Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano and James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in a scene from the last episode of The Sopranos. (AP)

Los Angeles, June 12 (Reuters): The mid-scene blackout that brought the final episode of The Sopranos to an abrupt, ambiguous halt on Sunday night left many viewers dismayed and even convinced they had lost their cable TV reception.

But a day later, the ending was the talk of the television world as fans and critics debated — sometimes angrily — whether series creator David Chase had pulled off one of the most surprising and unorthodox conclusions to a great drama or simply decided to cop out and leave everything up in the air.

After viewers were led to believe mob boss Tony Soprano was either about to be whacked or share a relaxing evening with family at a diner munching onion rings, the award-winning HBO series’ 86th and final episode cut to a blank screen, with no picture or sound for 10 seconds until the credits silently rolled.

“It may have been the greatest double-take — by the audience — in the history of American television,” wrote Washington Post critic Tom Shales. Daily Variety called it a “finale without finality”. “You could sue for dramatic whiplash,” said TV Guide critic Matt Roush, who found the ending “a little too self-conscious”.

“He is confounding our expectations of what a finale ought to be,” Roush said in an interview yesterday. “It wasn’t a finale, it wasn’t an ending. It just stopped. And that I think is the revolution of this episode.” The finale, aptly titled Made In America, will likely go down as one of the most memorably offbeat in TV history, alongside the trial of Seinfeld” and the conclusion of Bob Newhart's second sitcom, in which he awoke from a dream in bed with the wife from his first sitcom.

Fan reaction was swift.

HBO, the Time Warner Inc-owned pay-cable channel that launched The Sopranos in 1999, was immediately flooded with emails from viewers.

The volume of feedback was about 10 times higher than normal, network spokesman Jeff Cusson said, adding HBO’s website crashed for about half an hour due to heavy traffic on the official Sopranos online chat room.

Comments posted by fans ran the gamut, from those who hailed the finale as “brilliant” to others who hated it. One called it the “absolute WORST ENDING!!!!” and threatened to cancel his HBO subscription. “It was like a French movie where the woman dies, the good guy gets killed and the villain gets elected president.”