Or so we thought. Part VII: “The Public Enemy” and “Goodfellas” influence on the end of The Sopranos. So, really, that just tells me that from the writers’ point of view, it doesn’t really matter if Tony died that night or not. I personally love ambiguous endings since the conclusion can mean anything you want it to mean, but I know a lot of people can’t stand them. I don’t know, maybe to leave the audience hanging. His wife, Carmela, enters, then a shady looking guy, then his son, AJ (who wants onion rings). Matt: Just like the Holsten’s scene. It’s fun for me. By James Hunt Published Sep 08, 2020 I vote that there’s something else happening. Also, how do you think the ending of The Sopranos compares with other popular shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad? But I also think it’s fair to say that he lived beyond that moment, even to a ripe old age, because ultimately this scene is making us ask, “What have we learned?” or “Where have we been?” and “Where is Tony, right now, as a person?” These are reckoning questions, and they can occur at many different points in a person’s life. Chase provides glimpses of all the other customers — a scout troop, two unidentified black males at the jukebox, a man in a Member’s Only jacket like Eugene Pontecorvo’s at the counter — because he wants us to wonder if one of them might be there to take out Tony. The screen went black for a full 11 seconds before the credits came up. I was there. I felt then, and now, afraid for Tony Soprano, and painfully aware of both his fragile mortality and my own, more keenly than any other piece of art has made me feel. Getting a quick shot to the head, or having to live the rest of your life knowing that somebody out there wants to kill not only you, but possibly even your entire family? The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.” I think the most important two words in those two sentences are “spiritual question.” And if we fixate on anything other than that, we’re missing the point. But what do you think? Matt: All right, let me back up for a second and say that at no point during my now ten-plus years of arguing about the meaning of this scene have I said that “Tony died” is an inconceivable or unacceptable interpretation. Or maybe nothing happened in that scene, but Tony went on being Tony and maybe died of heart disease or Alzheimer’s, which, given all that we’ve seen him go through, is a sadder outcome. We make up stories to reassure ourselves that we have control over life, and we really don’t. Some more people enter, rubbing their hands as they ogle what looks like some tasty cake. Because according to the writers, Tony does end up dying or getting caught at some point in the future. Whether we get to see what comes next or not, which is a more entertaining, exciting, and/or thematically fitting conclusion to the story of The Sopranos: Tony’s abrupt death or his continued existence? I mean it’s a prompt for us to think about death and life, and what we’ve done with our lives. Part IV: The final season and “The Godfather”. Alan: Okay, but then, why the cut to black? Why the ambiguity at all? But the very fact that Chase devotes so much time to what seems like nothing makes the whole scene all the more nerve-racking. Not because I didn’t want him to die or didn’t think he deserved to die. According to Quinn, the show's creator, David Chase did not kill Tony Sopranos in the final scene. By telling other people what we think happened, we are revealing ourselves. Professionally, he has just survived a war with New York — has, in fact, enough juice that he was able to kill a rival boss with the tacit approval of Phil’s successor — but his organization is in a shambles. I’m reminded of that moment in “D-Girl” where Dr. Melfi summarizes existentialism for Tony. I think we’re supposed to be thinking about death, or the finiteness of life, during that last scene, but not necessarily that Tony died right then and there, and that’s the end of the story. Alan: Other than maybe the revelation that Big Pussy was an FBI cooperator — a plot idea conceived in the show’s embryonic stages, without Chase expecting anyone would care about him resolving it — The Sopranos tended to keep its plot cards face up. