While the season’s final episode of The Sopranos left a lot of people disappointed, it thrilled me with dis-ease. I had all but given up on the series about halfway through the season — the writing seemed tired and obvious, the plot points flat out unbelievable — but the sense of expectations betrayed last night I thought was a perfect commentary on two of the show’s ongoing concerns: therapy and recovery.

By failing to do the kind of thing many fans and members of his extended family think him destined to do (whack rival boss Phil Leotardo for killing one of his capos, or take out his “nephew” Christopher for banging some broad he wanted for his own), Tony is letting them down — but he is delighting his therapist. The scene where he was complaining to Dr. Melfi that he had been a faithful husband and had in general tried to control his impulses only to be rewarded in this fashion was priceless. Anyone who has gone as far into the house of mirrors therapy offers as Tony has knows the feeling: Where is my big reward?

Christopher, meanwhile, met the perfect woman in AA. Except for the fact that he’s married. And his wife is expecting. And she is someone his boss has designs on. So not long after she is fucking him in his car after a meeting (I must be going to the wrong groups!) they are smoking heroin together and congratulating each other because they are not using needles. Like a lot of people in recovery they are frustrated that, after months or even years of good behavior, all they get is their sanity

The dis-ease comes from the sense of disappointment both Tony and Christopher feel in ordinary life. They’ve got to blow — maybe. One of the hints about next year’s short final season (eight episodes remain) may lie in the Christmas party at Tony’s at the end. Christmas is the ultimate disappointment for many adults; you never get what you want, someone else always has more. Bobby Baccala’s son is watching Casablanca on TV and it’s early in the story, before Rick comes out of his shell to fight for the woman he loves, and then for France. “I don’t stick my neck out for nobody,” Bogie says after letting the Nazis haul Peter Lorre away — but what would it mean for Tony to stick his neck out for someone? Would it mean to act or suffer those slings and arrows?

What he fears most is himself, I think, or the worst side of himself. Did you notice that when he left the hospital, offering a truce to Leotardo in the Christmas spirit, that the bodyguard he encountered at the door looked like a miniature version of Tony — same jacket, same hair? “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” said the doppelganger — in the hospital? At death’s door? Hard to tell if it was meant as a promise or a threat.

The future of New York is pretty scary if you’re to believe the magazine of the same name. In its current cover story, The Horror, I mean Tomorrowland 2016, contributing editor Alexandra Lange posits a great big beautiful metropolis of tomorrow that is chockablock with jagged edgy sky scrapers scraping out what’s left of the sky, not just in Manhattan but here in Brooklyn, where Lange, who must be some kind of expert, considers Forest City Ratner’s “Atlantic Yards” development some kind of done deal.

Consider the headline to the Downtown Brooklyn section: Brooklyn (Like It Or Not) Will Get a Shimmering Frank Gehry Crown”. Because while Lange, who has presumably been to Brooklyn, allows that locals may not like the idea of having 16 skyscrapers rammed up its collective ass when all Ratner was talking about was an arena for his basketball team, those soon-to-be-homeless choke artists, The Nets. But it will be good for us, she insists. It will provides jobs and housing and beauty for us ungrateful wretches.

“We don’t want to build tall for the sake of tall,” she quotes Ratner mouthpiece Jim Stuckey saying. “Frank Gehry can frame the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower”—the current tallest, at 512 feet, compared with the 620 feet of Gehry’s main tower, Miss Brooklyn—“and make it a postcard with other buildings around it.”

You read that right: a postcard. As in, Wish you were here? No wonder the arrogant Gehry, who says those protesting the development should be protesting Henry Ford for inventing the automobile, is calling his crowned jewel, the building around the proposed arena, Miss Brooklyn. You’ll miss Brooklyn, too, when these carpetbaggers get done with it.

It’s a pity that Lange, who is presumably a reporter, could not have found an actual opponent to the project to quote. She does allow that “there could be a kinder, gentler Brooklynized version of the titanium town” but doesn’t offer much hope for one. And why should she? You can sometimes learn a lot by reading a magazine’s articles online, just by looking at the URL. This one is slugged “real estate” which is all ye need to know.

If you haven’t seen the video of Guy Goma on the BBC, you really owe it to yourself. Goma is the now-celebrated wrong man of the pundit world, a hapless job applicant (he was at the studio looking for a job in data support) who was mistaken for another guy named Guy who was supposed to comment on the verdict handed down in the Apple vs. Apple Corps case. As John Tierney and others have noted, the glory his performance comes not just in the instant, captured on camera, when he gapes at being intorduced as someone he is not, but in the follow-up. Asked by the BBC reporter if he was surprised by the verdict he answers, “I am very surprised to see this verdict becasue I was not expecting that.”

