Do I have to drink the whole carton to tell that the milk is sour? Do I have to eat the foul-smelling meat to know that it's rotten?? And do I really have to sit through 80+ hours of horseshit to realize that it's horseshit? If you believe that I should, then you've obviously never shoveled out a barn much less learned to differentiate between genuinely great art and...well, horseshit.

A lot has been made of the Journey anthem ending abruptly with "Don't stop..."

Unless my ears are playing tricks on me, I think the song playing faintly on the radio as Phil's SUV pulls into the gas station is a cover of the The Supremes "Keep Me Hanging on," a down-tempo version, with a male voice singing:

get out my life, why don't you babe?

'cause you don't really love me

you just keep me hanging on

now you don't really need me

you just keep me hanging on

*pop*

...with the cap to Phil's head coming precisely as that last line is crooned.

We all gotta go sometime. If it has to be instantaneous (and who wouldn't want it to be?) then at least both Phil and Tony went out smiling. Phil saying "bye-bye" to the grandkids, and Tony hearing from his son how A.J. remembers his father telling him, "Try to focus on the good times."

I was ok with seeing Phil's head crushed like a pumpkin. I don't need to see Tony face-down in a plate of onion rings.

If anybody needs the closure of viewing Tony in a coffin, rewind your TiVos to the very first shot of the final episode: an overhead Gods-eye view of Tony peacefully resting on a single small pillow. There's even funereal electronic organ music playing in the background -- until we realize it's the intro to a classic rock song on the clock radio.

I think it's just really hard to face -- and we should appreciate David Chase being gentle with us -- but Tony was shot by the thug in the Members Only jacket, gunned down in front of his family. Serendipity (or Fate) had a little mercy on Meadow and gave her some trouble parallel parking so she wouldn't have to get her dad's brains splattered on her.

Who needs to see Tony blown away? David Chase has a little mercy on the viewers too.

I'm also tuned in to the color symbolism, because in an finale this important you have to think that no detail was overlooked. In that diner scene the color palette is obsessively monochromatic -- all blacks, browns, and shades of gray. Absolutely the only flashes of color are Carmela's red jacket (which she takes off before sitting down) and after that the occasional glimpse of a red dress of a lady in the booth behind them, this patch of blood red seen directly in the middle of the frame between Tony and A.J.

Not a single bit of peaceful blue or natural green in the entire last sequence -- except for the distorted ethereal (heavenly?) reflection of a blue neon sign reflected in the windows of a building hanging over Meadow as she parks the car.

Laugh if you want, but colors signal meaning in art. I can't believe these production design choices were accidental. It's not all about the script or dialog. Every aspect of the visual medium is the message.

Black silence.

I don't think David Chase is playing loose or vague with that.

Okay, I like a good mystery, so I thought I'd follow one of the leads posted here (and before you go all "get a life" on me, this took roughly ten minutes worth of re-watching the final scene and credits and doing a few imdb and google searches). The "members only" guy in the diner is played by some regular fella named Paolo Colandrea, a dude who owns a pizza place in PA. He did not, as has been rumored, appear in an earlier episode as Phil Leotardo's nephew. He did not, as far as I can tell, appear in any other episode of the series at all. He is identified in the credits only as the man in the member's only jacket.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-06092007-1360360.html

However, there's still some intrigue to be squeezed out of this. The first episode of the season (I mean way back, the first half of this season) is called "Member's Only." Also, the actor has dropped a few minor hints. See this article:

http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=114&sid=1164709

The actor may just be playing himself up here, but he does say that his character is important and that there is in fact an answer about whether or not Tony was killed in the diner. Take that as you will.

My partner and I watched the last minute of the final scene frame by frame, however, and there wasn't a single shadow changing on the table nor an ominous reflection in the metal mini-jukebox to indicate the approach of a gunman. My partner is an armchair detective. :)

I still love the ending no matter whether there is an answer or not. I just felt like looking in to this puzzle, if only for the sake of contributing to the urban legend bonanza that will undoubtedly develop due to this scene.

There was nothing cheap in the ending. It provided a therapeutic laugh, an astute observation or two, and no cop outs.

The final season, as many have noted, is about the collapse of Tony's trust in what was already a suspicious, precarious world. Tony loses faith in -- or is deprived of -- all of his key relationships except, to a degree, his wife and kids. Christopher, Dr. Melfi, Silvio, Bobby, and Carlo all must be written off, on top of the betrayals by Pussy, Junior, Livia, Adriana, and assorted other turncoats in earlier seasons. Tony survives by improvising new alliances with Phil's underlings Butch and Cha-Cha, and with FBI Agent Harris.

