Remember the good times

Perfect ending to one of the most beautiful shows ever. No, Tony wasn't shot, stripped of power or arrested. He wasn't forced to pull a Henry Hill and eat egg noodles and ketchup like some schnook. And his family stayed with him.

So what did happen? Nothing. No resolution, because the point isn't in what happens but in how you accept what happens, and how you manage to be happy despite what happens because you can't ever really control what happens.

So we get the family in a diner as a lineup of potential assassins enters the restaurant -- everyone from the gangbangers who might be hired guns or perhaps representatives of a new power order, to the goomba you'd expect might do it, to the guy who looks like an ordinary nobody so you think, yea, it's gonna be him.

Of course, that would be too easy. But I still squirmed and leaned forward as Meadow struggled to parallel park between two cars you think might go off like a Pinto when she grazes the bumpers.

The camera moves around restlessly between Meadow and the family in the diner. Every new shot looks like the one set up to stage the final violent act -- we've all been trained to look for it, the way the camera lingers, the target slightly off center. It doesn't come.

And when Meadow gets the car parked, and A.J. recalls Tony's wisdom in a moment of understated epiphany that could finally mark his own turning point, in bursts Meadow to what you are sure will be a big explosion that takes out the whole family.

But no. Instead we get ten seconds of black screen without a sound or graphic. And just as you sit up and wonder if the fucking cable went out at a critical moment -- up comes the credits, silently.

And you think, huh? And then it hits you that it couldn't have ended any other way.

Beautiful.