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.” I think the most important two words in those … The Sopranos creator David Chase reflects on final scene, seems to accidentally confirm Tony’s fate. This is a show about either accepting that you’re not in control of anything, or making a conscious decision to deny that. Agent? Zoller Seitz then chimed in to point out that Chase had just referred to the infamous final scene as a "death scene" – seeming to confirm that Tony does die. God bless you!”, For No Reason at All, Here’s the Greatest Emma Thompson Acceptance Speech. Of course he did, why else would the screen go black? Another car-centric episode drops in on a whole slew of Pearsons driving newborns home for the first time. He was never interested in the Russian, the rapist, the stable fire, or any of the other characters and threads that he left dangling over the life of the series, except as forces that test the main characters and reveal their essence. © 2021 Vox Media, LLC. Loose ends and uncertain fates are a hallmark of The Sopranos ' final season, and nowhere is that more devastatingly evident than in the … Matt: There was a moment a few years ago when a journalist reported that Chase told her Tony lived, and he got mad at that — as mad as he’s gotten at all the people who keep saying Tony died. Tiger Woods Hospitalized After Rollover Car Crash in L.A. Many have argued that after avoiding gangster movie cliches for so long, Chase wouldn’t have defied The Sopranos’ modus operandi by killing Tony in the final scene. What’s more in character for The Sopranos, to kill a magically charmed character in the final scene, or to refuse to do so? We can all go home now. You knew virtually everything important that was going on, not only with Tony, but with all his enemies and allies. But… but… that’s stupid. It’s become increasingly clear to me as we’ve worked our way through the entire series again, with over 10 years of perspective on that finale and nearly 20 years of living with the show in some form, that Chase is an intuitive writer, somebody who’s not trying to send messages or create puzzles for people to solve, but is just trying to make people feel and think and question themselves. I know now, and I don’t have to worry about this anymore.”. Because that’s the thing about ambiguous endings—either people are going to love them, or they’re going to feel they wasted their time watching a show because they wanted a definitive conclusion. The following is an excerpt from The Sopranos Sessions, in which Alan and I debate the still-controversial last four minutes of the show and come to different conclusions about what it meant. The shady guy gets up, walks past Tony’s table to go to the bathroom (and if you ever saw The Godfather, you know that’s not good). Meadow runs to the door, the bell rings, Tony looks up, and … nothin’. Alan: What I mean is, maybe that cat is Christopher reincarnated, or maybe it’s just a cat that won’t stop hanging around Satriale’s and staring at a photo of Christopher. First, this essay will briefly illustrate how Chase set up the “never hear it” concept before the final episode. Well, it’s complicated. I suppose you could argue that somebody snuck in from the side, out of frame, and shot Tony. And that’s even before we get to Holsten’s, a scene shot and edited unlike anything else in the history of this show. This guy lives a charmed life. And does that matter? Or it could be like the decision in “Long Term Parking” to not only provide a glimpse of Adriana’s daydream where she just gets in her car and heads south on I-95, but to deliberately stage her death scene so that she’s off-camera when Silvio fires the fatal shot. The day James Gandolfini died — in sudden, startling fashion that sadly evoked the very themes Chase was trying to convey with this scene — I wrote that, “as horrible a human being as Tony was, it gives me a small bit of comfort on this surprising, terrible day, to imagine Tony still alive, waddling out of his SUV and into the pork store, or calling up Dr. Melfi for one more shot at therapy.”. But he always manages to avoid going there. And 11 seconds is an eternity when you’re on the edge of your seat. The screen just went black, and that’s what we have to go on. Brian Regan wants to give his audience escapism, but 2020 is a tough year to escape from. Does Paulie freaking Walnuts somehow become boss of the Family, or does Butchie throw up his hands at this point and decide to put his own guy in charge of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight? The Sopranos seasons one to six are currently available to stream on NOW TV. Bits of time are elapsing in terms of the physical motion of Tony in that space, but that’s not indicated by the music, which never stops. He could’ve had a coronary or another panic attack. And the single most obvious thing to do in a gangster movie is to kill the main character — out of reflex, or because the storytellers want to express that crime doesn’t pay. Eight years after HBO’s The Sopranos ended on a stunningly ambiguous note, creator David Chase gave a shot-by-shot explanation of the final scene that left many viewers scratching their heads. Alan: There’s no way around that, and even David Chase says as much in the sixth