US:After eight years of teasing viewers with false leads and vanishing plotlines, The Sopranosbecame history on Sunday with a finale that confounded critics' expectations and left many fans seething with frustration.
The final episode opened with New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano lying on a bed in a safe house, clutching an automatic rifle as he waited for a rival New York mafia family to attack.
Most critics had predicted that the series would end with Tony's death or his admission to the FBI's witness protection programme, and for most of Sunday's episode both outcomes remained plausible. A deal with the New York family won the New Jersey gang a possible reprieve early on, but even after Tony's nemesis, Phil Leotardo, was shot in the head at a petrol station, the prospect of further violence hung in the air.
Tony's son, AJ, narrowly escaped death when his SUV caught fire, but the experience served to exorcise the junior Soprano's depression and he happily accepted his father's offer to arrange work experience at a pornographic film company.
Tony himself seemed depressed when he heard that one of his men had agreed to testify against him, and the final minutes of the show were freighted with tension. As he waited for his wife Carmella, daughter Meadow and AJ at a diner, Tony flicked through a jukebox before choosing Journey's Don't Stop Believin'. As Carmella and AJ arrived and the three exchanged chit-chat, the camera picked out any number of strangers who could have been an assassin.
Meanwhile, outside Meadow struggled to park in a minute-long scene that seemed to presage a terrible conclusion. When she parked at last, Meadow ran across the street, narrowly avoided being run over and opened the door of the restaurant.
A bell rang, Tony looked up, and then . . . nothing. The screen went blank, the soundtrack was silent and the credits rolled.
Angry fans called cable channel HBO to complain that they had been cheated, but Alan Sepinwall, television critic at the New Jersey Star Ledgerand one of America's leading authorities on The Sopranos, said the ending struck a perfect note.
"Why wouldn't a show that's taken such pleasure in rewriting the rules of storytelling - from making a sociopathic thug its hero on down - go out in the least conventional way possible?" he wrote.
