I watched the replay of the episode last night, and picked up a couple things I missed the first run,(Carlo is the snitch, because he got caught with drugs, just as Tony had feared Christopher would be)but what was most interesting is that final scene.

If you don't imbue it with your own stress and tension, the scene is acted very differntly than you first think.

The Guy in the Members Only Jacket is clearly not a hitman. He's doughy and self involved, he's not watching Tony, he's watching the bathroom.

If you notice someone else walks past (as if walking out of the bathroom) as he walks in. The guy even seems to be doing a bit of a pee pee trott as he goes in.

No one in the resturant gives the look of stern determination that the Phil's other hitmen did in the last episode, and everyone is clearly doing their own thing.

The paralell parking scene is just a scene of frustration for Meadow, not a dramatic foreshadowing.

The scene is domestic bliss, something Tony long sought even as he knows it will as always be fleeting.

Does he die at the end? No way to know, but there is little to imply a hit man. He could have easily had a stroke (damn onion rings) or a terrorist bomb blast could have taken out Holstein's, or they could have just run out of tape.

Cut to black was a sweet ending, meant to show the ambiguity of life and how no story ever really ends, especially not in TV which is, as a genre, all about how stories grow and evolve and take on new dimensions over the lifetime of charecters.

Anyway, watch it again and see if your opinions on the ending changes.

I am not a big beliver in the Dream Sequence theory for two basic reasons.

1) the Previous Dream episodes made their dream state clearly obvious.

2) what's the point of a dream you don't wake up from?

However there are a couple scenes that when you watch it you realize that there is something odd about the perspective. The scene with Uncle Junior springs to mind, where you see Tony upclose, and then the next scene is from what would have been Tony's perspective except now we see Tony walking into the frame. That was confusing the first time I watched it, and reminded me of some ultra low budget productions I've been on where you realize after the fact that you never shot a certain camera angle and have to splice two things that don't go together together.

I highly doubt that was the case for Mr. Chase. No to me, the "we ran out of tape" idea strikes me as the most probable option, as if you were watching a soprano's 8mm home movie and that was just where they ran out of film.

In fact, wasn't the first episode of the half season called "Soprano's Home Movies"? maybe I'm wrong on that point, but still you get the idea.

If David Chase was going to pull a "St. Elswhere" I think he would show us the snowglobe. I mean if you don't see the snow globe, any show could be a dream sequence.