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Victor: It's the sidewalk in front of Satriale's pork store, scene, you may recall, of Tony Soprano's very first panic attack, when he caught his dad snipping off Mr. Satriale's pinky finger over an unpaid gambling debt. Three lawn chairs are pulled up, close-like. In each, a typewriter, as Mob types denominate hacks such as ourselves. On our table, a fresh pan of ziti, whipped up by Carmela and rejected out of hand by that ingrate Anthony Jr. Our mission: Prognosticate and such on how The Sopranos, set to get popped tomorrow night, will meet its demise.

But first, I offer a confession: I think I'm glad it's ending. The extortion, the hands shoved in vats of boiling spaghetti sauce, the smothering of elderly widows with their own pillows during botched robberies – plus a cast of sad, depressive characters. Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony's long-suffering shrink, recently shot back at her own couch doctor: “What are you saying? My whole work with Tony Soprano, all these years, it's all been a waste of time?”

I ask you, my lovely goomars: Do we at all feel the same way as in relation to our own 6.5 seasons with Tony? Are we sad the fat lady's singing? Or are we a little glad the fat guy's going? Discuss, irregardless of fear or favour, and all that that entrails. My only proviso, to continue quoting the great one: “If the proper response isn't forthcoming, and in a businesslike time frame, my next move will not be further conversation.”

Elizabeth: Well put, Big V. Or, to paraphrase that sage of the ages, Little Carmine Lupertazzi, “We're at the precipice of an enormous crossroad.” I feel like I've had my hands across my eyes for the past several years, afraid to look, unable to look away. And this season has just got more and more tense and bloody – a fitting end for Shakespeare in New Jersey. Tony's turned out to be a big, fat, capicolla-eating Lear. His kingdom's fallen apart, his captains are dying around him and his faulty loyalty gauge will be his downfall.

And, of course, he's nuts and no longer has Dr. Melfi to follow him out in the rain. What's the last act for the Skip?

Johanna: For these last few episodes, I've been feeling the kind of nearly nauseating excitement I get at the end of a great novel. I know it has to end, I feel the inevitability, but I can't bear the thought of not seeing these people any more.

Make no mistake, The Sopranos is a work of art, the modern equivalent to Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Victor: Thus, such turns of phrase as Uncle Junior's description of the perfect hit being “as silent as a mouse pissing on cotton.”

Johanna: Yes! This series is a classic, tragicomic saga in which all of life can be found. Its particular brilliance is that it's a purely 21st-century American one, set squarely in its time and place.

Everything about this show is fat.

Victor: Even the still-sultry Dr. Melfi's gone from nice legs to nice logs. And as of about three episodes ago, Tony officially sprouted man boobs (although, to be fair, neither doctor nor patient approaches Ginny Sacrimoni, owner of the 95-pound buttock mole that almost started a Mafia war).

Elizabeth: Let's not forget little Vito Jr., or as I like to think of him, Tub o' Goth. He's a chunk off the old block and now emotionally crippled by his late father's homosexuality. In the Mob world, you can beat a pregnant stripper to death, you can even mug Lauren Bacall, but don't you dare make googly eyes at a guy with a handlebar mustache.

Johanna:The plot lines are just as puffy as both Vitos, crammed with betrayals, reversals, hubris — not only Lear, but Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Henry IV, too. All that heartache between fathers and sons, mothers and sons, brothers and cousins, awareness of which occasionally flickers in Tony's squinchy eyes. Physically, the characters themselves are so enormous, I practically gain 30 pounds just by watching an episode. (What will happen to all those plus-size thespians? Who will employ them so well ever again?) The SUVs are gigantic, the malls vast and echoing, the houses obscene. And the largeness is so exquisitely specific to Tony's class – there is not one item, not one pillow or picture or dish in Carmela's house, that I would like to own.

Victor: I think my favourite line ever was when an antiques dealer asked Carmela if she'd like his card and she very patiently told him, in her Jersey patois, “I don't hay-ve ayn-tiques, my house is tray-dish-een-al.” As for what all these bloated actors will do for work, it brings to mind another question I've long pondered: Who plays those silicone-injected strippers at the Bada Bing? Tell me it's not hungry rookies from the Screen Actors Guild.

Johanna: They're strippers, dear. No one is that good an actor.

Elizabeth: And, terrifyingly, one of them is often required to service Tony, which is like watching a Chihuahua ride a blue whale.

Victor: You give Uncle Junior Chekhov a run for his money. As for that gnawing feeling that I finally want The Sopranos to die: It feels as if it wants me to want out.

Christopher shooting his sweet AA sponsor. Bobby Bacala – himself smoked in front of several little kids at the toy-train store last week – carrying out the laundromat liquidation of a young Canadian dad with no Mafia ties. Anthony Jr. abetting battery-acid torture. As the end nears, to paraphrase T. again, I feel like I should be gargling with Drano, to get the stains off my insides.

