I didn't find the ending ambiguous at all and I'll bet Chase confirms this in interviews soon: Tony got killed. The music didn't continue over the credits or fade out like in every other episode. It stopped and the screen went black for several seconds and the credits rolled over silence.

We watched the show mostly from Tony's point of view and it ended, as it had to, with his end.

Yes the line about how he wouldn't see it coming was pretty clear foreshadowing. Tony went just like Phil Leotardo did - A gun to the temple that he never saw and shot he never heard or felt.

I don't think Chase was being cute or cruel with his ending. He was just giving us Tony's subjective (non)experience.

Should we really be that surprised that a show that continually referred to Yeats' "The Second Coming" would end any other way?

Chase's ending of the Sopranos, while not the neat and tidy exercise we may have hoped for, was not unsurprising. In thinking of it, I'm reminded of Eliot's "The Hollow Men:"

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Sarah

Great review- one of the best I've ever read, especially the last line.

I'm just thankful Chase pulled the plug before we had to hear one more fucking note of fucking Journey.

Did anyone else get the feeling that you were just watching events unfold, and not really watching a show? Does that even make sense? I just felt so curiously disengaged...

And what of the other song choices that Tony passed up unitl deciding on Journey? Guess he really was in charge of his destiny, deciding to forego Tony Bennett's "lonely guy" for Journey's halcion lyrics. Bravo, Brilliant, pass the xanax now.

David Chase gave us the greatest gift, and I for one am accepting it with pleasure and gratitude. The ambiguous ending means that no more rabid speculation is needed. The show is a fiction, and it has ended. A month or a year ago, there was plenty to wonder about--the #1 question being, What will happen to Tony? Now we can let it go. The ending was comedy, not tragedy, and that seems one with the entire series. During the finale, I alternately laughed my head off, gasped in horror, and clapped my hand over my mouth in fear of what would happen in the diner. When the screen went black and the credits finally rolled, I laughed my head off again... Thank you, Mr. Chase!

It feels good--cleansing, like AJ's SUV blowing up. We don't need to know any more. We don't need to know how they cleaned up Phil's smushed head, or whether they got the babies out before they drifted into traffic. We don't need to know if AJ stuck with his movie job or joined the CIA. Or whether Meadow ended up having to defend her father. Or even whether the guy from the restroom blew Tony's head off 5 minutes later. At the "Don't stop" moment, Tony died into the Mystery, as we all will someday. There is no God, not even David Chase, to explain to us what would have happened if we had lived.

Am I the only man in America that never liked this series? Well, almost never -- I've watched every episode, initially enthusiastically, later out of obligation. Chase and his writers have never had a full grip on their material; their vague ambitions have been diffused over the last decade or so, the repetitive and muddled product resulting in about a dozen good episodes total.

Perhaps it's not entirely Chase's fault. Within the context of a media product, how can there be basis for a true critique? Composing a series about characters with no insight, written by people with limited insight can only result in an art-as-emetic: in other words, these trapped characters, entirely dead to meaning, might help speed up and induce in one (if at all -- for it seems to be principally a lucky thing to have such insight) an awareness of one's own trapped position within this culture, the better to vomit it out.

In this sense, this episode was very admirable and was among the very scattered good episodes within the series. Tony Soprano, his (ultimately corrupt) audience no longer in existence with the cessation of Melfi's "help", goes forth into life with vague and senseless experience behind him. Tony's death, imprisonment, flight, would all be false ends following the enforced nihilism of the previous seasons.

Chase and his writers have in sum offered a disappointing corpus, post the initial inspiration of archetype-examines-feelings-with-therapist. If I had to, I would pinpoint the failure to execute Big Pussy at (if memory serves) the end of the first season as the point when Chase and his crew demonstrated that they had none of the required insight, intellectual bravery or aesthetic boldness to carry out their designs. In the end, our default attitudes, given to us by the late capitalist system, converted the rogue elements into the core of the fascination with the mafia, that is, a bourgeois power-fantasy, among other elements I cannot point out in these hurried comments.

Even this series' famed use of red-herrings, dead ends, etc, is an affectation done to distract from the empty critique of America this series provided. Attempting to defy Aristotle in eschewing a beginning, middle and end (fair enough -- it worked in War and Peace) this series fell into that Greek philosopher's waiting trap: "Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot 'episodic' in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to break the natural continuity." (his Poetics)

"Who is the more fiendish - Phil or Tony?"

yeesh, scaring the shit out of me.

Who is the most fiendish - Phil or Tony or Tronbrain?

:)