[NoMyths]

It was great. The more I think about it (and I've been thinking about it all day) the more I'm impressed. I spent a chunk of the day talking about it with anyone who'd let me harangue them. The final scene achieves the effect it sets out to achieve -- it heightens the tension to a peak using film craftsmanship (the fast intercutting of shots like Meadow's tires, people entering the restaurant, etc.), and then ends at exactly the most tense moment for anything that might have occured next. The effect has its merits and faults -- chief among them being that it is in opposition to the closure effect (descending action, the falling off from the peak to a resolution) the majority of the general audience is expecting -- but it was masterfully done, and it's the only example of which I now know that skirts the fallacy of imitative form (frex, the idea that the best way to write a story about something boring is to write boring sentences) and yet finds a compelling place beyond the emotional effect to a fulfillment of the series' themes.

It was a really remarkable magic trick: we as the audience were demanding something never before seen on television. Chase and Co. delivered. And the better you know the series, and the more you enjoy it for the non-whacking scenes, the more this end becomes the most effective way to exit the Sopranos narrative. Whatever happens afterwards, we feel at the ultimate moment exactly how Tony Soprano feels: that everyone is a disappointment or a threat, and that the end could come before you even know it. And then it did.

I really can't praise The Sopranos as a whole enough -- for its flaws and the limitations of its medium and makers, this episode and this series, are a landmark in the art of filmmaking. Last night we saw something that will be a watershed moment for future television narratives and where they can go. But time needs to go by for perspective, as with most great art.