Sopranos wrap-up: The House Next Door has its usual Monday morning wrap-up, which I endorse more or less fully, as well as links to other wrap-ups around the Web and press. What is crystalizing as my take on the final sequence is in the comments of my original post, though I still go back and forth on it.

I haven't seen many people comment on the absurd brutality of the gas station sequence (filmed almost in my beloved Randolph, like five minutes from my house, right where Shankar once got a ticket for turning left), but it seems to me that that moment, and not the final five minutes, is Chase's real middle finger to his audience. The violence there, punctuated by a vomiting bystander, has roughly the same symbolic content as the gawking crowd standing outside the Bing last week: we who have been gleefully watching these whackings for the last decade are ghouls.