What The F***

Like everybody else last night, I thought the cable had gone out for a second, at the worst moment in the history of such moments. We rewound (We've got DVR) just to see if we'd missed something. Then the realization hit. Nothing. Not a thing.

Te best TV Show ever ended with the best ending ever on television. The idiots screaming this morning that they deserved "closure" after eight years of loyal viewership (to paraphrase George Patton), don't know anything more about real drama than they do about fornicating.

Do you remember the tedious two hour ending to M*A*S*H*? (Or was it three hours), still the most watched finale in history? At least with The West Wing there was a logical place to end, but it still went on. And that's the point. Tony Soprao went on. I've been complaining for a few months now that HBO hasn't been edning their series. Sith both Carnivale and Deadwood, they simply didnt' renew it for another season. Carnivale ended in a cliffhanger and I was left feeling jilted. But here it was calculated. We were manipulated. We were played like fifty-million fiddles. And it was beautiful. It was one of the most effective, most artistic moments I've ever seen on television.

I mean seriously? What could he do? How could he end it? In the end he didn't, which was such a bold and visionary choice it still gives me shivers. I woke up gigling all night long last night.

Like evryone else my girlfriend and I had spent the last few weeks trying to predict what would happen. And especially last night. Would Tony cooperate witht he FBI? Would Phil whack him? Would Paulie whack him? Would he go to prison? Would Sil run the family? Janice? Meadow? As the tension in the final scene built it was excrusiating. "Here it comes," I said when the mysterious stranger walked in in front of AJ. Then again when he went to the bathroom. When meadow had trouble parking I was sure she'd walk in just in time to see her whole family murdered. Then when she ran accross the street it was "Oh no! She's going to get hit." And when Tony looked up, was it meadow coming through the door, or something more sinister?

Who knows. All of us had made up our own endings to the series. No matter what happened it would be a letdown. David Chase picked the only ending that made sense. He refused to end it. He refused to give us what we wanted. Somewhere in writer heaven, George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen are laughing their butts off, rewinding that scene again and again to pick it apart.

Brilliant. Totally fucking brilliant.