Or maybe I'm being too bleak. Maybe I simply need to get smashed on sacramental wine, à la Tony's loser son, or appease my conscience by making a donation to a suicide hotline, as Tony so thoughtfully did when he depressed his mistress into offing herself.

Elizabeth: Vittorio, you just need to go back to your altar-boy youth for answers. After all, Carmela's seen no problem reconciling her faith with living off her husband's blood money. One Hail Mary, a couple of church fundraisers, and her conscience is as clean as that brand-new Her-meez scarf Tony bought her.

Johanna: Find a diamante-studded press-on nail in your husband's laundry and then tell me how you feel, Ms. Liz. Carmela has sold her soul for cash and then regretted it numerous times – it's one of the great recurring themes of the show, what any of us is willing to ignore to keep our lives intact. In Season 5, Tony skewered Carm's lust for luxury with one brilliant line: “Right, you'd be just as happy with a Honda Civic and a little gold heart on a chain.” Chilling!

Victor: She may not be a mayonnaiser, as Tony once dismissed the snobs who wouldn't let the Sopranos join their country club, but the woman has her standards.

Elizabeth: Yes, and I think she's got a pearl-handled pistol stuck down the front of her push-up bra. Carm may bat those big blue eyes, but inside she's tougher than Artie Bucco's day-old saltimbocca. That's the wonderful thing: The women on this show are harder than the capos, and it's not just their acrylic nails. Look at Tony's mother Livia ordering a hit on her son; or his sister Janice stealing Svetlana's prosthetic leg – over a record collection!

Victor: Janice – bad teeth, bad hair, bad ass and all – is the Soprano psychopath I will miss the most, a woman who guilt-tripped Tony into hauling away her murdered boyfriend in a Hefty bag, only to whine soon after about how Bobby Bacala's loyalty to his “dead, idealized wife” stood in the way of her next relationship.

And let's not forget Meadow. She's as bipolar as her dad Tony, only in terms of her morals rather than her moods. I loved when her boyfriend was murdered by the Mafia, so she rebelled by accusing her dad of being “Mr. Mob Boss” – a major transgression – while threatening to take a year off university. Instead, she compromised by heading back to Columbia, but signing up for a course called Morality, Self and Society.

Elizabeth:Wait a second, was that around the time she made Christopher sell her some speed so she could “study” all night? Speaking of chilling, Giovanna, do you remember Carm's quiet threats toward that woman who wouldn't write Meadow a college recommendation? She loves wielding Tony's power.

Johanna: Oh, Carmela has loved being the boss's wife for much more than the dough. She also loves Tony for his certainty, his strength, his decisiveness – qualities that, at one end of the continuum, make him the very definition of a man, and at their extreme, a monster. She's Lady Macbeth, yes, but more complicated, with more consciousness. And with a team of cleaning ladies to get those bloodstains out.

Elizabeth: If Carmela has the odd endearing quality, Tony's a pure monster this season, unredeemed even by his previous love of helpless animals, from racehorses to ducks. But the violence has to be the plan of producer David Chase: He's at least giving Tony the glorious, gory-ous exit he was born for, and saving him the ignominy of a tamer death, like Johnny Sack's cancered shrivelling, or Uncle Junior peeing and drooling himself off this mortal coil.

Victor: I've been waiting for Uncle Junior to die a shameful death ever since he lemon-meringue-pie-faced that great, brassy moll Bobbi on account of her letting it out at her (and Carmela's) nail salon that his oral gifts go far beyond mere words.

Johanna: The stage must be littered with corpses when the story ends.

When Uncle Tony snuffed Christopher a few shows back, it really froze my spine, because I realized everyone – everyone – was fair game. I predict that the weakest will survive, including the restaurateur Artie Bucco, one of the all-time great screen weasels, and Paulie Gualtieri, as unkillable as a cockroach. His hairdo was no accident: He's always been a skunk in silk shirts. He may well outlast them all, especially now that my beloved Silvio's been shot nearly to death.

Elizabeth: Do I hear Darkness on the Edge of Town playing in the background?

Victor: Paulie's always been a madman, but I have to cut some slack for a guy who forced the cliquey matrons in his mom's nursing home to let her into their circle, by way of breaking the arm of their dowager ringleader's son. And when Paulie ordered 500 prayer cards for his mom's ill-attended funeral a couple weeks back, I had to stop and dry my peeps just like I did that time Angie Bompensiero was forced to work the kielbasa-sample station at the supermarket after her husband Pussy got deep-sixed for stooling to the feds.

Elizabeth: Isn't it great how pathetic their lives have turned out to be? The whole show's about the twilight of the shiny-shoe gods. Instead of being the Mafia from The Godfather myth, they're just a bunch of guys in a dying industry (pardon the pun), dealing in black-market Viagra and shaking down 17-year-old Starbucks managers. It would be fitting if Tony just slipped quietly away to live out a boring retirement in Florida, but I don't think it's going to happen.

