Eminent Domain

I posted this Sunday night on my MySpace blog...

The series finale of the Sopranos was incredible. I'm blown away. I have the feeling that a lot of people are going to bitch endlessly about it. I've already read a lot of message board/Internet anger about how it ended. People are calling for the head of David Chase. I disagree totally. The episode was brilliant, and here's why...

First, the least important part of the brilliance (but the part that actually had me yell out "YES!"). Phil died. And not only did Phil die, he died horribly. Shot in the head in front of his family, then had his skull crushed by an SUV's wheel. He earned it.

The ending itself was the real pay off, though. From the moment that Tony sat down in the diner booth and "Don't Stop Believin" started playing, my heart was racing. It was pounding like crazy. The episode was almost over. The series was almost over. This was it.

Every person in the diner became a suspect. Every time the door opened, I was on the edge of my seat. I was thinking "when is it going to happen?" Is the guy at the counter going to kill him? Has Carlo given them enough to put Tony away and are the feds on the way? Who are those two shady guys that just walked in? Then I realized it. I had become Tony Soprano.

Seriously. Bear with me here.

That paranoia, that tension, that suspense that I felt watching that scene, was the same paranoia that Tony lived with every day. He was always looking over his shoulder. "When is the other shoe going to drop?" Tony lived everyday like that in every situation, even the most benign ones (like having dinner with your family at a cheap diner).

The ending was great because you got to make it whatever you wanted. Did the guy at the counter go into the bathroom to get a gun (an obvious Godfather reference), come out, and kill Tony? Or did he kill Tony, Carm, and AJ just as Meadow walked in? Did nothing happen at the diner and the feds finally got enough to indict Tony (thanks to Carlo)? The ending is whatever you make of it. There is enough for us to think about, and debate about, for a long time.

Oh, and I think that the cat is Adriana reincarnated.

This is proof that I am alive and still have the ability to type. Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I've been very busy and very detached from my computer. I also haven't really had anything law-wise that I wanted to talk about for a while. My muse took a powder, apparently. Hopefully she comes back soon.