Wow was that bad. Almost impressively so. Ben Adler turned to me at the end and defended it. "They couldn't kill Tony," he said. "That would've been trite." Well, it would have been expected, at least. An interesting trick Chase and the writers pulled. Because we all assumed this was a good show, and they wouldn't do the actually trite thing and kill off the hero's enemies and put his family on stable footing, we began expecting that Tony would die, and the final episode would be fraught and tough. By going and doing the actually trite thing and making the last episode like a hyper-violent finale to a warm-hearted sitcom, the show managed to be surprising to its fans. But the cost was that it was bad. And no, the uncertainty of the final shot doesn't change that. That sense of continuity may have been the right close for the series, but coming atop this episode, it felt like a cop-out.