Victor: Liz, you may enjoy a certain in-house knowledge in regards to matters Italianate, but speak for yourself when it comes to retirement dreams. Even I sighed with a sort of wispy envy when Johnny Sacrimoni dismissed Carmine Jr.'s donship résumé, noting that Carmine's chief accomplishment was “five years in Florida fixing wet T-shirt contests.”

Johanna: I especially loved that they failed to shake down Starbucks, that the 17-year-old manager didn't give in.

Victor: Four thousand possible combinations for your morning coffee, most of them involving Italian words, and they can't accommodate a Mafia shakedown.

Johanna: Not to harp too much on this American metaphor, but the mobsters' shrivelling power parallels the shrivelling of their country, the shrinking of its imagination, largesse and influence in the world.

Never forget, the Sopranos are the Jersey family — the “pygmy family,” as Phil Leotardo dismissed them last week. They live west of the Hudson, which may as well be the Midwest.

Elizabeth: And, just like all their countrymen, they're watching the world pass them by, and the new global sharpshooters — Russians, Latinos, Québécois — outsmart them at every turn.

Johanna: Yes, all their beloved notions of respect and ritual are being undermined by their own lazy slobbiness and rampant consumerism. This season I've really noticed how blandly American the Soprano clan is: shopping in big-box stores, fretting about maintaining their health insurance and slumping inert in front of their huge TVs, which are permanently on. What they're watching is always deliciously ironic – remember when the late, great Adriana, panicked about informing to the Feds, chilled out by watching Everyone Loves Raymond?

Victor: Panicked is right. Her projectile vomiting straight across the FBI boardroom table was a scene for the ages.

Johanna: Even the Feds barely care about the Mob any more; they've been eclipsed by the terrorist threat. Why tinker with money launderers when there are suicide bombers? Tony and the G-men swap sandwiches now. Tony is on his own, physically, psychically and metaphorically, abandoned even by his shrink. That last image of him in the penultimate show, alone on a bare mattress in a borrowed house, clutching a machine gun in the dark – so tragic.

Elizabeth: Poor Tony, left alone in a fetal position with his gun and his Oedipal issues. I like how his recent peyote trip showed him one thing: that he's waiting for the “bus” – there's a flattering way to refer to your mother – to come back for him.

Victor: Still, I'm not convinced Tony's been brought so low that he'll actually be popped by the writers. Are we seeing no chance at all of a movie sequel? If Tony is in fact getting it, tell me at least that Carm and Meadow will live. I see them taking over the Sit-Tite Luncheonette, where Tony once stapled a parking ticket to a guy's forehead. Carmella could work on a BA part-time through correspondence, and Meadow could sit at the lunch counter and power drink as only she can. But whoever else gets neutralized, tell me Janice Soprano lives to ride the teacup ride another day.

Elizabeth: She's probably already got her beady eye on Bobby Bacala's successor. It seems that as the present generation falls, clutching their chests, we're meant to see that the violence will live on: Anthony Jr., when he's not whining about his dad-given depression has shown a genuine talent for torture. And now that Meadow's dating Patsy Parisi's son, a new dynasty is born. I predict she gives up college for a Joisey mansion filled with gold toilet seats, and starts making ziti that would make Carm cry. With the occasional pinkie tucked in for flavour, of course.

Victor: Please, Carm, make sure she gets your recipe for Lincoln-log hot-dog sandwiches. And can anyone snag Christopher's mother's secret formula for fluffernutters while I'm thinking of it?

Johanna: Meadow is the only one remotely tough enough to lead them on.

She's like a less-threatening Hillary Clinton. I think she'll get her law degree and use it wisely, infiltrating the Internet and banking systems, revamping what crime families concentrate on. Instead of the Bing, she can hang out at her spa, which will import all the best illegal creams from Asia. And instead of Satriale's, she'll run a shiny electronics store, which will supply the security cameras the cops will install on every corner to catch criminals – a deal she swung during spinning class. And who will be her second? Paulie. “I worked for your dad and your granddad …”

Victor: As long as Paulie's white-hair thingies live on, ideally with their owner taking a little well-deserved marlin-trolling time aboard the See Vous Play, I'm a happy man. And I'm thinking you two may well be right about Meadow's ascendancy: She is, after all, the granddaughter of Livia Soprano, a woman who actually did her best to follow up when she threatened to kill her nattering kids, but who also spared great-nephew Christopher's life because he once put up her storm windows. Priorities (not to mention the ability to dodge a bullet to your beehive, delivered by your husband) are important when it comes to … family.

Elizabeth: And maybe Adriana will come back from the dead – after all, we never actually saw Silvio shoot her. I'd like this last shot: Adriana, wearing a leopard-skin miniskirt, framed in the Bada Bing doorway, uttering her immortal catchphrase. “Chris-tuh-fuh!”

Johanna: Then she sees Tony, and the door swings shut.

The final episode of The Sopranos airs Sunday on TMN and Movie Central.