interview later in this book. There are no cookies for figuring things out. Here’s How to Watch the 2021 Golden Globes. Matt: Yes! Depardieu, 72, is accused of sexually assaulting a then-22-year-old actress at his home in Paris. Possibly, because it was a pretty damn good show, and a lot of people are still talking about Breaking Bad even though that conclusion was pretty clear cut (though, some people denied what they saw). Does Tony’s death alter the career plans of either kid? Nasim Pedrad Is an Awkward Little Teen Boy in the Trailer for, “Now get on your jammies, put on a better attitude, and let’s spend some quality time together.”, Jon Stewart’s New Show Will Have Real Journalism Energy. But all that stuff exists outside the text, not in it. Part V: How 9/11, terrorism and the U.S. war in Iraq unlock the keys to the final scene in Holstens. Chase lingers on the parking job to raise the question of what terrible thing will happen because it’s taking her so long. The final close-up of James Gandolfini’s face contains no note of fear or apprehension. Long answer? Alan: I don’t know the answer to that hypothetical, because either one seems like the kind of thing The Sopranos might do. The shady guy looks back from the counter, and Tony’s daughter, Meadow, struggles to parallel park outside (I can relate). I think it’s also interesting if he dies, though that’s a less disturbing ending to me, because it’s the standard gangster-story ending, and no matter how you read it, for reasons of genre history it always comes back to “Don’t do crime, kids.”. Alan: This is all-important, and we’ll see what happens to the conversation now that the phrase “death scene” is out there. In the season premiere, Bacala raised the idea of what happens when you die, speculating, “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” — a line so clearly important to the end of the series that the conversation is replayed at the end of the penultimate episode, after poor Bobby had that question answered. No. Because nothing in that scene says, “Somebody just killed him and that’s what the cut to black is about.” The only objectively true statement that can be made about that ending is that it’s ambiguous. Matt: Well, that’s been my overall point in these arguments from the very beginning, and I’m glad you framed it in those terms, because it does a nice end run around the whole “Tony Soprano, dead or alive?” question, which I’ve always thought was an attempt to change the question mark at the end of the sentence to a period. I hate that when you ask, “What happened at the end of The Sopranos?” and people just shrug and say, “Well, he died!” A better question is, “What did that ending mean?”. The restaurant scene looks like a … Chase replayed the Bacala death line and laid down so much death imagery throughout the season and this episode, so we will understand that when the scene jarringly cuts to black, it’s because Tony has just died, either via a bullet from Members Only Guy or a coronary from one onion ring too many. Did he ever come back out of the bathroom? I had another scene that was going to be Tony’s death, that we were going to do. Would anybody still be talking about the show thirteen years later if that had happened? This is what I keep coming back to. If the scene’s about the fragility of life, and the omnipresent specter of death that leaves us all fumbling about for meaning in this cold, cruel world, why leave even a trace of ambiguity? Yeah, I was thinking that, too — that despite the hours we’ve spent talking to Chase about the ending, I don’t think it’s necessarily been “explained” in any meaningful sense, in terms of what happened next, and I get the impression that Chase can’t really explain it either. Fans may have an answer to whether … Or it could be, as I wrote in my original recap hours after the finale aired, that the character who died there was us, the spectator. And series creator, David Chase, made it pretty clear back in 2007 when the show ended that he wasn’t interested in the latter. As he is waiting for his family to arrive, he puts on Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing track. Alan: Yeah, I would say the circumstantial evidence of death in the scene is overwhelming. It doesn’t make any sense. More recently, I found myself swaying over to Team Tony Dies, not only because of the death imagery throughout the season — including the way so many episodes open, as this one does, with Tony waking up from a deep slumber — but because some of my initial, long-hardened impressions of the scene didn’t hold up under further scrutiny. That final scene is something he felt was correct, and that came out of his desire to subvert or amend the traditions of the gangster film, while perhaps coming