Think about it. Meadow tells Tony she wants to be a lawyer because she was outraged at the way the FBI kept harrassing him. Tony responded with a look of incredulity. Deep down, Meadow realized that she was in denial and living a lie. Her father really was a murderer!

Meadow seethes with resentment and self-loathing. How could her father have deceived her all these years? Worse, how could she have deceived herself? Her anger grows and grows.

Come the night of the diner. They're all their except for Meadow. Meadow cannot do something as simple as parking her car. Why? Because's she's too agitated and nervous, but about what? About what she's about to do, that's what!

The scene ends with Meadow entering the diner. Tony looks up, and darkness falls. It is obvious what happened. Meadow walked in with guns blazing and shot Tony dead.

Pretty clever, that David Chase guy. Who woulda thunk it?

I'm pretty much with everyone else at being surprised at the sudden black screen. About the time the credits started I realized-Tony's dead. I just don't think anything else fits.

As far as a movie goes, the only talk of a movie I've heard has to do with Tony's father and Uncle Junior's days. If Tony would be in it at all, it's as a child. I think speculating that the motive for leaving the ending unknowable is to milk some sort of cash cow is pretty ridiculous. David Chase has made it pretty clear that he's tired of The Sopranos, and so has James Gandolfini.

Thanks David Chase! It's been great! Thanks to the cast, as well!

most of this final season has been terrible. The various plots just plodded along and yet everyone kept saying that Chase was a genius. There was seldom any suspense, just scenes that had been deliberately slowed down to a crawl. Besides, it really is the easy way out to simply piss off viewers. Sure, you can say that Chase did all of this deliberately, but I found most of this last season to be patronizing, heavy-handed, a parody of parodies, and very much resting on its past laurels, when it used to be good and interesting and yet, still not predictable. It's a false choice to think that Chase either had to be predictable or make something this bad and that, for the sake of his art, he chose to make something this stinky. And then to excuse it all by saying that he wanted his audience to argue about it for years. That level of open-endedness is a neon arrow pointing to a lazy director who couldn't make a choice on his own.

Everybody who subscribed to HBO just for The Sopranos, raise your hands.

"John from Cincinnati" is just not gonna do it for me.

And it was Schrödinger's cat and it wasn't.

When it was Schrödinger's, it represented the ending. It was everything and nothing. It was everything each of us imagined. And it was nothing all at once.

This is how it feels to be used by the mob. The producers obviously wanted the LOYAL audience to feel used and abused.

They succeeded.

Kittycat

For all the reasons Heather lists as to why the Sopranos has been such a great show and so well written, the ending was cheesy and unworthy. It reduced The Sopranos to a reality TV show in which the audience gets to choose the winner. Maybe HBO should take a text message vote: 1 if Tony gets killed, 2 if the all get killed...

Maybe the DVD of Season 7 will have multiple endings and we can choose the one we like. Or maybe it will have some cool software that allows us to graft on YouTube endings to it. And so on.

To David Chase: own the end, dammit! If you wanted us to have a moral crisis, write something that does that. If you wanted us to feel satisfied that justice was done, write that. We didn't need your permission to argue about the woulda, shoulda, coulda stuff -- we'll do that anyway. But it would have been fun to argue about your end, not your non-end.

Upon the screen turning black, my wife immediately said "oh, there's going to be a movie and they don't want to ruin it." Hard not to feel manipulated like that.

You idiots. Do you think the only people who read this site have already seen the Sopranos finale? Cheers giving the ending away. Morons

I never actually watched it. This man is a murderer, and he was glorified by being loved by millions of people. Here was a show that glorifies criminals and it's called brilliant and the greatest thing on TV. This angers me, but what angers me even more is I bet so many of the people who threw a hissy fit over the Janet Jackson fiasco a few years back are the same ones who loved this show.

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.

Anyone who liked this show supports crime.

What about the dream sequences in the first part of the season? Tony is shot, lives, and we get a peek into the psychological interior, stripped of Tony's usual bullshit.

Perhaps this time, Tony is shot and

Tony eats more onion rings. He hogs them, in fact, and AJ pouts about it. You see, Tony is immune to the quickly-get-sick-of-onion-rings gene that most of us carry. And then they eat, and Tony eats 2 desserts. Then they all leave. The guy who went to the bathroom had to take a dump. That's all. And the black guys were just there for dinner. You people are so racist for assuming that the black guys were assassins!