Great take on the final episode. Brilliant ending. I love the way Tony can look so reptilian when that part of his brain takes over.

David Chase has said that he knew how the Sopranos would end even before the first episode aired (or shortly thereafter). I don't believe it.

Now, having ended and looking back on the whole Series, I can say that it was brilliantly crafted crap.

Unlike quality shows, like Six Feet Under, which was driven by personality and evolved over time and told a real story with events with their array of predictable and unpredictable repercussions, on the Sopranos no one changed and key plot elements went nowhere.

If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, then the Sopranos had to be about less than nothing, because Seinfeld, ultimately, lifted its material well above meaninglessness and give its loyal following a farewell of sorts. Ultimately the Sopranos was essentially unchanged from its first season. It made its point, then kept making and then made it again and again. It went no where. So when we finally wanted SOMETHING, it continued giving the same thing over and over.

In contrast, The Sopranos hit absolute rock bottom last night. I wonder if the Sopranos following would have been so loyal to the show if they knew how vacuous the ending would be.

Outside of the tension of the final scene, last night's show was actually somewhat dull. It was meandering, episodic, and, consistently, indicated that nothing would ever get resolved. We all, nervously, looked at the passing minutes on the clock and as each minute passed, the knowledge of Nothing ever changing became increasingly clear.

Nothing mattered and we, the viewers, now know it. The task of engaging us, in stimulating us, utterly failed David Chase. Now we have to make desperate sense of our loyalty to this over-rated, hyper violent, show, that was empty at its core.

Yeah, America is a violent, consumption crazy, spiritually empty, paranoid society. Wow.

Sopranos hit THIS nail on the head. It was all of that.

We could go on and on over the triumphs and failures of the last few seasons, especially this last one. However, I think Chase did take the easy way out. Tony was distracted by his family (wasn't he always?) and the screen and Journey soundtrack both went black abruptly because a bullet had just entered his brain, courtesy of the hitman in the bathroom. Would David Chase really send Tony into witness protection to wind up as a "schmuck," like Henry Hill at the end of "GoodFellas?" Would Chase have shown us a bloody shootout? Would Chase have had the series end with nothing more than a family dinner at a diner? No, Chase's brilliance is in finding the tension and drama in the empty spaces, the stuff between the lines, the breath between the notes.

It is really over, for us, the series and Tony.

Casting another vote for the "Tony got whacked, but we experienced it as he did...an abrupt cut to black" (which PRECEDED the credits by several long seconds) view on the finale. I'm surprised this seems to be the minority opinion, here and among other published reviews in newspapers this morning since I too thought it fairly clear...the cut to black was abrupt, jolting, and confusing...but a perfect fit with how one should experience Tony's end. No gore-splatterfest could live up to those that had gone before, so why attempt something which wouldn't have done Tony justice.

(So if Tony was whacked, who ratted him out, so that the killers knew he was having dinner there with his family? I think Meadow's boyfriend...)

I enjoyed the last episode a lot, and found the final scene with the buildup of tension and use of an abstraction which was clearly open to other interpretations as a way of whacking Tony to be worthy of the shows overall dramatic and artistic merit. I had dropped out of fandom the previous couple of seasons and felt the show had lost it, but this last season was a worthy and enjoyable wrapup.

Heather, also thanks for your reviews...I was looking forward to reading them and particularly this one on the finale all season. Made the watching even more enjoyable to ponder the various themes, and you definitely stimulated my thoughts on a lot of those mentioned.

Utterly meaningless. Head fakes here and there, but ultimately pointless.

I did watch the show. It was good for its continuing story (whatever was left) and moments of entertainment, but attempting to read further into it is as meaningless as trying to dissect the creatorwriters true intentions. Only they know and have no need to explain to the rest of us. We had a choice to watch the show. If we didnt like its direction then we didnt have to watch.

Furthermore, I didnt like the ending. I thought it was cheap, but to say that I could have done better would be completely unrealistic and making light of what it takes to createdirectwrite a show.

While we sit at our desks pondering potential "meanings", EVERYONE from David Chase down has moved on with their lives.

Lets try to do the same with ours.

Cenk Uygur on Air America's "The Young Turks" speculated that the fade to black was Tony's getting capped. I think that goes too far, but Chase did manipulate the national expectation that looked for the Big Whack. For better or for worse, the show ends with an aura of uncertainty for good reason: Tony's whole life is an uncertainty: every time the door opens, he must look up to see if Trouble is walking in. Business as usual.

Reading these articles on the unanticipated ending of the Sopranos reminds me of the vast effort religious scholars expend to make sense of the Bible, when, in fact, it is full of contradictions. Where logic and meaning fail us, we become mechanics of contorting the contradictory and the vapid into a desperate call of sense and meaning, when there is none.

After reading the hundreds of predictions on how this series would end, there was the general consensus, that the vast majority of viewers wanted some form of closure. They wanted meaning, they wanted justice, they wanted irony, they wanted something, and David Chase gave them nothing.

To quote meaningful critique of the superficiality of the American TV viewer using the words of AJ, suggesting that his words are the words of conscience, is fatuous. He, like his sister are shown to be morons, time and again. That she is inspired to take the moral and legal high road because of the way Italian-Americans are treated is key to understanding the utter emptiness and absurdity of the Series in general.

David Chase played his audience perfectly. We can either hate him for failing to provide us with the closure and moral certitude than many of us believe we deserve after investing almost eight years slavishly on this Series or we applaud his artistic arrogance for playing us as fools all long. Everytime we sought something uplifting and meaningful, we could count on him to deliver neither.

In either case, we are played.

Nothing in this show had meaning. From Tony's momentous "I get it" in the Nevada desert, to the cat peering and purring at the picture of Christopher. Tony's therapy - meaningless. Tony's love of nature - meaningless. Carmela's crappy spec house - meaningless. The whole mafia thing, whether it be in Brooklyn or N. Jersey - meaningless. AJ's absurd self-centered personality contortions - meaningless.

Melfi was the ridiculous character of conscience and she, finally, had the good sense to throw Tony out of her office. Looking back on it, we, the viewers, should have done the same and ended the Series on its penultimate episode.

Just like Tony supported a lavish life style by stealing, David Chase has created his own fortune, by playing his HBO audience with a show that, ultimately, is about red herrings.

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.