This Thing of Ours

Here are some of the text messages I received at around 10:05 last night:

"WTF?"

"Worst. Finale. Ever."

"Who took Jr's dentures?"

"Meadow..Mmmmmm."

"I just stopped believing."

In case you live at the bottom of the Hudson River, you're still trying to understand the anti-climax that was last night's series finale of The Sopranos. How many guys that look like Paulie just lost a bundle in Vegas after Tony didn't get whacked, didn't turn state's, didn't get assumed into heaven by the winged Borderline Livia?

Actually, the abrupt screen blackout that ended the diner scene was, unless I'm mistaken, supposed to convey an ambiguity as to who walked through the chimed door just a second before. Was it Meadow heading in from the parking lot, or some button-man Tony recognized that caused him to shoot that look of mild consternation as the ultimate frame of this landmark drama? Not even David Chase knows for sure.

People have already begun to bitch. They wanted bloodshed, mayhem, RICO indictments, closure! But they forget their sense of disappointment is moored to their fanatical love of a show that trafficked in the ultra-mundane at least as much as it did in the extraordinary. These characters slept with the fishes just as a sure as they got singing trouts for Christmas. Did anyone really expect Tony to have his Analyze This moment and, mirabile dictu, be cured by Dr. Melfi? Has any of us ever actually been cured by a psychotherapist? Don't some mob bosses end their days waiting for pasta night in prison, instead of drying out on the slab?

In fact, there was one unlikely character turnaround and its constituted my favorite joke of last night's episode: Agent Harris's. The G-Man who you once would have thought was either going to slap the handcuffs on New Jersey's elusive don or be disappeared in the Pine Barrens came to empathize with his former suspect and delivered the vital intel that saved Tony's life. He gave up the whereabouts of Phil Leotardo. When another FBI agent walked into Harris's sub-basement office, aglow with Al Qaeda footage, and told him of Leotardo's whacking, Harris, channeling all of us, shouted, "We're going to win this thing!"

You're a no-good lying rat if you tell me you didn't secretly share that wish all along. If hearing a federal agent sound off his criminal abetment like that had your disbelief crashing double-quick, consider that a running conceit of this series was that sociopaths are notoriously charismatic. They'd have to be for us follow the ups and downs of this one for close to a decade. More dramatic than Dr. Melfi's stamping out of her guilty clinician's impulse to reform the incorrigible was her stamping out of her even guiltier thrill-seeking hope that incorrigible was exactly what her favorite patient was.

No better lesson was nail-gunned home last night than the following: The Sopranos earned its reputation for defying the expectations of television by cleaving so tightly to those of reality. Like another famously ill-received but perfectly apt finale, Seinfeld's, this one carried its genius for the frayed and humdrum to a self-satirizing conclusion. The Sopranos wasn't a show about nothing; nothing was just what happened in between murders.

You got a problem with that?