Yes, the cat could well represent Christopher, Adriana, or (naturally) Pussy; any member of the family who Tony has seen fit to include among the missing. But what we really get is a contrast between Paulie's and Tony's reaction to the cat, revealing their differing methods of coping with the guilt that comes from a life of murder. Paulie, though he has an even a colder, more violent temperment than Tony, can still be haunted when he comes up against symbols of the church, old wives tales, talismans, or other classic bits of voodoo. Tony can compartmentalize and rationalize in a perhaps more modern way. He likes to move on. Tony thinks the cat serves a good purpose, and in his own mind won't encumber the cat with any of his old relationships. Even Tony's dreams, and we've seen plenty, seem more about the possibility of escape from the arc of his life than about directly confronting his personal guilt. Tony's moral conflicts reveal themselves, if at all, mainly in his panic attacks, now mostly under control, and in certain moments of self-loathing shown in his therapy. Those would never be Paulie's symptoms.

The final scene combines a wink to the audience with the narrative certainty that even if Tony isn't gunned down in the diner that night, he knows that such a fate could arrive at any moment. The scene begins with with Tony walking in to the diner, surveying the landscape. Chase then employs a startling and ambiguous jump cut to show Tony already seated, rather as if Tony is imagining himself on stage for a short play. This particular edit suggests that the entire last scene may be simply another of Tony's exercises in visualization, rather than a conventional narrative.

And as a matter of basic narrative, the final blackout probably doesn't denote Tony's rendezvous, at that exact moment, with death. Yes, the blackout could be viewed as a reference back to the season's first episode, with Bobby noting that at the instant of a hit one would hear nothing and everything would just go black. Yet Carmela decided on her own, rather spontaneously, to have the Sopranos meet that evening at the diner. Nobody else would have known Tony would be there. There is no suggestion Tony is being followed, and indeed the story line is that Tony has bought some (at least temporary) peace with his mobster enemies.

The better interpretation of the final shot is that Tony knows, even if he has avoided death this time around, it could it could descend at any moment, and he can never escape the tax of constant vigilance and suspicion. There is a tight close up just before the blackout. It doesn't show Tony's facial reaction to a specific event. It just shows Tony's instinctive, animal wariness, which we've seen cross his visage many times through the years.

The fellow in the diner wearing the Members Only jacket -- and that is exactly how he is identified in the end credits -- is certainly a delicious piece of dessert. At the beginning of season six there was an episode titled "Members Only," in which Eugene Pontecorvo commits suicide because he is barred from leaving the "life." And of course, "members only" is a reasonable synonym for "La Cosa Nostra." The jacketed fellow in the diner certainly looked the part of a mob hit man. But Chase then sends the fellow to the restroom, obviously mimicking Michael Corleone's fateful journey at Louis's Restaurant in the Bronx to retrieve the hidden gun, and we suddenly realize that we're being treated to a bit of splendid, over-the-top comedy. I immediately exhaled. This guy was not a menace to the Sopranos or their onion rings. He was another example of Chase's long running penchant for meta-gags.

In the final episode Chase has these kind of Prospero/Shakespeare moments flying fast and furious. For no important narrative reason, Meadow's friend Hunter, from the early seasons of the series, suddenly shows up again at the Soprano home. But Hunter is played by Michele DeCesare, David Chase's daughter. Her gratuitous return seems to be either a valedictory favor from Chase to his daughter, or just another sneaky way for Chase to stamp his personal jurat on the final episode and the series. And returning to the all important final diner scene, remember one of the other people Tony notices entering the diner is a short fellow with a vest and a baseball cap. We then see the short fellow sitting by himself at a nearby table. The bill of the baseball cap somewhat obscures the character's face but unquestionably the fellow looks rather like, well, David Chase himself. Oh, and the fellow's baseball cap is emblazoned "USA." The final episode is titled "Made In America." Made in America (and in many ways about America, as well as about made guys) by David Chase. Even Picasso probably never attempted a triple entendre in naming one of his pieces, but Picasso would have told you that a well known artist's painting is generally more valuable if the artist signs his name in some conspicuous way right, smack dab on the front. The final Sopranos episode, particularly its final scene, is Chase's signature, with a flourish. And why not? He's earned it.