The Sopranos: The Very Last Episode

So this is what we're left with: A diner with A.J, Tony, and Carmela. There was the suspicious looking guy at the bar walking into the bathroom. There was the gentleman in the corner with the USA hat on. There were the two African American young men hovering around the entrance. Meadow is having more than enough trouble parallel parking. She gets in the door and meets Tony's eyes and then: blackness. Darkness. A screenfilled with the emptiness you always knew David Chase, the shows creator and writer, tried to fill us with.

I had called that Paulie Walnuts would do Tony in. He'd whack him after the storm had settled and Phil had been taken care of. I thought that in the end it would be Tony's indecision that would do him in. It would be his inability to follow his instincts and have killed the loose lipped Paulie on that fishing boat down in Miami.

Still, if any of us thought we had a handle on the season finale, we were sorely mistaken. David Chase has made an art form of giving us everything we never expected and he always delivers by giving us less action than we craved. The world thought the Russian in Season 3 would resurface. We thought loud mouth Capo Ralph would be whacked over wild behavior, not over insensitive comments about a dead horse. We thought Christopher would flip or whack Tony or get whacked, but we never dreamed that Tony would deliver a mercy killing as Chris' body lie mangled in his own car.