Why Tony Soprano must die.(the Tube)

Television ... that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night--Ray Bradbury

Tony Soprano must die. There's really no other way the brilliant HBO series can end. Consider the options:

1) He goes into the Witness Protection Program, gets a new life as an insurance salesman in North Dakota. How you doin'. You got enough term insurance? 'Cause things, I dunno, they have a way of happenin'. After six months he'd snap, and beat a waiter to death at the Olive Garden for passing off rigatoni as mostaciolli. Not that the guy had it coming. But, you know, things had been buildin' up.

It wouldn't be dramatically satisfying for Tony to sink into a new life of existential kinship with the infinite flatness of the prairie. Picture it: Tony unmanned, sitting on a patio in his robe in January in West Fargo, staring at the dead end of a cold cigar. Unbent, unpunished, unmoored, and powerless. History remembers the kings that abdicate, but not with much affection.

2) Tony just goes on and on as before. He has another affair with some cynical, bitter Russian stripper, spends a year agonizing over some hothead in the organization who doesn't understand the way things are--Doesn't he know some guy has to get clipped every season? This genre of ours, it has rules. He has a falling out with Paulie Walnuts over a Grecian Formula joke. He goes to therapy and complains about the new pills-They help with the anxiety, but doc, they give me gas. Guys in my line of work, we can't get up all the time and leave the room, people get nervous. And if I stay, well, badda bing badda boom, you know? And so on, and so on. He plugs away until one day he has the big, whaddya call it, cardial infraction, and he drops hard. Just like everyone else. Larger than life, right up to the moment he was smaller than death.

3) Or Tony could go to jail. This would mean "The Sopranos" turns into a courtroom drama, and there are enough of those. It would also mean dragging up all the crimes and schemes and whackings, which no one really remembers very well. We remember the high-profile rub-outs--Adriana, Big Pussy, that one sleazy guy who was shacking up with Tony's sister (like that wasn't punishment enough)--but a trial would turn ...