N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd is calling Sopranos creator David Chase “an apocalyptic tease” and claiming that last Sunday night he “gave us a gimmicky and unsatisfying film-school-style blackout for an end to his mob saga, a stunt one notch above ‘it was all a dream.’ It was the TV equivalent of one of those design-your-own-mug places.
“Even though I loved the first few years of The Sopranos, Chase always struck me as passive-aggressive,” she opines. “The more fans obsessed on his show, the longer his hiatuses would grow and the slower his narrative velocity moved. His ending was equally perverse, throwing the ball contemptuously back at his fans after manipulating them and teasing them for an hour with red herrings — and a ginger cat.
“Surely, after eight years with this family, we deserved some revelation better than ‘life goes on…or not.'”