[molson]

I've been going through the entire Sopranos series again, 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, like one huge episode, for the last couple of weeks. Still hugely entertaining, and I'm always catching new things I didn't notice before.

And /r/TheSopranos is still a goldmine for fun Sopranos talk and observations. It's a rare subreddit that seems to like the thing it talks about, so that's nice.

Overwhelming consensus from people who have broken this down there and other places is that Tony was killed at the end. The most popular theory is that it was ordered by Patsy Parisi, perhaps with the support of New York. There's a million little clues hinting at this throughout the series (but that's not the only theory).

The manner of his killing, in front of his family, would have been considered contrary to the code of how they did things, but, it was a fitting response to Phil being killed in front of his wife and grandkids. So after Tony was gone, New York did, like Phil wanted, decapitate the family and do business with whoever was left (which would have been Patsy, who was on his way up but who always disliked Tony)

Edit: As an aside, the list of dead Sopranos actors is growing all the time - which makes sense, we're going back over 10 years now since it ended, and it was a relatively older and unhealthy cast. But Phil, Butch, the crooked cop from season 1, Tony's lawyer, Angelo, all died in the last year or so.