The howls! Countless viewers are indignant over "Made in America," the last episode of The Sopranos and its refusal to supply one of the multiple choice climaxes. You might have thought the writer and series creator David Chase denied the cowardice of the 9/11 kamikazes or suggested the president deliberately lied! The cyber-mob crashed HBO's website and otherwise lit up the internets with cries of "Sopranos finale sucked!"

The joke is emphatically on them. "Made in America" didn't suck; it was a brilliant and fitting full-stop (perhaps the only possible one) for the greatest television show of all time. It did provide a fine surprise ending, which was in fact a sort of climax, just not the sort the couch potatoes hunger for. They worship certainty, however specious, and they have an unseemly need for some sort of terminal money shot — which somehow validates what has gone before it. (See, it was good for someone.)

They feel cheated because they don't know what "really happened" to Tony — as if anything could really happen to "Tony." The cut to black is a rude reminder that it's all a fiction, and much brainier, funnier, more reflexive or "meta" fiction than the disgruntled seem to appreciate. The climax here is comic, and Chase all but announces that it's going to be, long before we ever get there. The problem, if there is one, is that the "text" is so rich that even the discerning viewer is hard pressed to catch all the jokes in the storm of allusions, quotes, samples, send-ups, feints, non-sequiturs, red-herrings and MacGuffins on the first viewing. Cleary Chase is baiting the Professor Fleebers of the world to deconstruct his work — especially since the finale seems to have done half their work for them.

In fact, The Sopranos crossed the narrative point of no return a few seasons back. It must have gotten hellishly difficult for the writers to come up with new conflicts and crises that would engage the sympathies, prurience and amusement of the viewer, and not degenerate into self-parody. How many times could Carmela be hurt by Tony's philandering? How many lieutenants can get whacked before nobody would plausibly want the job? How much pure siblings-and-kids soap opera will the viewer stand for? Where else can Tony, et al, go on the road? Even the comic aspect of the series (they're suburban and they're murderers!) was starting to fatigue.

And though this last season was engaging, the plotting was pretty perfunctory, as if the writers didn't really care much about plausibility. Things just happened (like Christopher's car crash), and people reacted. There was plenty of prurient appeal, if you didn't think about it much, but a lot of disbelief was suspended, washed away by the overarching question: how will they wrap this up?

In this context it would have been impossible to come up with a satisfying narrative climax. To satisfy the impact of the reveal or climax needs to be commensurate with the wait for it. Trivial questions (e.g., who's shadowing the detective?) get posed and closed rather quickly; the bigger questions (how will X overcome impossible odds?) are kept open with various diversions, dead ends and reversals of fortune until the explosive or romantic crescendo. After seven seasons and eight years of sensational twists nothing Chase could have devised for the finale would be satisfactory. He had put himself in a trap, and then he fashioned a trap door.

Chase's solution was to turn the last episode into a bleak cartoon, proceeding from that bad-pun title "Made in America." The finale is distinctly less about being a "made guy" than what America has made of itself. On the morning after the finale millions of us had Journey's anthemic "Don't Stop Believing" humming in our heads like a signal through our fillings, but the leitmotif could also have been, "Losing My Religion." The world depicted here is distinctly post-modern, a place where all the old verities have become travesties of themselves. Of course, the essential faith, the Catholic faith of this Italian clan has become the most redundant joke of all. When Paulie bares his soul to Tony, confessing that he's had a vision of the Virgin (in the Bada-Bing!) Tony gives this all the respect it deserves, "Why didn't you say somethin'? Fuck strippers — we coulda had a shrine. Sold holy water in gallon jugs, we coulda made billions."

Faith in the age of Falwell, Robertson and Bush is snake oil, bottled up and sold to suckers.

One might not expect gangsters to take the Vatican seriously, but the worldly ethos they are supposed (by their hagiographers) to live by is getting threadbare too. At one point in the last episode we find ourselves in New York's Little Italy, sacred ground in the Mafia mythology from which The Sopranos sprang. A tour guide tells us that its erstwhile 40-block sprawl has been reduced to a single street of stores; it's a Potemkin village, a theme park, or a movie set. In a snowy street there, one Butchie talks on his cell to his evil overlord Leotardo (who speaks from an "undisclosed location") about Butchie's failure to "decapitate" the Soprano gang by having Tony killed first. It's bleak Beckett-esque comedy, as the conversation foregrounds failure to communicate. Leotardo terminates his refusal to have talks with the enemy, "You're breaking up;" then slams the phone down. Butchie looks up from the squelched call to find himself in a different story; the street has turned to Blade Runner and teems with huddled masses of Asian immigrants.

Indeed, everything is breaking up, "the centre cannot hold" — as Tony Junior might say. The mob Family is a banal remnant of its legend, bereft of chivalry and loyalty. The gang sit-down in the final episode is more like a binding arbitration (bottled water is served) than a Corleone-style Theater of Blood Oaths. Now mobsters flip for the government and turn on the bosses to whom they've sworn loyalty. Even Leotardo, who personifies the old order, despises it now. A few episodes back, speaking of the years he spent in prison out of loyalty to his Don, Leotardo wondered bitterly, "And for what?" — then had Butchie kill the man.

The nuclear family intersects with la famiglia in the person of Uncle Corrado, who having nearly killed Tony in his dementia, no longer remembers his nephew or any of the clan — or his onetime prominence in "our thing." But that's nearly SOP for Sopranos; Tony's mother conspired to have him killed at one point, and Tony himself recently killed his own favorite nephew with his bare hands. At best, you have to wonder if family is a blessing or curse here.

