Frankly I have been a little shocked at how wild the criticism has been about the Sopranos ending. I liked it. I feel it put us in Tony’s shoes this article (an interview with creator David Chase) sums it up nicely:

Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony’s mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia’s rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony’s looking at because he never knows what’s coming next.

The article also posits another theory about the ending which I find intriguing:

In the scene on the boat in “Soprano Home Movies,” repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don’t see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men’s room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first “Godfather”), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony’s life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

Never thought of that one.

Either way. I intend on watching the entire season again - or at least the last few episodes. They were great.

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