is just a cat. Doing cat-type weird shit, while we try to assign human motives to it. Just like Paulie was.

I think Tony seeing himself in the diner (I actually thought I might have imagined that, I thought I saw the girl captain who got chased through the house naked in the buffet line earlier but I was wrong) was him having one last mini dream sequence, picturing himself as a normal guy who does not have to be aware of every single person in the restaurant at all times, having dinner with his family. Not a nightmare this time (like the traveling salesman dream), but wishful thinking. And that makes me rethink my take on that entire scene a little bit.

We were the paranoid ones. We saw assasins every time the door opened, just like we saw imminent danger in Meadow being unable to park her car (the most brilliant piece of TV I have ever seen not on The Wire - we were scared to death that a girl couldn't park her car). Tony didn't see it. For once, he wasn't looking for it. Tony was playing at being the normal guy part of him really wished he was. Every time he looked at the door, we thought he was afraid when he was just looking for his family. Tony relaxed, in a foreign environment, and that's how Members Only was able to come up behind him and kill him.

Love it or hate it, that final scene will go down in television history.

"We sought meaning, which shows that, at best, we are naive. David Chase, the newly crowned God of high TV art, has shown us fools that we were looking for meaning and substance in all the wrong places. Life is violent, vulgar, meaningless, and we are all idiots to place our faith in a mere TV show. I guess many of us wanted a "story" and Chase gave us the randomicity of life. Oh well...

In gratitude to this vast, naive, audience, maybe David Chase can give the money he made on this Series to something like Amnesty International or the ACLU ---oops, that would be an act of meaning."

-- ericg51

Eric G insinuates that TV is meaningless then uses his college-writing techniques to pen a ten-paragraph dissertation on the significance of The Sopranos...then closes his letter with the suggestion that a contribution to Amnesty International or the ACLU is the answer to all these problems.

Oh, it hurts.

Heather, you're why I keep coming back to Salon. Beautiful writing, deep insights ... I feel at peace with "The Sopranos" ending when there once was nothing but sadness and confusion.

Just occurred to me: I also predicted that Paulie would face a key decision in the last episode that would test his loyalty to Tony and could have life or death consequences for either him or Tony. Well, he did, didn't he? I just wasn't expecting this decision to come at a moment when he was quietly sunning himself in front of Satriale's pork store or that the life-and-death consequences would likely not manifest themselves by the end of the last episode.

You know, we also talked last week about whether those of us on Salon who adhere to the same basic political worldview have a different take on the Sopranos than, say, someone who rabidly supports the Bush presidency. I wondered aloud how pro-Bush Americans view the Sopranos, whether they pick up the same "messages" that we do or whether we have been projecting onto Chase. Last week, no one seemed to have an answer and most people said they didn't care what pro-Bush Americans think. However, I'm going to posit a theory and I'd love to hear what you think: I think that the Salon crowd largely reacted with wide-eyed wonder and/or humor at the ending and is now parsing through the symbolism, small touches, and broad themes from the show. By contrast, I think the pro-Bush crowd is the same crowd that is now threatening to cancel HBO and whining about how Chase "robbed" them of the ending they really wanted, which would have involved a lot more people getting whacked. I laughed at the black-out when I realized I'd been royally had, just because Chase had done such a good job of it. I suspect that the pro-Bushies would be less amenable to enjoying being the butt of a practical joke.

Incidentally, as someone who is guilty of inferring all sorts of human motives to my cats on a daily basis, I have to say I loved the cat. I love how the cat scenes continue to mess with people's heads on this board today. Cats are just wonderfully weird that way. The show couldn't have achieved the same effect with, say, an abandoned bassett hound.

Yeah, you're right - I used to have HBO and watched this show for its first three seasons, and only rented/borrowed tapes/DVDs since then. However, I do keep up on the show with Slate, etc...

Anyway, according to a Yahoo blog, the episode "The Second Coming", aired May 20, 2007, has Meadow deciding to go to law school - what's that - three episode ago? It doesn't say which school, and I have to assume, even with TV life/time compression, that she would be a first year student, if that. Now, unless she managed to get into a top notch law school, she ain't going to make $170K her first year, even with her fiancee pulling strings for her. If you're not a graduate from a top notch Ivy League school, you pay your dues first. And if you're a flake, you're not getting into that type of school.

My point of the previous entry was to point out that Meadow is in complete denial about Tony's business and cannot relate to real racial profiling due to her sheltered upbringing. She's a rich Italian princess with no clue and a high-profiled mobster's daughter - would you risk hiring her and get visited by her father or one of his associates if they were upset by her office hours or the type of work she was doing? Lawyers do talk to each other - they don't want any association with the mob. I would have been far happier with her character if she would have stayed in the medical business, believe me. At least there would be one decent Soprano. (I guess that was the point of her becoming a lawyer, instead of a doctor. I used to think that she was becoming a doctor to reject her family's business and make amends for all the misery they caused.)

I think you just have a thing for Meadow and are just defending her - (lots of us have the same fantasy!)