Network television is all talk. I think there should be visuals on a show, some sense of mystery to it, connections that don't add up. I think there should be dreams and music and dead air and stuff that goes nowhere. There should be, God forgive me, a little bit of poetry.
— David Chase

Cliffhanger endings are a bit absurd. There's a sort of hackery involved in letting the viewer off the hook by putting them on the edge of their seat: the lady tied to the train tracks writhes anxiously as our hero stumbles wounded towards the advancing train, which is gathering steam, gathering more steam, only to find...wait for it...fade to black. Will our hero save the day? Tune in next week! Now here's a word from our sponsors! It's a quick, easy, juicy and cheap way to save oneself the pain of coming up with something brilliant to tie everything together. There's no parsing out of details, no debates, no drama, no secrets to decode. The audience yawningly fumbles with their coats, tosses the Raisinets in the trash and goes on blandly with the rest of their evening. Entertainment accomplished. What's for breakfast?

Good thing David Chase is no hack.

What seemed to be in the cards, summation-wise, didn't look like this. But what we got instead is really the proper conclusion to a truly great series. Here's how it works out (if the musings of an overheated fanboy aren't redundant at this point).

Part of what gave The Sopranos its power was the utter lack of resolution which clung to every scene and remained, ruminating, after the strippers and the corpses had all been shuffled off the stage. Nobody in the DiMeo Family ever got anything close to wholeness, selfhood, completeness, or whatever term Dr. Phil would have at hand.

Neurotic, charmingly annoying and slightly batty Paulie ends up the capo of a crew he is convinced is cursed. And only because Patsy Parisi (MIA) would have taken over the role. Janice is left mourning in her crocodile tears, her eyes not quite wet enough to forget about angling for a husband. The real existential setup for the final episode wasn't in the last few seconds. It's with Uncle Junior, left creeping up on death in the middle of his dementia in a dingy asylum, broken completely from his legend and his past, eyeglasses settled defeatedly on his shrunken ears. When he's told that his devoted servant Bobby Baccalieri is dead, his mind coughs up factoids about Bobby Kennedy. Tony underwhelmingly reminds him that he and his brother used to run North Jersey. "That's nice" is all he has to say. There's nothing like old age for precious recollections. More on this later.

And that's just the survivors. The dead were all doomed. Christopher's endless bout with substance abuse made plain his flaws in character to everyone but himself. Silvio Dante had to be slipping, since no consiglieri ever leaves the Bing with his gun out of reach. Sweet, bumbling Bobby was too excited about model trains to check his voicemail and avoid an ambush, smearing the plastic figurines in his own private world with blood. And Tony killed — or wanted to kill — all the rest.

No one knew what to make of their lives. And neither, for that matter, do we.

So we watch dramas, read books, go to art museums, visit the local headshrinker.

For her part, Dr. Jennifer Melfi led us to the climax this show had been heading towards all along. As the viewer's leggy and cerebral super-ego, she consistently pushed Tony to open up. Which naturally he was both tempted and hesitant to do, since doing so would necessitate some moral verdict. And the moral verdict seemed to be in, from her side at least. We'd been witness to countless visceral examples of Tony's incontinence in the episodes leading up to the ending — his vengefulness, selfishness and his spite. What had seemed to be good within him — his rationality, effusiveness, his bardic and poetic glimpses, got railroaded by the beast in him. After all that, she as much as says, he was just a sociopath! (If there's one thing the show has taught us, it's never tear a page from a magazine.)

And this is what we needed all along. David Chase had to weigh in himself, however, through his choice of Tony's final destiny. He needed to have the last word on what was to be made of his beautiful, wretched creation from the beginning. But that would have been a violation of the poetry of the series. (It also might be the reason why HBO's website crashed in the ensuing hours after the end, long after Chase had absconded to France to wait out the "Monday morning quarterbacking" he was precient enough to anticipate.)

So he did the only thing that he could have done — the only thing that fit. He gave us ambivalence. He cut if off and left us in darkness and silence for ten seconds. He had originally wanted thirty but the executives talked him out of it. This brings the narrative full circle. Tony doesn't have much of a life left to live. The envelopes are getting smaller and smaller. Carlo Gervasi is going to testify to the grand jury. Jail is likely, if not imminent. His playground of childhood friends is pretty much decimated. His family is shaken and near-shattered from A.J.'s trauma and Carmela's mutual misunderstandings. Meadow just can't quite seem to parallel park. There's a swarthy man in a Member's Only jacket who might or might not be about reenact Tony's favorite scene from the Godfather movies.

This is not the karma collected from a lifetime of good works in the midst of Social Darwinism. Neither is it the final nihilism of an ultimate scumbag. It's somewhere — paralysed and passive — in between. It might be the manifestation of all that dim lighting and rich, deep coloring of the walls of Vesuvio, which Tony certainly did not burn down. It's the meagre, ambiguous accumulations of a life spent vibrantly, which is more than can be said for those which are spent miserly.

All this is as it should be. David Chase, Kubrickian in his secrecy and his exactitude, resembles the maestro in one more crucial way. He has never been quite so lenient with the human race, though he does see fit to add tenderness and loveliness to his world, something Kubrick in all his gifts never quite managed. Inter faeces et urinam nascimur said one ancient Catholic, and The Sopranos in all its charm never forgot it. As Paulie Walnuts once said: "In the midst of death, we are in life." Or is it the other way around?

Tony Soprano's world is dead, but he is not. Salud!

— Matt Hanson (junglegroove@gmail.com)