Carmella has embarked on a career outside the home, partnering with her father in real-estate fraud. Meadow is reverting to type, having abandoned her idealistic medical ambitions to be a rich lawyer to the Tonys of the world. Her inspiration, she announces, is the injustice of Tony's arrests for a few of the crimes he's committed. Anthony Junior, having failed at everything, including suicide, keeps getting social promotions thanks to his family's clout. His vestigial idealism leads him to consider the Army at one point, and his parents are appalled; people from their caste do not become "cannon fodder," at least not in foreign wars. They get him a job on a schlocky movie, a new BMW and model-girlfriend as befits it.

Family is less a viable unit, in this world, than a psycopath's sentimentality. If, through thick and thin, Tony has hung in with his wife and kids (between bimbos anyway) and the show's infamous final scene, set in a sort of Happy Days diner, seems to be drawing a folksy "at least we've got each other" moral, still it's all bitterly undercut by the Gangland Massacre! foreshadowing.

The same moral entropy has engulfed even the legal system; the cops and crooks here compromise into tepid equivalence. Since everything's been subsumed to the counterfeit war on terror, the FBI gets in bed with Tony, who feeds them tips about possible "Arab terrorists." In return, his FBI contact feeds Tony information on Leotardo — betraying the Bureau and the beautiful agent with whom he's betraying his wife. (We've come a long way since Eliot Ness.) The mobsters turn detective and track down their man by painstaking leg-work. When Tony's guys finally find do find Leotardo, the feared gang-boss seems more like a pathetic geezer. He gives his daughter instructions for his pharmacist, and says to the kids in the back seat of their monster SUV, "Say bye-bye grandpa; say bye-bye!"

Then he takes one through the skull and the Ford "Exploder" rolls over his melon — in a macabre logo-centric send-up of product placement. (Clearly Leotardo's plan has blown back.) When Tony's FBI collaborator hears the news about the hit, he turns away from his terrorist surveillance tapes to exult, "Hey, we might just win this one." His fellow agent is nonplussed, perhaps confused about which war is being referenced, or perhaps wondering what "winning" means in this context.

Even the miracle worker Dr. Melfi, High-Priestess in the Church of Medicine whom Tony takes as confessor, has lost her faith. She's realized that her "talking cure" is just helping Tony to hone his manipulative style; she's not making him a better person, just a better criminal. So she coldly terminates his therapy.

Just to make sure we understand that all the dreams are dead, Chase gives Tony Junior a little dialectic with oblivious tablemates at a funeral dinner where he quotes Yeats' apocalyptic The Second Coming and pounds his point hard: "You people are fucked! You're living in a dream.... 'What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?' The world? Don't you see it? Bush let Al Qaeda escape into the mountains. Then he has us invade some other country...."

"It's like America. This is where people come to make it. It's a beautiful idea. But whadda they get? Bling? Come-ons for shit they don't need and can't afford."

Tony Junior's tablemates laugh all this off as psycho rambling, and perhaps in today's corporate and political climate a network could only put these words in the mouth of a nutcase, but still, it makes one grateful that HBO has no sponsors to answer to.

Some might find the whole tone of "Made in America" a bit odd, given that it represents Chase's final bow, in what has to have been a success beyond even his fertile imagining. He goes far out of his way to bite the hand that's fed him, if not HBO per se (and that's arguable, given the outage), then certainly television. Had one of the broadcast networks picked up The Sopranos, as Chase had originally hoped, it seems doubtful it would have caught on so. Much of its appeal came from the tension between its domestic comedy and the great lashings of sex and graphic violence it delivered on cable.

The show's enormous success must've brought Chase enormous artistic freedom, yet he still seems to despise television. Or perhaps he's just using his bully pulpit to piss on the networks, which of course owe their existence to the non-stop "come-ons for the bling."

In the safe house where Tony and his gunsels are holed up, Twilight Zone plays on an old TV; Chase has the boys watch in slack-jawed silence so we can hear the on-screen bigwig kiss off an aspiring writer, "I'm not a hard man, not a mean man, but right now it's late. The television industry today is looking for talent. They're looking for quality. They're preoccupied with talent and quality. And the writer is a major commodity...." This can only have been meant sardonically in the '60s; its irony has expanded exponentially since with the vicious kitsch of Reality programming.

At the funeral dinner Anthony Junior decries "jackoff fantasies on TV about we're kickin' [terrorist] ass" (surely he means 24) but before it's all over he'll be working for jackoff-fantasy producers who are trying to diversify out of porn. Tony and has talked him out of joining the Army (to kick terrorist ass) by pitching him a film over breakfast, "It's about a private detective who gets sucked into the internet through his data-port, and he's gotta solve some murders of some virtual prostitutes."

This is the trajectory for the Soprano dynasty, and also a metaphor for our condition, Chase implies. We've been sucked into a fictive dream by the medium with which we famously amuse ourselves to death. "Everything's a joke with you," Anthony Junior complains to Tony at one point, but as his fleeting idealism gutters Junior is seen tubing-out with girlfriend, laughing at Karl Rove's rap for his pet journalists, at George Bush's Dance with the Africans on the White House lawn.

Perhaps the healthiest thing we can do about the crime syndicate in the White House is laugh. It distracts us from the fact that nothing much is "made in America" anymore, except Hollywood diversions, except billions on various speculative schemes and military-industrial scams, except gas-guzzlers we don't need and in many senses can't afford. It keeps us from questioning the simple black/white conflicts our "leaders" want to script over reality. It helps us to forget that we've decapitated a vile old man or two, but that won't prevent the blowback, which most won't even see coming. We laugh, lest we stop believing.

"Leave 'em laughing when you go," might be the coded message of Chase's final fade to black. And then again it might be something Chase picked up from across the pond, something about no future.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)