ``observes'' the cat, and ``collapses'' its wave function.

So in the broadest terms the kitty is both alive and dead at the same time, as far as you can tell without opening the box.

That now-notorious cut-to-black was David Chase shutting the lid on the "quantum box," sealing Tony, Carm, A.J., and Meadow into that "superposition of states."

Who would live and who would die was, of course, one of the big themes (if that's the right term) of The Sopranos, and the series ended in a way that will allow us fans to speculate endlessly (and oh, how we will speculate) about what might have happened in that diner after the cut . . . or whether anything would have happened at all.

But LIFSOS, you say, everyone was still alive when the cut-to-black happened. (And caused us all to go "WTF?" and think that our cable or TiVo or DVR had gotten screwed up at One Of The Most Significant Moments In Our TV-Viewing Lives).

Didn't it seem, though, that we were being set up for some bloody denouement?

There was Meadow having trouble parking and showing up late . . . at which point I thought, oh, no, Chase isn't going to pull a Godfather III and have Meadow whacked and dying in Tony's arms? Or will her parking issues mean that she escapes death but witnesses a hit on Tony and maybe the rest of the family?

Then there was the weird guy who went into the men's room . . . at which point I thought, oh, no, Chase isn't going to pull a Godfather I and have the guy retrieve a pistol from behind the toilet tank and emerge to plug Tony and/or the rest of the clan?

And then there were the original-gangsta dudes walking into the diner and looking around nervously . . . at which point I thought oh, no, Chase isn't going to pull some "botched hold-up" scenario, in which Tony gets in the line of fire, or is unable to keep his wife and kids out of the line of fire . . .

Of course the first two scenarios are too derivative and the third too conventional for Chase. But again, by heaping up all these possibilities and refusing to resolve them, he definitely created a "superposition of states," in which life and death will forever exist simultaneously--as far as we can determine from our position outside the box--for Tony and his kin.

Unless Chase, as the "observer" of his experiment, chooses to open the lid and "collapse" the narrative "wave function." Which might happen if he caves in and revives the series or does a movie deal.

If that happens, we Sopranos fans will also be in a "superposition of states"--simultaneously grateful and pissed off.

Let me present one final piece of support for my thesis: The cat that Tony adopts at the safe house and installs as a mouser at Satriale's. Introducing a cat in the final episode? Incontrovertible evidence that Chase had Schroedinger's Cat in mind.

Finally, I hereby dedicate this post, with much gratitude, to my friend Jules. When the first season aired in '99 I was living in London, and one of Jules's emails to me reported that she and all our mutual friends were constantly discussing a TV show called The Sopranos. I had no idea what she was talking about. A show about opera singers? Then I looked it up on the internets but I still wasn't all that interested . . . a mobster in therapy? Sounded too much like that stupid Analyze This movie.

But I was sufficiently interested to check it out when the first episodes later arrived on UK TV, and of course I got hooked. The following year, Jules was kind enough to tape some episodes of the second season and leave them for me at her apartment, where I was crashing during a Stateside visit, so I was able to keep up until I got home and ordered up HBO, mostly--like a lot of people, I suspect--just for The Sopranos.

So, thanks, Jules, for introducing me to this great televisual experience.

Comments

[Jules]

Welks. Sorry for the delayed response. I just read this Thursday, having finally caught up with TiVo last night. I like your theory. But really I think it was just lame. I would have been fine with it ending on the happy (?) family in the diner, similar to the way they ended one of those early seasons, in Artie's italian joint. Uncertainty is just too manipulative. I hate feeling manipulated.