Watch: Meadow Soprano: The Only One Who Got Out Clean

Meadow Soprano spends six seasons arguing with her father's world, defending it, and finally joining the profession that protects it, and the show leaves you to decide whether that's escape or capture. Watch the video above, then read Meadow's arc.

Jamie-Lynn Sigler grows up on screen from a spoiled teenager who knows exactly what her father is, to a law student whose outrage at the government's treatment of Italian-Americans sounds, deliberately, like a defense attorney's closing argument. Meadow is the family's great hope and its most sophisticated denial mechanism in one person: smart enough to see everything, equipped to rationalize the rest. Her final scene, parallel parking outside the diner while the audience's dread peaks, is the series' last cruel joke about who gets to arrive safely.

Quick answer: Meadow escapes the life materially but ends up defending it professionally, as a lawyer for the very world she once confronted her father about.

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