By Stephen Silver

The fourth season of HBO's critically acclaimed mob opera, "The Sopranos," ended on Sunday night with an epochal event of destruction that assures with virtual certainty that the series will never, ever be the same again. But since it was a marriage that was rubbed out and not a mobster, many "Sopranos" fans are likely to walk away from the episode feeling disappointed, if not downright betrayed.

Ever since "Sopranos" returned from a 16-month hiatus and began premiering new episodes in September, public and private discourse from the armchair writer/producers has been overwhelmingly negative, with the main complaints being that it had gotten boring, lost its focus, and most of all, that "nobody's getting whacked!"

The implication, from this, was that all of the show's strengths and nuances (its characters, its writing, its moral dilemmas, the family/Family juxtaposition) were more or less moot, unless major characters were dying violently on a regular basis.

I never understood this theory, that major characters need to die all the time for a show to be entertaining or effective. Isn't dramatic weekly elimination the reason "Survivor" is so popular? Isn't "CSI" the place to go for the promise of mutilated corpses? They seemed to forget that "whacking is forever," and if the writers rub out too many characters then sooner or later they'll have no one to work with.

The constant complaining from the "whackers" continued unabated until Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano) was bumped off in the season's ninth episode (predictably, the season's most well-received hour). But then the outrage returned when no characters (instead, merely a marriage) were whacked in the season finale. Even the planned shooting of New York boss Carmine didn't pan out.

I'm not saying I have a problem with televised violence or of characters being whacked in general. But when a major character leaves the show it's supposed to be a big deal - and "The Sopranos" has never been about cheap payoffs and surprises. To reduce this brilliant and influential show to a mere guessing game over which cast member will die next is an insult to the performers, the writers, and David Chase himself.

The chief whacker has been New York Post television critic Adam Buckman, a man so eager to prove his macho credentials that he actually chastised Dan Rather for crying on the Letterman show the week after September 11. For weeks Buckman ranted that the show had "lost its focus," and that the cure-all was to "whack somebody!"