This past Sunday’s episode of The Sopranos was certainly the most anticipated and discussed series finale since Seinfeld’s, and certainly better than most television we’ll ever see. Less than 24 hours after its showing, reaction falls into two broad camps: praise for series creator David Chase’s genius, and disappointment at the putatively open-ended nature of the denouement. Indeed, the final scene rivals David Lynch’s finest for spurring interpretation and debate. (Not for nothing did Chase call his creation, “Twin Peaks set in New Jersey.”) If you’ve not seen it and want no spoilers, read no further.

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As the Sopranos’ (biological) family gathers at a diner, brutish patriarch Tony warily eyes incoming patrons. Tension builds — is a hit imminent? — and then, with a final closeup on the eponymous mob boss, a cut to black.

Plenty of viewers have commented that Tony Soprano’s death is implied: Chase stated that the cardinal clue to the series finale could be found in the first episode of this season; and in that, the now-deceased (as of the penultimate episode) Bobby Bacala remarked that when death comes, “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens.” We didn’t hear it, and Tony didn’t hear it — and when he ended, so did his universe. In this sense, the close of The Sopranos is wholly fitting. It was his tale, and there is nothing to see once he departs from it.

But this is not the whole of the series finale, nor even the major event within it. With so many plots, subplots, and narrative threads woven in the tapestry of Chase’s mob New Jersey, it is easy to lose track of what matters: namely, family. The advertising for the first season of the show played this up to an almost absurd degree, to the point that the then-new series appeared as a sort of black comedy. “If one family doesn’t kill him,” read the HBO marketing, referring to Tony Soprano, “the other will.” But the implied equality between the two “families” was always false. Time and again, the most difficult choices are always forced upon Tony by his real family — as is his ultimate tragedy. He was surely a psychopath in the classic sense — a remorseless killer of friend and foe — but what moral feeling he retained was for his own blood. His rough and often cruel solicitude for his children, Anthony Junior and Meadow, was quite nearly the only meaningful solicitude he had for anyone at all.

We can therefore assess the enduring moral worth of the series’ central figure by the moral trajectory of his children. The tragedy of The Sopranos is that in its final episode, we are brought to understand that this trajectory is irrevocably downward. The tremendously intelligent Meadow and the oafish A.J. are both shown to be their father’s children: calculating, rationalizing, and utterly amoral. In the finale, we are given hints that Tony Soprano himself is dismayed at this: Even the monster does not wish to produce more monsters. And yet he has done it, and on the surface, this is surely because of the moral erosion produced by a lifetime of exposure to his other “family” and its works.

Chase titled the final episode “Made in America,” and the easy inference is that the milieu of The Sopranos is just that. This is untrue, of course: Organized crime as such exists in nearly all cultures. On a deeper level, the idea of a society run by kinship ties and otherwise anarchic violence is deeply pre-democratic, and hence fundamentally anti-American. Some, including John Marini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada-Reno, have said that the Western film genre is essentially a retelling of the story of America itself: the bringing of order into the wilderness, and the concurrent decline of the rough code of vengeance and force as law and true justice emerge. From this comes democracy, and America. If the Western genre is the making of America, then the mob genre is its unmaking: the subversion of law and justice, and the replacement of order with the family and tribe. Indeed, in an unconscious bit of irony, the tribe — the mob, this thing of ours — is itself called family.