to terms with the fact that he was unable to escape them. The end. I know this is a minority reaction, but I like being baffled or challenged or frustrated by art. Matt: Well, this isn’t how I thought this would go. I like having to make a case for a particular interpretation or just throw my hands up. Whenever the Sopranos ending is discussed, and somebody starts with the presumption that Tony is dead, I ask the same follow-up question: “Why do you need for Tony to be dead?” Because you have to need him to be dead to insist not only that he got shot right there in the diner, but that him being dead is in fact the entire point of the scene, and that no other approach is permissible. The idea of presenting the ending as a thing that can be mastered and explained is philosophically the opposite of everything that led us to that point. The sixth and final season of The Sopranos was an interesting one. The show’s closing scene took place with Tony Soprano & his family eating dinner … Now, I’m Schrödinger’s critic: equally intrigued by the idea of Tony living and Tony dying. And maybe not. The show absolutely dabbled in the supernatural throughout, from Paulie being haunted by Mikey Palmice, to Tony dreaming something that Tony B was actually doing, to whatever and wherever Kevin Finnerty was. He thought his cable box went out, and apparently, he wasn’t the only one. Blow-Up is one of his favorite films, and it has a famously non-definitive ending that invites the viewer to project their own meanings. And so on, and so forth. Tony goes to a diner and waits for his family to arrive. I don’t believe it’s necessary to establish that to discuss the ending of the show, nor do I think the evidence necessarily points to that. So, let’s get sleuthing. To quote Tony, the floor is yours, senator. I think you and I are in agreement on the larger point of the scene, right, Matt? The Sopranos Ending: Conclusion. I don’t think you were going to see the death, but you were going to know that he was dead. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: Tiffany Haddih 18 October 2020. The Sopranos creator David Chase appears to accidentally confirm what happened to Tony Soprano in that final scene. Gandolfini’s playing it as Tony enjoying a peaceful night out with Carmela and the kids, up to and including that final look on his face in between when the bell rings and the screen goes black. Death is the only absolute truth for everyone, and if you read that ending simply as “he died,” you can wash your hands and walk away from it and not have to think about anything else that might be raised in that scene. When Tony’s meeting Agent Harris by the airport, or Butchie is wandering through the last remaining scrap of Little Italy while talking to Phil on the phone, or when Tony and Butchie and Little Carmine sit down to broker a peace in that cavernous truck depot, the cold and wind and snow are all so palpable that the only truly applicable phrase is, “You’ll catch your death.”. During the final moments of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano is eating out with his family at Holsten's diner. I think the ending is sadder and more powerful if you think, “All those people he killed, all those people he loved that died, all the stuff he’s been through personally, including getting shot and being in a coma — none of that really made much of a dent in this guy’s thick skull.”. How do we choose to live it? Why does it have to make sense? Because, while you’re right to point out how Chase and company have very deliberately put us in a death-obsessed frame of mind during this final run, during the preceding seasons he showed us time and time again that he was never interested in doing the obvious thing. Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda is heading home after serving six years in prison. Phil is gone, Butchie made peace with New Jersey, and anyone else who might wish Tony a violent end is out of the picture. The scene was great, but the effectiveness only lasted a few seconds, while I've been thinking about The Sopranos ending for years now. Whether you just finished your first binge of The Sopranos or you were one of the many who saw The Sopranos Ending the day it happened, the controversial (and highly lauded) final episode of the hit HBO drama still has people talking about it even today. