Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
Whenever this comes up, I always say: yes, that is the conclusion Chase desperately wanted to imply with the cinematography of the last scene of Made in America, that T met a bloody end in front of his family.
My problem is, that ending is not set up AT ALL. Not thematically, not via the narrative nor any sub-plot throughout the whole goddamn series, much less that season, and certainly that episode (Yes, I know Tony and Bobby talk about what it is like to get killed, and Chase pulls from that as foundation for his ending, but those guys were 1) celebrating a mid-life birthday and 2) have killed a lot of people, talk of death is not out of the realm of possibility as idle chit-chat).
Think about it, the crux of that final scene is that Members Only Guy is a New York button-man acting out orders from Phil, despite Phil himself being murdered some number of days previous, and the highest remaining power of the New York family sitting down with Tony and Little Carmine to hash out a truce (very quickly, I might add, intimating that Phil had little support for the war with Tony, and was its sole driving force--we even see this in action in a scene in the middle of the episode, when Phil's consigliere suggests reaching out to Tony to end the war, but is quickly admonished). Are we supposed to believe this lone gunman somehow didn't get the word? Doesn't care about the peace? Or are we supposed to believe that New York will sit down for a truce, then break it in the next couple of days to kill a boss? Bobby is dead and Syl is in a coma, but ostensibly everyone else returned to their normal lives after the sit-down after Phil got killed, and there aren't shootouts in the streets from soldiers on either side who happened to not get word, nor is New York shown in any other scene openly reneging on the deal.
I could STILL swallow the ending as "acceptable" if, at any point in the episode or season, Chase had explored the idea of guys acting on their own to exact justice despite explicit orders not to. Bear in mind, we're not talking about Richie Aprile hounding Beansie after Tony told him to lay off, I'm talking someone taking matters into their own hands and doing something that could re-ignite a war AFTER a tentative peace had been made. We got kinda close to that with Tony B, but the circumstances, from a narrative and thematic sense, were much different.
It's a bad ending not because it isn't supported by the use of cuts and music/SFX cues in the scene, but because it isn't supported by anything done in the series up to that point, and is purely the exercise of a man who had written himself into a corner and decided to use gimmicky cinematography to obfuscate his complete lack of a thorough narrative.
I would argue once Phil died there was a chance for a takeover of NY/NJ. and its plausible Phil's second or anyone who was left in NY made the move.
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