Did We Just Get Whacked?

David Chase is a genius. It’s what everybody’s talking about this morning. Yep, he’s a friggin’ genius.

I’ll admit it. Last night, I was mad at him. Angry that he didn’t “finish” the show the way Gilmore Girls and Sex and the City so neatly tied up loose ends and gave viewers closure about their favorite characters.

But that’s not what the show is about. It never has been. The show has been about a day in the life, about how someone so tough, so menacing, so larger than life can have the same complexities and trivialities in his everyday life…one kid that talks back, another with pie-in-the-sky ever-changing ambitions; a wife who knows what he does but chooses to look the other way and enjoy the lifestyle; a love-hate relationship with his sister; a mother who doesn’t love him; a relative with Alzheimer’s slowly fading; addictions that overtake him, emotional issues that overwhelm him; yada, yada, yada.

So why shouldn’t the last episode be – just that? A little bit of everyday life and a whole lotta nothing? Didn’t we get enough excitement after last week’s episode with two big cast casualties? And we did get to see Phil bite the bullet not once, but twice in a memorably gory yet amusing exit.

I’ve had the most fun checking out people’s theories online: the black screen represents Tony getting whacked and the very last things he sees and hears; their lives continue as we leave them with Tony paranoid but business as usual, the whole family gets knocked off by the guy in the bathroom and the seedy-looking fellow in the booth; the two guys are feds and arrest him abruptly; etc. My particular favorite theory is that music lover Chase built the show as a tribute to the Beatles’ last recorded album Abby Road by cutting his “masterpiece’s” final scene abruptly as the tension builds in much the same way “She’s So Heavy” ends right after the song rises to a crescendo but immediately cuts to silence. Hmm. Interesting. I think I may go back and listen to Abby Road and see if there are any other correlations to that album. I could completely see Chase weaving some Beatlesque symbolism throughout the show. He’s all about the music.

But think about it. Chase did the only thing he could do to deliver the unexpected – absolutely nothing. He’d be accused of being too predictable if he sent Tony to jail, enlisted him in a witness protection program or whacked Tony or the entire family in that serene restaurant setting. It was too easy to do that. He had to throw us off and the only way he could do that was to leave it so open-ended that we’d finish the show however we saw fit or speculate to no end. Again, he’s a friggin’ genius.

So what’s your theory? What really happened after the scene cuts away?