The more I thought about it, the more it was a brilliant way to go out for David Chase. He lets the viewers choose their own ending. Depending on how you viewed Tony and the rest of the dynamic crew will determine the ending in your mind. Maybe you think Tony gets shot. Maybe you think he gets indicted. Maybe Meadow defends him. Maybe the truck driver or the black guys in the restaurant come and shoot him. Brilliant.
That and the multiple places in the show where you were waiting for someone to get whacked. Chase level set the tension real high last week with Bobby and Silvio getting capped, and he gave you plenty of spots where you were just waiting for something to happen.
My wife and some of her friends hated the ending, but, in retrospect, I think it was the best (maybe the only) way to do it. The only point that got me was that there was no acknowledgment by Tony and his gang that Phil took one in the head (and one on the head :D).
Not brilliant. Just a cop-out.
My favorite episode is on A&E tonight...where Chris and the other guy take the big Russian out to the Pine Barrens to whack him and get lost in the freezing cold woods. I laugh every time I watch it...how the two New Jersey Mafiosi apply their survival skills. I laugh just thinking about it.
That’s an awful lot of intuitive reasoning for a blank screen. It could be, you know, that Chase took the easy way out. And/or knew that people could make up their own endings, which is still the easy way out. And/or that he took the crass, calculatedly commercial step of leaving an opening for a film version, at the price of infuriating the show’s fans. Now if Chase had previously vowed there would be no rehash/movie version/alternate ending DVD, then the blank screen could be interpreted that Tony was killed and that has a certain sterile brilliance to it.