Someone compared this series to Julius Caesar and King Lear but it seems to me that Macbeth is the Shakespearean play most nearly evoked. You kill a rival - your cousin, I might add - for what in your sociopathically logical mind seems like a pretty good reason. You declare yourself prepared for consequences and the first succession of deaths thereafter are easy to dismiss as inevitable casualties of the battlefield rather than of the crime, pretty ordinary wear and tear. But eventually you need to have Banquo offed - what other choice does a quick-thinking man of action committed to his own survival have? Then pretty soon the wife you counted on loses it and after a while, Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane and you just can't count on anything. You see things through to the exceedingly bitter end even when there's nothing left you care about except your commitment to your own power and the way of life you were born into and repeatedly chose to uphold.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that the Soprano plot mirrors Macbeth in all its details, just that the patterns of violent ambition, slippery-slope social interaction, personal disintegration and a world spinning away from you are not very different from each other.

And, as in Macbeth, I think the protagonist will have to die because it's the only way we can be sure the series is over. Nobody else's death would achieve that goal because (as in Macbeth) hardly anybody in The Sopranos manages to stay dead. They remain very much alive in Tony's consciousness. Murders have been undertaken in the expectation of bringing an end to a threatening chain of events but on this show the threat and the chain have just kept on growing. Even fragments of random bodies committed to the dust 20 years ago have a way of needing to be moved.

Tony has plenty of charm and pathos but not enough desire for good, not enough identity apart from the mobster, for him to substantially evolve at this point. The rules of classic drama shrug and say that if your protagonist can't do that, he'll have to die.

P.S. I love Heather and I love all of you. I'm just pissed that I didn't discover you until a week ago.

I heard a prtty way out theory the other day that I will just throw out there for comments.

Tony is still in the hospital in a coma from the gunshot. He never woke up from his dream state and all that has followed is nothing but Tony's own stream of consciousness - dream walking us (the viewer) through T's thoughts.

Now, I think this would be a HUGE cop out and mistake on the part of David Chase. This type of ending is more for the soaps, it was done by Dallas when Bobby "came back" from the dead and his wife found him taking a shower. A major letdown for the fans of that show and that show sucked! So just imagine the fallout if it happened here?

Just yet another theory to think about...

Tony will not die

David Chase has said that he does not weant to take the easy way out on a moral level in showing that "crime doesn't pay". He has said this in public interviews. If I am reading this correctly, by killing Tony you do just what Chase does not want to do, show that crime does not pay. But by keeping him alive this totally contradicts the typical formula driven media vheicle wher the criminal gets what he deserves in the end.

Although Tony is indeed a murdering, lying, cheating, robbing scumbag - we still like the guy. But we would never want to piss the guy off. Genius is taking a guy like this, guys like this and make them as likeable as they have become (i.e. Goodfellas is another great example). No, I don't see him being whacked based upon Chase's comments on the overarching theme that underlie the show's character.

Little Stevie was just on Howard and all he said was there was going to be A LOT of violence in the last two episodes. He also knows how it ends.

Silvio definitly will be cleaning up this mess, for sure.

Edie Falco was on the view and she said three versions of the end were chosen and she has no idea which one will be chosen!

Man, the suspence.

I think two people who will prove important in the end are Meadow and Dr. Melfi. Because of her therapist, Dr. Melfi may begin pulling away from Tony when he needs her the most. Meadow, who all along has distanced herself from the family business, is turning into her mother - "shutting things out" and dating Patrick Parisi. In different ways Tony needs both women, but they are both going to hurt him by doing what he's tried to prevent all along.

When Dr. Melfi was raped in the garage, she knew who did it: the employee of the month at that pizza shop. She could have easily told Tony and known that revenge would be exacted. She did not. Meadow was intimidated in public by a drunk man and ran to daddy. She pretended that she didn't want to tell him, but why else would she tell Carm in the kitchen.

I also noticed the Lear-ishness a few episodes ago. And with Christopher/Regan-Goneril gone & the fool Sil getting tips on how to clean things up, how will our blind king's reign end? I wonder about the Freud allusions now, or is that a given? Tony's slips with Melfi seem more frequent & meaingful ("prostate" when he means to say "prostrate"?), and Christopher's murder - did he wish him dead to relieve himself of a lifetime of having to worry about him, as Freud's female patient did with her ill father? It all seems so apparent, but then, it doesn't. As for the center not holding, I never thought of AJ as it, despite what Meadow said (they're Italian, he's the son, etc..) He always seemed exactly like Tony to me, absent the turn-off switch. If anything, Tony has always recognized everything of himself in AJ, and has always known that's who he'd be if he'd had the choices AJ has had.