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 'Coming 2 America' Interviews With Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall And More, Teyonah Parris On WandaVision, Captain Marvel 2 And More, Minari Interviews with Steven Yeun, Yeri Han And More. “When some people first realize that they’re solely responsible for their decisions, actions, and beliefs, and that death lies at the end of every road, they can be overcome with intense dread … a dull, aching anger that leads them to conclude that the only absolute truth is death.” I think the insistence on “proving” that Tony died is a means of reasserting control over the show, and over the life of the person doing the proving. Is this, the superstitious Paulie wonders, just a cat, or his late colleague returned to life? What I don’t like is any kind of conversation that seems to be leading toward, “He’s dead, end of discussion.” Because that should not be the end of the discussion when you’re talking about a show like this one, a show about psychology, development, morality, and all these other deep and tangled subjects. Alan: Let me ask you this, then: If, during one of our many conversations with Chase, he had invited us to lean in close, and whispered, “Guys, Tony’s dead,” how would that change your feelings about the ending? The 2021 Globes ceremony might be a mess, but we’ll always have this ghostly moment. Don't stop believing, indeed. Now, there’s going to be some speculation in this piece, but also some evidence from David Chase and other writers from the show. He whacked the viewer. Alan: Right. And everybody who walks in, a guy in a Member’s Only jacket…this could be the guy, or that could be the guy. Alan: So for a while, it seemed easier to just go with the idea that he dies — that the cut to black follows on Bacala’s line from “Soprano Home Movies,” Silvio’s reaction to the Hairdo’s death in “Stage 5,” and all that death imagery. I mean, if you step back and think about it, killing Tony this mysteriously does defy Sopranos modus operandi in multiple ways. I remember watching the final episode with my friends, and I’ll never forget that my buddy, Nick, got up from his seat after the screen went black and apologized profusely when we all groaned. Log in or link your magazine subscription, Don’t stop believin’ … you know exactly what happened at the end of, when Chase wrote that article about the scene, a journalist reported that Chase told her Tony lived, Martha Stewart Still ‘Pissed’ Her Probation Officer Wouldn’t Let Her Host, Meanwhile, Clare and Dale Are Really Selling Their Reconciliation, Rachel Lindsay Criticizes Rachael Kirkconnell’s ‘Vapid’ Attempts at Anti-Racism, The 101 Greatest Endings in Movies History, Aziza Barnes, Jeremy O. Harris to Write for. The onion rings finally arrive, Meadow almost gets hit by a car as she rushes across the street, the bell at the door rings, and the screen cuts to black abruptly as Steve Perry sings “Don’t stop!”… and then... well, that’s it. There’s a reason The Twilight Zone keeps coming up, whether in conversation or on the safe house TV in the finale. I ask this not to spoil the details of the many pieces of Sopranos fanfic I have saved to the cloud, but to consider the larger question: Which ending is more interesting? I thought about Tony’s entrance into Holsten’s in the context of the earlier scenes where he visits Janice and then Junior. Or if we can’t discern that, what is this ending trying to make us think about? Images of death — or a Hell frozen over from overcrowding and neglect by management — abound throughout the series finale, as the show’s usual fascination with the extremes of weather in the Garden State gets amped up to an almost supernatural degree. Excerpt from The Sopranos Sessions by Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall published by Abrams Press; © 2019 Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall. This ending puts us in their shoes. Alan: Back in the day, I felt like death was an easier sentence for Tony to take, because so much of his life — thanks to genetics, mental health, and the monstrous business he has chosen — brings him so much misery. So it felt better to go with “Tony died.” It was An Answer, in a way that “Tony lives” never entirely felt like one to me, and when Chase wrote that article about the scene for DGA Quarterly, and talked about the fragility of our mortal existence, I was able to smile and say, “Aha! And by that, I don’t mean he handed us the answer, because The Sopranos was never the sort of show that made you hunt for answers in that way. But again, that seems like a reach to me, especially since Members Only Guy hasn’t come out of the bathroom yet. Maybe the wiseguy who has turned into a cat — Schrödinger’s cat, to be precise — isn’t Christopher, but Tony? The way the ending teases audiences by seeming very definite while denying us answers and closure makes it the ultimate Sopranos moment. We only have this one life, and precious little control over how long it lasts. What follows is one last go-around for the gangster: he strikes some deals, his rival Phil Leotardo is killed, and then goes to meet the rest of his family