When television is good, nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you – and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

-Newton Minnow, FCC Chairman, 1961.

I really don’t much care for gangster movies and TV shows, but if I’m reading the howls of anger from the couch potato crowd right then I am truly sorry now that I missed watching The Sopranos after all.  It looks to me like its creator, David Chase, has worked one of TVs rare moments of absolutely pure gold, taking the medium that Newton Minnow once called a "vast wasteland" and proving him right when he said that when it is good, nothing is better.  I’m sorry to say that the howling anger also proves that the audience mostly wants the nothing-is-worse bad.  But it’s not because Chase didn’t give them the satisfying final shoot-out they were hungry for.  What he gave them, unforgivably, was a head on collision with their own ticking clock, their own little patient shadow of death just waiting to tap them on the shoulder when they least expect it.  And they didn’t much like it.

On this Slashdot thread, one commenter puts the pieces together for the slower ones…

The ending left a lot open to speculation, but one thing that it didn’t leave open (IMO) is Tony’s fate.

Tony is dead – if you watch episode #78 "Soprano Home Movies," while Tony and Bobby are on the lake they are talking about what happens to people like them, and specifically about what it’s like to get killed. Tony says something along the lines of "you don’t hear the one that gets you," and Bobby asks "what do you tin happens when you die," to which Tony replies "nothing, everything just goes black."

Then, in last week’s episode, "#85 The Blue Comet," Tony flashes back to this scene while he is lying in bed "everything just goes black."

Even David Chase said in an interview that the key to how it ends is in that first episode (Soprano Home Movies), and to make sure people would remember this he put Tony flashing back to that moment at the end of "#85 The Blue Comet."

It’s something we all wonder about.  What happens when you die?  In a nation that claims to be overwhelmingly Christian (at least, in theory), you have to think that most folks are counting on seeing the pearly gates, or some acceptable substitute when the moment comes.  That final curtain really isn’t final after all.  Perhaps, a merging of one’s soul with that airy Cosmic All.  Perhaps a rebirth into an entirely new life.  But what if this is it.  What if death is simply and finally the end of consciousness? 

For most folks, myself included, that is a deeply horrifying thing to consider.  Who among us doesn’t want consciousness to endure, in some form, even in some completely disembodied existence, even at last, to spend an eternity in Hell.  Better that even, then simply…nothing.  Emotionally it’s the great despair.  And even intellectually and dispassionately it’s difficult to grasp.  How do you visualize nothing?  David Chase tells us how, and in the ultimate irony, puts the words into the mouth of a cold blooded killer.

"Nothing.  Everything just goes black."

So there’s Tony Soprano, mobster, murderer, king of his own little corner of the gutter, family man, sitting down to a plate of onion rings.  We nervously glance here and there, perhaps just as Tony does…to the man walking into the bathroom…to the guys over at the jukebox…to Meadow just walking in the door.  And Tony’s eyes rise to look at Meadow.  And then…nothing.  Just…nothing.

Nothing.  A fitting end perhaps, to the nothing he’d made of his own life, except that it’s the end we all get.  Maybe.

Digby of course got it, and quotes "one of the 100 most dangerous academics in the country"…

Now, the fact that Chase didn’t even give us a gunshot to go on, no clue that Tony really dies — well, so what? Are there really ghosts in The Turn of the Screw, or is the governess mad? (That debate has been going on for more than a century now.) We’re left to wonder whether we’ve been duped into thinking that Tony dies because all the staging in that final scene — the brief shots of each of the restaurant patrons, the focus on the guy going to the men’s room, the closeups of Meadow having trouble parking the car — feels like the generic suspense-creatin’ mechanisms that precede a catastrophe. We stop and ask ourselves how much of our reaction depends on those narrative mechanisms. And so the ending becomes, in a meta- way, not Chase’s "final fuck you" to the viewers (as so many pissed-off viewers have said) but, rather, a form of what did you expect? — except that it’s a real question, not a rhetorical one.

What did you expect?  Good question.  Maybe we shouldn’t expect anything.  Maybe we should pay a little more attention to the life we know we have, right now.  Maybe we should get off the goddamned sofa.  Maybe, the next time we get a chance to do something we always wanted to do, or to make our little corner of the world a little brighter, or bring a little more happiness into it, we shouldn’t let it slide on by thinking that we can always get to it later.  Because later may not even be there.  And when it’s over, when that cut to black happens, what you made of your life, your mark on the world, and the reputation you left behind, is all there will ever be of you.  What did you expect?

I’m going to date myself here, and also place myself firmly in the context of my generation.  I read raptly the books of Carlos Castaneda back in those days, and still find some of it very worthwhile.  Knowledge of The Four Foes being one, and how your death is actually an ally, keeping you on the Path With Heart.  And what came to mind while I was reading the howls of viewer outrage about how The Sopranos finally ended, were these words of Don Juan’s…

"Death is our eternal companion.  It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us.  Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has.  Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he’s about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so.  His death will tell him that he is wrong, that nothing really matters outside its touch.  His death will tell him, ‘I haven’t touched you yet.’"

Okay…it’s a metaphor.  But a good one.  Every now and then you need to turn around quickly to your left, and look your death right square in the eye and not flinch away…and wonder.  Why?  Because if you don’t, you’ll fritter the life you know you have, and everything you could have become, away.  Tony Soprano was a gangster, and in the end his life didn’t amount to anything.  But on the other hand, what have you made of yours?  At least Tony knew enough to look over his shoulder from time to time.  It’s the most subversive thing your TV can say to you, and the absolute horror of its corporate masters:  Put the remote control down and get off the goddamned sofa.  Because someday, in an instant, maybe in the next instant, while you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing at that moment, everything will just go black.  And that will be that.  You won’t even get to see the credits rolling.

Bored with your life?  Save your boredom for the Big Nothing.  Instead of living vicariously though the lives of TV characters, why not live your own life for a change.  It might get a little less boring then after all.  Your life stinks?  If can know it, then you can do something about it.  Don’t like what you are?  Then be something else, something better, something you really want to be.  Come the fade to black, the world will never know what you kept inside all to yourself.  Is that what you want? 

Live.  Now.  Make something better of yourself.  While you still Are. 

No wonder so many people hated that ending.

[Edited a tad…]