Two Sopranos theories

David Chase, creator of "The Sopranos," left the country before the final episode of his HBO TV series was unveiled Sunday night. He knew a lotta people would be second-guessing him, or worse. He's somewhere in France right now, but before he left he gave an interview to the Newark Star-Ledger.

Chase won't give his own interpretation of the last Sopranos scene, but the writer posits two theories:

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

By the way, Chase doesn't dismiss the idea of a Sopranos movie someday.