The End

"End times, huh?" FBI Agent Harris remarked to Tony Soprano a week ago as the pair looked out the windows of Satriale's pork store.

End times indeed. It's finis for two cultural landmarks that so thoroughly dominated the past decade that it seemed they would always be with us: David Chase's "The Sopranos" and J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" book series.

For "Sopranos" fans, a gaping hole has opened up on Sunday nights now that the final episode has aired. For devotees of the boy wizard, the local bookstore may suddenly seem like a less enchanted place after July 21, when the final installment of the series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," will be published.

But is there something deeper going on as we say goodbye to Tony and Harry (or any other fictional characters to whom we have become attached on the page or the screen)? After all, the million-megaphone effect of the Internet now allows us to insert ourselves into the consciousness of authors and TV auteurs, to become, in a way, part of the story as it unfolds over years and years. What, then, are the stakes for us ?

"With something like 'The Sopranos' and 'Harry Potter,' where people have made a strong investment over the years, there's a sense of mourning and of grief," says Jason Mittell, who teaches media studies at Middlebury College. "But if it works well, there's also a sense of conclusiveness, and a reminder that you can't have life without death."

Yet the eminent Harvard psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton says that while endings are an inevitable and even necessary stage of human and narrative development, they still deliver a substantial blow to the psyche. "We have a difficult time with endings, because they seem absolute and can be associated with a kind of hopelessness, that there's nothing beyond in which to find meaning or solace," says Lifton.

"Endings are associated with separation, which can be a profound psychological matter, and ultimately with death," Lifton adds. However, he says, "We can better accept endings when there is significant meaning that we derive from that narrative or that experience that has ended. . . . In reading a powerful book or having any experience with a work of art, the book or film ends, but it reverberates in us, and in that way, continues."

The way it ends, though, can have a pronounced bearing on the way it reverberates.

Rowling has said that two characters will die in "Deathly Hallows." Would she go so far as to kill off Harry himself? Wouldn't that permanently darken the picture readers take away from the series? Perhaps, but as Mittell notes: "The stakes of 'Harry Potter' have always involved death, and lives have gotten cut short. Death is hanging over the books from the beginning."

Dying is easy, but comedy is hard, as the man said, and the finale of "Seinfeld" seemed to prove it. A consensus pick as one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, "Seinfeld" bowed out in 1998 with a wrong-headed, unfunny finale that was at odds with the show's overall dynamic. Jerry, Elaine, George , and Kramer, whom we had come to know as self-absorbed and quirky but not cruel, were shown laughing derisively while an obese man was carjacked. The endings of "The Bob Newhart Show" and "St. Elsewhere" messed with viewers' heads by intriguingly suggesting the entire series had been, respectively, a dream and the product of an autistic child's imagination. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" closed on a beautifully elegiac note -- the cast in a literal embrace in the WJM-TV newsroom, singing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" -- that captured the idea of workplace-as-community that was at the heart of the show.

The words "The End" are so pregnant with portent that Paul McCartney invokes them twice on his new album, with a meditation on mortality called "The End of the End." ( It's a pretty chipper meditation, but this is McCartney, after all.) As President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Ford told the nation: "It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must."

If narratives are constructed around a beginning, a middle , and an end, the special function of The End is to give shape and definition to what came before, to cast a backward light that illuminates the whole, while remaining true to the characters, to the spirit of the saga, and to us, the readers and viewers.

That challenge is especially acute for the Harry Potter series and "The Sopranos" because, as possibly the most influential serials of the Internet age, they accelerated the movement toward a profoundly interactive relationship between author and audience.

Thanks to the Web, readers and viewers are not limited to chewing over each new plot twist at the water cooler (office or school). Instead they can feel a kind of complicity in the act of creation itself -- which could intensify their sense of mourning as The End arrives for the conflicted New Jersey mob boss and the intrepid hero of Hogwart s. "Today many, many people participate in online forums, fan websites, wikis, listen to podcasts," notes Mittell. Consequently, he says, authors and TV producers are increasingly willing to "directly acknowledge it, to give a shout-out to say 'We know you're paying attention.' "

Consider the home page of J.K. Rowling's website. With its depiction of a cluttered writing desk complete with computer keyboard, plot outlines, a table of contents, and reading glasses, it is a visual invitation for readers to feel part of her creative process. Even as she cranked out book after book, Rowling kept up a steady online conversation with her fans. It was clear she was aware of the massive, mostly young, audience that was peeking over her shoulder, so to speak, and she spoke to them often on her site, in tones that were sometimes bantering, sometimes scolding, but always companionable.

She scotched rumors, planted hints about future plot developments, and even dropped the omniscient narrator's mask on occasion and showed her vulnerable side. In a posting several weeks ago, Rowling told readers she was "incredibly moved and grateful" that one fan website had pledged not to print "spoilers" about the ending of "Deathly Hallows." It underscored the sense of mutual obligation that has grown up between the author and her readers.

Of course, the Web-enabled two-way relationship is not always a friendly one.

In the early years of "The Sopranos," some activists took to the Internet to vehemently protest the depiction of Italian-Americans on the show. Chase responded with an episode in which Dr. Melfi's ex-husband complained at a family dinner about Hollywood's stereotyping of Italian-Americans as connected to organized crime. Melfi mocked him for what she calls his preoccupation with "rehabilitating Connie Francis's reputation," but the scene ended with the family raising their glasses in a toast to "the 20 million," an allusion to the 20 million Italian-Americans who, the ex-husband noted, have nothing whatsoever to do with the mob.

Still, "The Sopranos" went out on its own terms. It was Chase, not HBO, who decided when the show would reach the finish line. He understands that to control the end is to control the story, and that the end is in some ways the most important part of the story. So, apparently, do the producers of "Lost," who recently announced that the story of the plane-crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island will end in 2010.

"A show like 'Lost,' which is predicated on a very specific story in which every episode adds to that story, it needs an end," says Mittell. "It can't keep going on and on, spinning into infinity."

Neither, alas, can "The Sopranos" or Harry Potter, much as we'd like them to.

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.