roundtrip for the midnight train going anywhere, please

It already seems a bit late to chime in, but the last scene of the episode was brilliant. Part of it went straight for the gut, of course—flirting with the possibility of a whack, or a whack of A.J. or Meadow, or Meadow getting hit by a car, or the possibility that no one was showing because they’d all been whacked, and so on, all while being advised not to stop believing. On the other side, the scene was an exquisite exercise in high realism: diners, Journey, parallel parking—what else is there, really? In the end, the tension of finding the proper angle to parallel park was aligned with the tension of possibly being marked for murder, and that’s a pretty perfect condensation of the show’s affective tactics, and view of the psyche, as a whole.

David Chase is already denying a lot of the openings for interpretive creativity the episode seemed to leave—the main one being what I actually first thought—that Tony had been shot dead; if the show were from his p.o.v., one wouldn’t hear the gunshot, right? It’s too bad Chase is playing interpretive FBI man, but it shouldn’t stop us from getting hung up on such questions as why Meadow was so anxious about being late. . .

A good deal of the web discourse about the episode seems to be that it constituted a “giant ‘fuck you’ to the fans” because it didn’t deliver any of the endings people had been discussing and predicting for weeks. But at some point on Saturday, I realized that nothing was going to happen. I can’t believe it took me so long. Given the series’ longtime comfort with loose narrative ends, it would have been absolutely inconsistent with the tenor of the show to attempt to put forth a single event to function as closure. You didn’t like this ending? Well, in fact, any other ending would have seemed wildly anti-climactic.

As for the “fuck you,” it seems to me that the real target of that particular oath in this particular case is the drivelly local news culture that produces “stories” about TV episodes that air the evening of the newscast. The show didn’t deliver an event to serve as easy fodder for segments like this one, or for bar interviews in which people are asked if they were shocked to learn that the last five episodes were a peyote hallucination. Given the amount of news coverage the episode was getting before it aired, I’m wondering what happened afterward. . .