Although it is one of many possible interpretations of the series finale episode that Tony is shot and killed at point-blank range, the man in the diner that enters the bathroom (ala
The Godfather...a deliberately cheap ending-option for a certain mindset) is
not credited as Nicky Leotardo; the rumor being regurgitated began as a (no surprise here) New York Times article. He is listed in the credits merely as "Man in Members Only Jacket."
Go back to the "Seven Souls" montage at the beginning of the final season and the ensuing first episodes of the season. The viewer's salt was already being tested. People that were either sadly or angrily disappointed shouldn't be so shocked, although the blank screen (in all its relevant connotations & despite the earlier flashback to Tony & Bobby in the boat) was a trickster's ending, to be sure.
Perhaps an important notation to make when offering conjectures (hell, Tony awakes to an outfitted bedroom in the beginning and even changes shirts towards the end--both with many explanations possible) about the Soprano family's "final" journey, is that the b-side to "Don't Stop Believin'" is "Any Way You Want It." Speculation abounds with the open ending that there may be a feature film forthcoming. For now, Chase has intimated that he's already entertained ideas of doing a movie depicting a day in season six we didn't see, or a film about the "old days" when Tony was just a youngster.
The inclusion of
The Twilight Zone episode
"The Bard" (humorously about how Shakespeare would write for television) I found cute, since critics have been known to refer to
The Sopranos as "modern-day" Shakespeare.
The show has always examined how we rationalize and prioritize things and in the episode, A.J.'s arc goes from giving Dylan a thumbs-up & wanting to join the military to jetting off in his new BMW with his high school part-time model girlfriend. "While one who sings with his tongue on
fire..." haha. Great stuff.
Quite understandably, the cat has also been commented on numerous times in this thread. There are lots of funny moments in the finale, but perhaps the best was Paulie with the cat. While, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the forty-nine days in bardo (plus however old the cat was) had not yet passed for Christopher to be the cat (who, it seems, would relish tormenting Paulie), the cat, yes, could be Adriana, or maybe even Big Pussy if one subscribes to this particular sort of reincarnation interpretation.
More importantly, the cat is yet another in the line of symbolic animals used throughout the series to identify elements of Tony's psyche or to represent Tony himself.
And, perhaps most interesting and clever, is that the cat-as-Tony is also a reference to
Schrödinger's cat, a post-Heisenberg Principle thought-experiment designed to illustrate the uncertain incongruencies of particle physics in hopes of discovering more precise knowledge about our universe.
After an hour the cat is in a quantum superposition of coexisting alive and dead states. Yet when we look in the box we expect to only see one of the states, not a mixture of them.
Whatssa matta, cat got your tongue?
