Seriously, if Chase wanted to cap Tony as the ending, he would have. Now he gets the best of both worlds: fans obsessing whilst they build a market for a huge movie gross. He can make his choice when he wants to.

I’m still safely in the “Tony lives” camp, but that visual parallel is worth noting (as is the Godfather allusion). I think that the main reason I’m skeptical about there being a hit involved is that the feud with New York is supposedly over because Tony brokered a deal with Phil’s underlings, at least as I understand that scene.

I think the point of view when the screen goes dark makes the “hit” scenario unlikely, but I would note that, if I recall the scene correctly, Phil L was taken out from the side, not the front, at roughly the angle the bathroom presented for the final scene.

The fast cutting worked against the sense of relaxation that you describe (at least for me). The quick cuts and furtive glances, underscored by the crescendoing Journey song, prevented me from fully relaxing. But I think that either reading (Tony dies or Tony lives) can still feed the main thematic point that I take from the scene: that everything Tony has accumulated and achieved, including the (temporary) family harmony is tenuous and contingent, that it could be taken away at any moment.

I noted that Tony is smiling and relaxed. But it’s more than that. He seems like the mild-mannered Ray from Everybody Loves Raymond. Is that who Tony really thinks he is? Is that whole scene in his head?

Another colleague doubts it was a Mafia hit (besides the fact of who wanted him dead) because a mob hit is from the front, so you see who is killing you.

Another thing to take away from the interview is that Chase was operating within the constraints presented by HBO in terms of how many episodes he was asked to produce and how that informed certain storylines.

Again, I’m not that eager to defend him, but I am interested in how this perception of Chase gained such traction.

I didn’t mean that there is a subjective contempt, in the sense of “I’m gonna jerk these folks around.” Rather, as in the analogy to the rock star, it’s more like, “I’m gonna do what I want”, with the unstated and perhaps unconscious subtheme being, “without regard to what they want, ’cause I’m not here to entertain *them*”.

In fact, like M.A., I think Chase is showing tremendous faith in his audience by offering two of the more memorable final scenes in recent TV history (see her entry on this). Sorry to belabor this a bit, but I do think the final scenes offer closure even while keeping Tony alive (”the movie goes on and on…”).

But no, I’ll stick with my view that the roots of this can be found much earlier, in the “now that I’ve got your attention, wait around a few years till I feel like giving you a few more episodes” attitude.

Chase really does have the last laugh, here, making us pick apart lyrics to a Journey song, for Christsakes.

Indeed! The episode was the big middle finger…

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2007/06/11/sopranos/index.html?source=rss

I’m certainly willing to acknowledge that the show was made for the cash, but I can’t really blame Chase, Gandolfini and others for that motivation. If the work sucks, I won’t follow, but this past season continued to interest me, if not on a specific story level, in terms of how individual characters (A.J., Christopher) were explored.

I’m intrigued by your rock band analogy, Tom K, and while I don’t feel the need to defend Chase’s approach to the story’s end, I do think that a number of common themes were revisited in new ways (especially when it came to the nuclear family). But I have a hard time believing that Chase could have “contempt” for his audience, given the amount of money he’s made off of us over the years.

Tom W, the Cheers ending is one of my favorites, too.

I predicted in the comments on an earlier post that the series would purposely meander off and it did. Sadly, Ihave to disagree with the majority opinion here - I think Chase, Gandolfini and Co. were in full Roger Clemens mode - they pretended it was all about the art (”another ring”), but it was about the money.

Unlike Deadwood - which was a crime to kill.

The whole approach to the finale struck me as contemptuous of the audience. I mean that in a very speicific way: for example, like an old rocker playing only his new stuff. You can say he’s giving his audience credit for being up to his newer, more complex material, or you can say he’s being contemptuous of their desire to hear his hits. More often, I think it’s the latter.

Once you’ve decided to subject your audience to the absurd sort of “extended hiatus followed by directionless return” that the Soporanos has been implementing over the last several years, a conclusion like this is, at least, internally logical.

Suck-o endings:
Seinfeld
MASH
Twin Peaks (long over)
Crime Story (cliffhanger - cancelled over summer)

That was most excellent. I enjoyed this episode as much as any and am satisfied with the ending. That’s the superlative I think best describes it: satisfying.