Here’s another view of the last episode I got through the email, which includes a lot of smart detail and rejects the K-Lo Tony’s final moments interpretation.

On a scale of one to ten, I have to give the Sopranos finale a mediocre five. Some things were tied up; the Phil line played itself out, Janice remains Janice, Uncle Junior, like Livia, is left with almost no one, and it makes sense that apart from Tony the only other man who was made for that type of life, Paulie, is left in it. But Chase cynically left too much unresolved—where did the Russians go to after all (they were mentioned at the beginning of an episode this session). As for the ending, it was too cynical and too post-modern. AJ easily trades his grandmother’s “it’s all a big nothing” for his father’s “focus on the good things” self-imposed worldview. Tony who memorably once told his daughter that it is 1951 in his house (this by the way as she is telling him that he needs to get with the “times”) now shrugs his shoulders when he hears that she will be late for a family dinner because she first has to get her birth-control prescription switched. And we are left to wonder about a guy in the member’s only jacket and two Black guys in an Italian diner. This, of course, was egged-on by the final music. As a recovering eighth grade Journey fan, the choice of music was not lost on me. Right before the unresolved fad to black, Steve Perry sings “some will win; some will lose; some were born to sing the blues. Oh, the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on.” Sadly, Chase left us with a teen-aged version of the Moviegoer.

UPDATE: I asked this author for some more specific wack-related comments:No whacking here. Apart from the draw of a big-money movie in which Tony must appear, the scene is not really set for a hit. Tony eye-balls the members only guy twice, including when he enters the bathroom. Egged on by Paulie, he still wonders whether Phil’s crew will really call a peace—thus he must keep his eyes’ open, especially with his family there. I doubt he would be blind-sided by someone questionable that he knows is in the bathroom off to his right (his gun hand by the way). As to the Black guys, Phil’s crew in the past frowned upon using them for hits (they can be used for other crimes but not hits—this was Junior’s unseemly move in their view).

The only response I can have is that turning to Black guys might be the post-Phil Brooklyn generation’s way of catching Tony unawares.