The best thing about the end of "The Sopranos" is that we won't have to read any more fawning articles about it.

We stopped watching it after the first episode this year, and will always have fond memories of earlier seasons. But the story lines got stale and repetitive, and the characters didn't really grow in response to situations.

I wish it had been as good as some TV critics thought.

Let's just move on.

Robert Bruce

It was the greatest mob hit ever--a murder shown from the victim's perspective without him even knowing it was coming. It was the perfect depiction of instant death: alive one second--observing a random, everyday event such as his daughter coming through a diner door--and then...nothing. He was shot. Read Tobias Wolff's "A Bullet in the Brain" for another very cool depiction of the same thing....

"Don't Stop Believin'" was the theme song for the White Sox during their World Series season in 2005. And now we know what's happened to the Sox in the last year and a half...

Make of it what you will.

You may think that the hoopla over the Sopranos does not bode well for our national character, but it's nothing new. Dickens used to serialize his novels, the last being "Our Mutual Friend". Each chapter was as highly anticipated as the Sopranos episodes. There would be people waiting at the dock in Manhattan for the ship that carried the latest chapter.

The more things change...

Having said that, let me say I thought that the last scene was a nod to The Godfather (weapon in the mens room) and the Crazy Joey Gallo hit in Umberto's Clam House. Joey was shot in front of his family, at the time this was considered a severe breach of etiquette (sp?), if you can imagine such a thing. Combine that with what Bobby said in an earlier episode and I think that sums things up. I don't remember the exact quote, but the words were to the effect of "you never hear the shot that gets you; everything just goes black".

I'm just sayin'

The Sopranos finale reminded me of nothing as much as that last great, over-hyped TV goodbye, the last episode of Seinfeld. Both shows rewarded their fans by laying on the self (and, by association, audience) loathing nice and thick.

Yes, yes, we get it Larry David Chase. You created a show about likable assholes, and now we're all assholes for liking them. Thanks for pointing that out.

I thought Tony (& possibly the whole family) got shot, too.

But like every major blackout, this one raises a lot of questions about the distribution of power... whodunit?

I'm with the crowd who think Tony does not get shot. Instead he gets to live life as usual--never knowing when the next person through the door might blow him away...or his family. Never knowing if he will be ratted out, if he will go to prison. H Watching as all his friends are killed, one by one. Living a life of constant anxiety. But I do like the interpretation of the world going black because he has been shot. Either way is a good ending. I'm satisfied.

When he checked his bank balance built on Sopranos viewership? Pretty good I'd say. I vote asshole.

Exaclty, best review I read (cause it resembles my take) . He gave us what we wanted cause like Tony we wanted the easy way out, we wanted him to live at any cost. He lives, for what purpose? He learned nothing from therapy and life, he just rolls on to the next crisis, consuming, killing and having fun. And guess what, we loved him and identified with him and called him a family man. Right. Awesome. No redemption for anyone and the disease goes to the next generation. Cause, we don't want to do the hard work for change, we want the status quo. Slap. And to all those who harp on his relationship with his mom, I say, the mom was dead and Tony was still a sociopath, so much for all the poor me I was a victim of my parents. We make choices and so did his kids, they choose the easy way, the mob way. And it goes on. The status quo, that is Made In America for sure.

Forgot to mention in my other letter that Phil was killed in front of family, suggesting that Tony might in fact have been killed in front of his in retaliation. If the hit had anything to do with Phil, that is. If there was a hit.

Like most folks, I sat there watching the blank screen last night in horror, thinking that the satellite feed had been lost. Now, it seems it's up to the individual viewer to determine how the show ended. Those who prefer to think that Tony finally met his just reward will find reinforcement in the black screen, particularly those who don't believe in a Heaven or a Hell or any afterlife. Those who prefer to believe Tony survived, still understand that death for Tony and company is always lurking just around the corner and sooner or later will likely pop out a door. Personally, I had hoped Tony would find his mother welcoming him to his eternal damnation. What greater torment could await Tony? Anyway, that's my personal ending.

I've edited stuff. A lot of stuff. From corporate propaganda to PBS documentary material. And Chase's ending was one of the finest technical examples of "backtiming" I've ever seen, anywhere, carrying the song, with visual notes highlighting specific bits of the lyrics, through much of the scene, across multiple shots, until he hit the "Don't stop..." just as he hit black and silence.

Anyone who's edited anything more complex than a home movie before will understand that. And yes, it's maybe a little too "inside baseball" for others.

Nicely done...

You make a great point, Heather. Why would Chase and his fellow writers keep us at arms length from Tony for so many episodes, only to suggest we should see things from his perspective in those last fleeting minutes?

Thing is, the writers went out of their way to make us see life from Tony's perspective all season.

From start to finish, we get closer to seeing Jersey through Tony's eyes than we ever have before. In fact, every episode begins with Tony gaining consciousness - that is, waking from sleep. (If memory serves me correctly, there is one exception - the episode where Tony smothers Christopher. I haven't begun to wrestle with what we might infer from this one anomaly.) The writers rarely get more literal than this; these episodes have been first and foremost about Tony's consciousness, his waking world.

I wrestled with Tony's mushroom-munching desert trip more than most other details this season, but from this perspective, a new detail stands out. We may not know exactly what he means when he giddily proclaims he "gets it," but we are permitted to see what he sees, a flaring burst of apocalyptic sunlight, through a rare first person POV shot.

And the music in this last episode. Every song I can remember from the finale wasn't artsy mood music. It was ambient. It was common, everyday radio fodder. Moreover, it's what Tony and everyone else was hearing. The classic rock on the radio when Tony wakes. The radio station in the car with Paulie in the airport's flight path. "Don't Stop Believin'" on the jukebox. Even the winter wind we hear blowing throughout the episode, we're meant to hear all these things as Tony hears them.

Indeed, the entire tenor of this season, so devoid of any of that, as you say, twisted tragicomedy, is a result of the writers pulling back the veil on Tony. The comedy of the Sopranos has always been an expertly manipulated tool that kept us from changing the channel in disgust.

In this final episode, Chase abruptly pinned that veil back on, reminding us to remember the good times. And why? So that in that last, unbearable moment, he could rip it right back off.

And I love him for it. Now that I've so thoroughly convinced myself that all the clues point to whacked, it's nice to have that ambiguity to fall back on. I just hope David Chase keeps quiet on the issue. It'd be far more devastating to know for sure.