Ross's predictions for the final episode of the Sopranos seem pretty sound. "The show isn't about the life and death of Tony Soprano," he writes, "in the end; it's about his soul, and the audience's (increasingly-vain) hope that a criminal they liked might be able to escape his pathologies and find redemption. The end of Tony's therapy, which closed off this possibility once and for all - with Melfi closing the door on him, in a scene that echoed the closing door at the end of the original Godfather - is the only ending that story needs. Killing him would be superfluous."
The final shot of last week's scene left me wondering if Tony wasn't going to turn the gun on himself, but somehow, that doesn't seem to fit. I'm also outside the camp that thinks Tony is going to die. Rather, my guess is that the final pivot will be AJ. He'll either have a moment of redemption in which he proves himself capable of the cruelty and violence that have sustained his father, or his paralysis before danger and threat will lead to death of his mother and/or sister. In the end, Tony's punishment isn't that he couldn't save himself, but that he couldn't save them. If Tony dies, though, I'd guess it would be at the hands of Paulie, who flirted with New York in the past and has, in recent months, felt acutely endangered by Tony's mercurial interpretation of his underling's loyalties.
Meanwhile, I was slightly disappointed in last week's show. Does anyone really think Phil would have allowed Vito and Bobby to be killed before Tony? You take out the underlings but you give the head of the family time to escape? Not terribly believable.
