Charles McGrath in the New York Times adeptly discusses the reasons why the interrupted ending of “The Sopranos” incited such passion — both positive and negative — over the past week. Paraphrasing literary critic Frank Kermode, he writes that “we crave endings for the same reason that some religious sects look forward to the Apocalypse — because it’s the ending that gives shape and meaning to the otherwise random events that precede it.”

While he looks at the most popular interpretations, he also offers one of his own:

If you were fashionably inclined, you could also give the ending a meta-reading. What is that dark screen but an image of the darkness that was there before you turned your TV on in the first place?

In this interpretation we are reminded, the way we are reminded, say, by all the textual gimmicks in “Tristram Shandy,” that what we have been attending to is a construct — a show, in this case. Not only that, but we also realize that Tony never lived in West Caldwell, N.J., at all, but inside our sets, where he resides still, granted a gift that is about the last that we would ever have expected for him: immortality.

It’s a compelling reading — and one that is similar to my own initial interpretation, which argued that the ending reveals that Tony’s story is, in fact, our story.