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Am I the only man in America that never liked this series? Well, almost never -- I've watched every episode, initially enthusiastically, later out of obligation. Chase and his writers have never had a full grip on their material; their vague ambitions have been diffused over the last decade or so, the repetitive and muddled product resulting in about a dozen good episodes total.
Perhaps it's not entirely Chase's fault. Within the context of a media product, how can there be basis for a true critique? Composing a series about characters with no insight, written by people with limited insight can only result in an art-as-emetic: in other words, these trapped characters, entirely dead to meaning, might help speed up and induce in one (if at all -- for it seems to be principally a lucky thing to have such insight) an awareness of one's own trapped position within this culture, the better to vomit it out.
In this sense, this episode was very admirable and was among the very scattered good episodes within the series. Tony Soprano, his (ultimately corrupt) audience no longer in existence with the cessation of Melfi's "help", goes forth into life with vague and senseless experience behind him. Tony's death, imprisonment, flight, would all be false ends following the enforced nihilism of the previous seasons.
Chase and his writers have in sum offered a disappointing corpus, post the initial inspiration of archetype-examines-feelings-with-therapist. If I had to, I would pinpoint the failure to execute Big Pussy at (if memory serves) the end of the first season as the point when Chase and his crew demonstrated that they had none of the required insight, intellectual bravery or aesthetic boldness to carry out their designs. In the end, our default attitudes, given to us by the late capitalist system, converted the rogue elements into the core of the fascination with the mafia, that is, a bourgeois power-fantasy, among other elements I cannot point out in these hurried comments.
Even this series' famed use of red-herrings, dead ends, etc, is an affectation done to distract from the empty critique of America this series provided. Attempting to defy Aristotle in eschewing a beginning, middle and end (fair enough -- it worked in War and Peace) this series fell into that Greek philosopher's waiting trap: "Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot 'episodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to break the natural continuity." (his Poetics)
