The Sorpranos Find Earth

** Spoiler Warning **

Unless you've spent the past couple of days rendered away in a Syrian prison you've probably caught the media coverage of the last episode of HBO's Sopranos. Instead of providing some definitive answer on the fate of Tony Soprano - possible outcomes included getting whacked by the mob or entering a witness protection program - series creator David Chase concluded the series without a big plot point on which to hang the story.

Ron Moore, showrunner for another progressive TV series, Battlestar Galactica, explains the last Sopranos this way:

Chase managed to do the unthinkable, the unbelievable and the unprecedented: he yanked us out of their lives without any resolution whatsoever. We were torn away from Tony, Carmella, AJ, Meadow, Paulie, Sil and the all the rest without any idea what happens to them tomorrow or even later that same evening. In real life, when you lose contact with someone, you seldom if ever have the satisfaction of knowing how the myriad threads of their lives resolved themselves. They are removed from your circle of knowledge and yet their lives go on unbeknownst to you in ways you can only imagine. The Sopranos are gone from our lives, but their lives go on without resolution, much like ours. None of us have tidy, revelatory endings that are the culmination of our "story arcs" and neither will they.

There are some implications here - not the least of which are for fans of Moore's own "BSG" franchise, which is scheduled to conclude next season after four angt-ridden years of struggling with cylons, faulty human nature, and the quest to find Earth.

Simply put, Battlestar fans should expect narrative frustration and a sense of incompleteness married together with some kind of twist. Ron Moore - as listeners of his podcast commentary know - delights in zeroing in on TV viewers expectations and artfully kicking them in the stomach. We should epect nothing less for the big finale.

But there's something else at work here - the tension between serial and episodic TV. Those aforementioned podcasts frequently discuss the difficulty of delivering a show with season- and series-long story arcs that must (according to the network) also attract viewers who may not have watched every installment. It's a tension as old as "Gunsmoke". Writers thought that some of the recurring characters might benefit from show-to-show development, but the TV brass wanted the simplistic Western formula, where everyone except the weekly villain is reset in their places like figurines in a cuckoo clock.

So what David Chase did was quite subversive. The Sopranos ended on note of tension mixed with the notion that the "world" actually continues in perpetuity. This - for a groundbreaking series that thrived by the longer narrative arc - is actually a nod back towards the episodic model of television. Maybe the search for Earth is, in the final analysis, more about the hunt.

Tags: The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore