Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun (SPOILERS)

So "The Sopranos" came to a close. I will miss it. Even their worst episodes were better than most TV ever aspires to.

However, the great debate seems to be whether Tony was killed or not. Some are theorizing that, since the show is (primarily) told from Tony's point of view, when his point of view ended (gun shot to the back of the head), the show ended - the last thing he saw being his daughter walking through the diner door.

Problem with that theory is that the last shot wasn't Tony's POV. The last shot was of Tony himself - no gun creeping into his coverage (a'la Phil at his SUV window). Were it meant to be his POV, and we're meant to think he's been capped, the last image before the hard cut to black would be of Meadow - maybe even Meadow reacting to something we can't see... because that would be the last thing Tony saw. So, for me, Tony's still alive. The show simply ended. Granted, there's room for interpretation; that's just mine.

Some folks have raved about and raged against the ambiguity with which such an engrossing piece of televised art closed. Look, I'm all for ambiguity, but it feels like they did exactly what everyone was expecting: to not go out with a bang. At all. And I respect that. But let's be honest: layering in all those inserts of people at the diner (suspicious or otherwise) was kind of like heavy petting that ends abruptly: you think you're gonna get to nut hard, and suddenly, her parents walk in; or worse, she loses interest. I'm not looking for absolute disclosure to their closure, but call me traditional: if you're not gonna do something dramatic (like kill off Tony) it just would've been nice to, I don't know... let Meadow sit down and do a pull back on the family (not the Family).

Still, I have always, and will always, love that show. And I'm not bitching about the ending (though, if I had any hardcore complaint it was that there was no shout-out to the ducks that kicked off this nearly decade-long love affair) because they provided one really beautiful moment that I feel summed up the entire series quite nicely: Tony visiting Uncle Junior.

"You and my Dad," Tony said. "You two ran North Jersey."
"We did?"
"Yeah."
"Hm." Beat. "That's nice."

I thought that brief exchange really captured the futility of not just This Thing of Ours, but ambition and accomplisment in general: you struggle and toil and put shit together from scratch, and it all seems so epic and important in the moment, and you make sacrifices, and there are casualties along the way... and ultimately, if you're lucky, you wind up in a wheelchair, unable to remember most of what you've done.

Fuck the haters: that show's still the best thing to come out of Jersey since Bruce and Jon Bon.