When everything was closing in on Tony, how could it end?

Praise has to go to the team that made this series; for not leaving it with a predictable finale. In the most annoying ending of all time...it ended in the only way it could have.

This is the seventh box set taking the excellent 'Sopranos' to it's inconclusive conclusion. The final nine episodes included here are of the same high standard as those before it and continues the build up of tension started in Season six part 1. Anybody who has watched the show and has got to this late stage in the saga will not be needing a review to decide on a purchase, you're going to buy it anyway!!. To those people it is an excellent buy. i'm just a little disappointed that the cost has remained substantially higher than all the series before it. You've got to buy it to complete the set and they know that! For this point alone i've reduced the score to four stars.

This last (half) series of the finest TV show ever made is actually one of its best (semi) seasons, so it makes some sense to review this masterwork from the (hopefully now spoiler-proof) end. The Sopranos finishes, indeed, as wonderfully as it began and carried on: constantly complimenting the viewer's intelligence, right up to the bitter-sweet d??nouement.

Yes, the penultimate episode is the proper narrative/dramatic "end," with its stunningly-staged assassination of Baccala and the calamitous (and, typically of the show, almost hilarious) near-fatal wounding of Silvio (to the sound of Nat King Cole, the sight of naked Bing bystanders and with hideous collateral damage to a passing motorcyclist).

But the actual finale itself had to, er, not happen; in that typical Sopranos life-goes-on manner of astonishing observation of, and pleasure in, the less extreme, often seemingly mundane, and frequently drop-dead-laughing details of "family" life. (Examples, I'm sure, will crowd in on everyone who knows the show: Junior getting the hump with an unflattering court artist some series back; Junior's conviction, in this series, that his will-executor - an unseen character we know, only from Janice's brief reference, to have an artificial larynx - is from outer space; the ketchup bottle in the last ever episode... there are so many.)

Individual episodes in this last set are also quite outstandingly brilliant. For me, number three ("Remember When"), is perfect Sopranos. It has an exquisitely-constructed counterpoint between a trip wherein Tony basically confronts Paulie with the problem of his trouble-making indiscretion about three series back, interspersed with the unfolding Cuckoo's Nest tragedy of Junior's inglorious "rule" of the mental health facility that is now his domain. The build-up of tension in these parallel worlds is breathtaking. Even as Tony finally asserts his scary authority over Paulie on an extremely uncomfortable boat-trip, Junior's "career" is meeting a sticky, violent end at the hands of a disturbed youth whose worship he has cultivated. The last shot of this episode, a track across one of those outdoor "pet encounter" sessions for Corrado's fellow-inmates, finishes on one of the most poignant images I've ever seen on TV, a devastating pan from the disfigured cat he's vacantly cuddling to the lost, toothless, living-dead face of Junior. Beautiful, dreadful.

So: the final episode has a deliberate, but no less entertaining, sense of bathos to it. And this is Sopranos "anti-climax," remember, so it was always going to be a cut above. Indeed, to echo the quite credible references from other reviewers to its Shakespearian level of attainment, I have to say that the Sopranos' ending certainly puts it amongst the greats for all time - with no small hint of the Existential playfulness we've all come to treasure.

In fact, this last series ends with the most vivid illustration of quantum physics since Schrodinger's Cat - really! Without getting into "spoiler" territory, I think we can confidently say (or not) that what happens "next" is entirely up to you/us. Or not: it's the audience ourselves who can most reasonably be considered to get "annihilated" in the series' last split second. Tony's "fate" won't be resolved until we reopen the "box" and look inside to see whether that Sopranos cat is alive or dead. The Uncertainty Principle in a nutshell - only the box gets switched off for us before we can look further.

Mischievous David Case would probably deny it (just as he playfully pleads ignorance to the significance of all those oranges and eggs), but there is some exceptionally witty referencing going on. As Tony's fellow-patient Schwinn (the great Hal Holbrook) says early in the first phase of this final season, "reality" is only a perception of wave-forms and "we're all connected" (this in an episode that also features some Creationist nutters getting roundly satirised).

So: that very last blip-out shot of Tony in the diner marks our own "disconnection" from the Sopranos' universe, an untidy switch-off that marks a proper anti-climax, weakly rhymed with the HBO "click-off" logo or the "stylus yank" cut-off at the end of every opening credits). It's that deliberate, that random.

Maybe they all go to Paris, as Tony did in his near-death experience (the Eifel Tower beacon tantalisingly visible from an "American" hotel window) and as Carm actually does (only to encounter dead Adriana in a boulevard... and elsewhere ask Ro whether the place really exists when they're not there). The last episode even playfully gives us a supernaturally "aware" cat to plague Paulie in our last glimpses of him!

Fantastic stuff - and all this in a "gangster" show that, during its time with us, has given us some of the funniest, most violent, tender, groovy and jaw-droppingly original moments we've ever had the pleasure of witnessing in a TV programme! The whole thing on box set - get it. Watch it. And, if you care at all about the cultural future, keep it as a bequest for your kids, along with all the other great complete works of which we might avail ourselves.

The sopranos is my all time favourite series ever to be on telly,its great and this for me was the best series out of them all.my favourite character died NO not tony,and the episods were very strong,will miss it but can always watch it back.

One of the best drama series of all time comes to a quite brilliant, and on reflection incredibly satisfying end.

Of course the end scene drove many people used to neat Hollywood endings mad, although this seems so disappointing that fans of this series appear to have learned nothing about serious intelligent drama not following formulaic structures.

Indeed, if you think about the last scene a bit and its openness is part of the point of the whole series.

For my money, the explanation of the final scene is easy- it's when the FBI, and thus by association, our (the camera's, the audiences') surveillance stops. There's no 'the bloke in the toilet's an assassin who comes out and whacks them all/ FBI man who arrests them all/ is a terrorist who blows them all up' or whatever other overly formulaic theory has been out there on the interweb, the show has been from the first to the last scene so much more intelligent and layered than that.

Ignore all that, and just enjoy one of the best examples of television as an artform you'll ever see.