Your question assumes that the last scene was in fact a cosmic joke about unending cycles.

The last episode of the Sopranos, and in particular the last three to four minutes of it, plays out like a Roscharch test in a way that no popular entertainment has since “The Passion of the Christ.”

That film, if you will recall, was the subject of intense controversy and sharply varied critical and public opinion. While I was reading the reviews I felt as if some reviews were talking about a film that the others were not referring to. The majority of the critics, somewhere in their reviews, noted (perhaps subtly, perhaps intentionally) their own opinions regarding Mel Gibson, his religiosity (or lack of same), the Catholic Church, the issue of the Bible as the unaltered word of God, and so forth. What individuals thought of the film, as an artistic mattter, was colored by people’s opinions with respect to these issues. David Ansen of Newsweek declared that Gibson, in making this film, was “punishing the audience for some unknown sins.” Roger Ebert declared the film to be an honest, honestly felt story about how one might dramatically imagine the final hours of Jesus’ life.

Reactions differed - based upon the reactors’ own morals, based on the sum of their life experiences - which dictated the tint of the glasses which they wore while viewing the film. This film was one of the few where, for various reasons, people did NOT already come in with a pre-conceived opinion as to what the film WAS about and as to what it should BE about. Those who appreciate would-be historical accuracy (i.e. those who believe it is a virtue, rather than a characteristic) were pleased with the film. Those who thought the film would be strident were unsurprised to find a strident filmgoing experience.

The point is that none of the reactions to the film were per se invalid - all were valid because criticism is not only subjective, but it is at the most fundamental level a skill that people come by in different ways. No two critics ever start from a blank slate when reviewing a film, and even if they did, the color of the slates would be different.

Likewise, in The Sopranos, a show which has been faux-psychoanalyzed to death, theories abound as to what the show “means,” what it is trying to “say,” and as to whether it goes about saying it in a manner that makes us take the show to our hearts as well as our heads.

There is no one “meaning” of the show because there is no agreed-upon meaning of life, and therefore, to insist, as some have done, that the ending was unquestionably a dramatization of a specific event (such as Tony dying) is to deny the validity of the existence, in a sense, of our fellow man. The final minutes can best be explained not by clues from episodes past, but by what the show means to the individual viewer, and by the implications of that meaning as applied to a particular sequence of footage. Those who believed that this show was a tragic hero/Michael Corleone dramatization streched out over seven years got what they wanted; to them, the fade-to-black was Tony’s death. Those who are wounded by the show’s demise have interpreted the fade-to-black as a “whacking” - not of Tony, but of us - we have been “rubbed out” of watching the show as no new episodes are left. Those who believe the show is by nature ambiguous about life themes, about the manner in which Tony processes and analyzes information, have stated that the ending does not represent anything in particular; some of these fans no doubt note that the seemingly melodramatic events leading up to the fade to black constituted Mr. Chase’s perhaps even unconscious inability to refrain, despite all efforts, from delivering even the semblance of a conventional ending.

That we can argue about the ending of this show, I think, is a sign that whatever it was Chase set out to achieve, he has achieved it to some degree. The show, as many have argued, is (at least to this viewer) about television in as much as it is television in that we are constantly aware of dramatic conventions popular in television programming being played out, sideswiped or trashed. Given this view, what better way to end the show than by saying that there can be no definitive ending because such a concept does not exist in television history? (Come on - think about it - how many shows have had a final episode that provided a sense of complete and utter closure? The few that seemed to found themselves the subject of spin-offs in short order; so much for closure).

I will miss this show. It made us think about how and why we react to events as much as it made us react to them.

I’ve seen the ending twice…the first time jarred me; but it grew on me. The final scene certainly got my adrenaline rushing, and on reflection there’s no other way it could have ended.

Two words for you: “Schrödinger’s cat.”

It seems to me (from the outside) that they’re going to make a big time movie to really end the show.

http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/1406/1/

There *is* a definitive ending; it’s just not given in a open-face way.

Even if Chase meant by all these visual/filmmaking clues that Tony does in fact die, all it means is that he died in total subtext and in a vacuum. He did not die in narrative, and there’s no road to or from that event, if it indeed was intended.

And it doesn’t change the fact that his death is meaningless and without context in terms of the story at hand. So Tony dies? Is that it? Is that the point? Again, this has more to do with Chase eschewing convention than telling a story. Not that he’s wrong in eschewing, per se.