This was the ending… This was the ending? Americans stared slack-jawed at their screens – initially too stunned to be angry – wondering if the invisible middle-finger of David Chase had been pointing towards them through the darkness of those final seconds. It quickly dawned on them, once the end credits started rolling, that not only were their sets and signals in perfect working order, but also that this was the ending David Chase had intended. When David Chase, The Sopranos‘ creator and guiding force, decided to end his magnum opus with that sudden cut to black, and then allowed that blackness to linger for ten agonizing seconds, he convinced millions of HBO subscribers across the continent that their TV sets had committed electronic hara-kiri, or else their signal had cut out at the worst possible moment. Just as Meadow reaches the diner’s door and pushes it open, Tony looks up and… blackness. Meadow’s a bit late, and seems to be having trouble parking her car. One by one, the other members of his immediate family arrive – except for Meadow – and they start to eat onion rings and indulge in small talk. Let’s just remind ourselves how – to use street parlance – the final scene of The Sopranos ‘went down’: Tony arrives at the diner, and selects Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” from the juke-box console at his table. It begs the question, though: if a mafia boss falls in a diner, and no-one is around to see it – or even hear it – does it make him dead? He’s Dead? Really? Now that, my friends, is the definition of a perfect mafia hit. Over a million witnesses to a murder, and not one of them could give a credible statement or offer reliable testimony.

Do you know why? Because hardly anyone – myself included – even knew that it had happened.

Hardly anyone flinched, raged, gasped or wept for the terminated Don. The strange thing is that little of the raw emotion stirred up by the finale was connected with the actual assassination of Tony Soprano.

Recall is easier in the case of Tony, as every single witness was doing exactly the same thing at the time of his assassination: getting ready to kick their TVs into a million pieces. As is said with JFK, no American will ever forget where they were, or what they were doing, when Tony Soprano was shot.

No look over the shoulder kick