I admit, I haven't read anything anyone in the media or the blogosphere has written about the Sopranos ending. So I might repeat something everyone's heard. So shoot me. Wait, don't do that. That would be predictable, or something....

I took a few minutes of my precious time to read this article from nj.com and got the gist of everything I needed to get the gist of about the ending:

Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

Not having ever watched the show, and being an expert at making judgments about stuff of which I do not know or fully understand, I think #2 is the likeliest scenario. And in that, I think the idea of Tony's life ending and never seeing it coming is the likelier intention (not the viewer being whacked).

And if that's the case, I think it's pretty clever and kind of deep.