fightthetheocracy writes: "This man was a criminal and deserved to die like the worthless piece of trash that he was. All the characters should have been killed off. Including his wife and kids, they knew he was a criminal and stayed with him anyway. They all deserve nothing but the death penalty. His wife and daughter deserved to get raped and he should have been forced to watch. Then the feds should have taken turns anally raping him. Then they should have taken a shotgun to his nutsack and left to die in a pool of his own blood."

Dude, come on. On the one hand, you can write something like this, and on the other, you complain about the violence and immorality of the show?

But you have avoided one of the main premises of The Sopranos. The Mobsters-R-Us concept provides a kind of mirror on our nation. It contains a cogent critique of the brutality and loneliness and gross consumerism of a culture in which we are all complicit.

An aspect of the finale that I loved was the use of memory, remembering and forgetting, as a kind of commentary on values. We have seen already this season a number of memories threaded into the narrative, but in the finale they are used with a more focused intent. Junior cannot remember Tony and he responds with a vacant “that’s nice” after being told he ran all of New Jersey--he becomes an Alzheimers Ozymandias; the cat staring at Christopher’s image makes both Paulie and Tony uneasy; Tony brings up his unhappy childhood with the therapist and Carmela gives him a warning look to be quiet; and when AJ reminds Tony that he once said to remember the good times, Tony cannot recall. At the point in their lives that they are watching the next generation choose what paths they will take in the future, Tony and his family/Family find that there is nothing in their past that can either inform or console them. It is easier to forget than to face the truth of history.

Connected to this is the self-indulgence and willful avoidance of the brutality upon which their prosperity rests by Meadow and AJ. From the Dylan song in his car, AJ hears, “I’ve got nothing to live up to….some…despise their jobs, their destiny,” but his short-lived attempts at some kind of self-determination (still based on delusion, however) quickly give way in the face of a job in show biz, the comforts of mom’s cooking, and a shiny new car (well, “at least it’s not an SUV”). And Meadow, astonishingly, skirts the reality of Tony’s business by shifting the premise for his arrests to the fact that he is an Italian-American. The past imposes upon the future with a legacy of increasing self-deceit and resignation for these two.

Delusion, denial, no historical memory, blindness to the brutality required for our continued prosperity...that's America.

The ads for the show already kill me, what with the "fan base" and the part-time model. I am so looking forward to it.

Even as I type this, I have that odd sensation in the middle of my body, a buzzing energy of anticipation that can erupt at any moment into giggles and outright barks of laughter.

What passes for humor in our pop culture so often announces itself loudly as though it feels the need to provide an unmistakable cue to laugh. It just wears me out.

So I welcome the fresh kiwis.