What he had been expecting was a little face time with some tool from HR, no doubt, not to have a mike clipped to his jacket and be asked about a subject not in his area of expertise. And while his game, even authoritative responses, have been touted as a primer in the basics of media-training (answer your question, not theirs — and never say “I don’t know”), I see bigger things for Guy.

Why not president of the US? Sure, there’s that little immigration hurdle — the native of the French-speaking Congo is new to England, and English — but a Constitutional amendment could take care of that. After all, our current president has no problem speaking on matters of which he knows very little indeed, lecturing scientists on science and economists on economics — even explaining to a group of journalists the meaning of “dissemble” (which he flubbed in both pronunciation and definition). What is certain about him is his certitude, and Americans crave that. Being the star of his very own Truman Show, Bush never gets to hear any bad news about his performance because he doesn’t read or channel surf. The look he gave Stephen Colbert at the White House press dinner was not so much one of annoyance as puzzlement: what was this guy talking about?

Barring the POTUS position, I say give Goma his own show, let people bring him questions he knows little of and let him expound on each one for five minutes. Then compare his response with those of the experts and see who makes the most sense. In fact, let the first topic be the war in Iraq: they guy named Goma versus the guy in the coma.

The plight of Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose citizenship may be revoked by weak-kneed Netherlanders, has become an international cause celebre. Hirsi Ali has been under government protection since 2002, due to her criticism of some of the more violent, paternalitic practices of some followers of Islam, and her collaboration with Theo van Gogh on a short film about Muslim violence against women resulted in the director’s murder in 2004. The killer pinned a note to van Gogh’s body, saying she would be next.

I met Ayaan quite by chance last summer. She was in Manhattan, working on her book and appeared, unannounced, at a reading by a mutual acquaintance of ours in Chelsea. She was flanked by her Dutch bodyguards (the Netherlands has since concluded she can keep the protection, for now) and blended in down in uber gay Chelsea like a giraffe at a zebra party. (Her bodyguards, on the other hand, with their military haircuts, tight pants and suit jackets concealing their sidearms, could have passed for a local.) She was soft spoken and polite, and though she has recently been embraced by the right, she was happy to have found a book on Marx in the Chelsea Barnes & Noble.

Her disdain for religion — all religion in as much as it is used as an instrument of censorship and brutality — will probably keep her from getting invited to speak at Liberty University. But the fact that she is being lauded by neocons as evidence of the evils of Islamic fundamentalists does not mean they’re wrong. The Dutch are clearly afraid of a Denmark situation — days of riots and burnings and a number of deaths (all in the middle east) in reaction to the Mohammed cartoons — and are reacting in a somewhat craven fashion. Don’t want to provoke anyone! But Ayaan does want to provoke people, provoke the citizens of western countries out of their slumber. The threat to her is like the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a sign of things to come. It is quite literally a threat to us all.

I have discovered an interesting subtext to this season’s 24, the addictive and insane Fox series in which superagent Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) saves the nation in a series of sleepless, danger-fraught days: It’s all about the presidency.

Not just the fictional presidency of Charles Logan, a chinless wonder with a soul more duplicitous than Nixon’s, but the current president and the man who would have been king. Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is probably as dismayed as every other Republican in the country over the dismal performance of GWB and in Logan the show gives us a president who is even worse: he has already killed the former president, hospitalized the First Lady when she stumbled on the truth of his villainy and sold the nation to a consortium of businessmen who seem intent to run it like Enron. Now who’s the worst president of all time, huh?

Then there’s the casting of William Devane as the Secretary of Defense Heller. Devane, with his lock jaw and patrician accent, is a suitable stand-in for a Kennedy — the actor once played JFK in a TV movie (The Missles of October) — a family that Murdoch loathes. Devane’s Heller is a decent guy, though, and in one of the show’s typically dramatic twists he drove his car off a cliff and into a lake to prevent bad guys from killing him to prevent him from going public with… O, I forget. Anyway he did it to save the country! And, until last week when we learned that he had somehow miraculously survived the accident, it seemed like the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Unlike, say, Chappaquiddick.

So in elevating a Kennedy manque and giving us a president worse than Bush, the Murdoch owned Fox has spun an alternate-universe presidency more satisfying (and less boring) than that of ABC’s Commander-in-Chief. That show would be better if they let David Lynch direct a few episodes, IMHO. I hear he’s a Republican, too.

Meanwhile, can anyone tell me what Jack Bauer is taking to stay up on days like that?