in a diner. The Sopranos Final Scene Still - H 2015. *Sorry, there was a problem signing you up. I just mean that Schrödinger’s cat is useful if you’re applying it to a story that could end either in a radical, art-house movie way, or in a traditional way, but with a fancy wrapping. Which is why I’m writing this article today. But that’s another issue entirely. So when he walks into the restaurant, judgment has already been passed, or maybe suspended. I’m not saying “Holsten’s is Heaven!” or anything like that. As you well know, the final scene of The Sopranos cuts to black very abruptly just after Tony's stuck Journey on the jukebox in the diner. Meanwhile, Meadow is STILL struggling to park. That’s because it didn’t just go to black and then the credits came up. Personally, I prefer to think that Tony didn’t die that night. As we know famously from gangsters, they always say there’s only two ways to get out of this: one’s jail, the other’s dead. Tony Soprano has clearly made many bad choices, as have the other people at that table with him, as have nearly all the characters with whom we’ve spent these 86-plus hours of television. Maybe, after spending a decade telling stories about this man — and having spent a whole lifetime thinking many of the same thoughts as Tony, particularly where their mothers were concerned — Chase just couldn’t bring himself to direct a scene explicitly killing him, or even one where he asked James Gandolfini’s face to point us more blatantly in that direction. “I don’t think it could get any worse.”. To paraphrase one of the Four Questions from the Passover seder, on all other nights we don’t watch Meadow attempt to parallel park even once; why on this night do we watch her attempt to parallel park over and over again? Honestly, my friends and I still debate what happened at the end of The Sopranos to this day, just like we debate what happened at the end of Inception. Did he really leave enough money in overseas accounts to take care of Carmela after his passing, or will she soon be taking Angie Bonpensiero’s old job passing out supermarket samples? In fact, it’s the most obvious interpretation, given that Tony’s pissed a lot of people off over the years, and in the overwhelming majority of gangster stories, the main guy dies at the end. Oh, man. And I would argue that, if the main takeaway from that scene is, “Oh, they shot him,” then either the show has failed and suddenly decided to give up and be a typical gangster story in its final four minutes, or there’s something else happening here. Alan: “Made in America” opens on Tony asleep in the safe house. Despite the fact that I’d never seen an episode of The Sopranos prior to its conclusion in the Summer of 2007, I actually tuned into the finale when it aired because it was simply that big of a deal — that even 14-year-olds who’d never seen the show before still decided to catch the iconic series’ climactic episode.. Oddly enough, while I’d had no previous … What does that leave us with, if that cut to black means somebody somewhere shot Tony? Or right, for that matter. No… Wait. We don’t get to watch the show anymore. I can’t imagine that it would succumb to them in its final moments, no matter how great the temptation — and as our conversations with Chase confirmed, that temptation did exist. It’s not wrong. And if, to quote Mad Men, the greatest predictor of what somebody is going to do is what they have done in the past, Tony’s always going to basically be Tony, the loquacious gangster who puts himself first. It’s also easy to see that Chase is of two minds on the last scene. Matt: “Death shows the ultimate absurdity of life.” —AJ Soprano. The cat turns up at the safe house and gets brought back to Satriale’s, much to Paulie’s horror — “You can’t even put them near a baby; they suck the breath right out!” — particularly once it starts fixating on a photo of Christopher from the set of Cleaver. If you enjoyed the massive “Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of the End”, I hope you’ll also enjoy this new annotated guide to the final scene. Death scene! Alan: Okay, so a hypothetical: Either way you lean, what happens after that cut to black? I think Meadow just entered the diner, but Tony will always be cautious, HBO's Allen V. Farrow Docuseries Has Already Been Targeted For A Possible Lawsuit, Parasite TV Show: What’s Going On With The Bong Joon-ho Series At HBO, How Pedro Pascal's The Mandalorian Could Be Affected By HBO's The Last Of Us, Why A Magic Kingdom Universe Is Good For Disney+, Even With The MCU And Star Wars, Bachelor Spoilers: When The Next Bachelorette Could Be Announced After Recasting, How This Is Us Is Already Building The Next Generation Of Pearsons With Unexpected Reveal, Superman And Lois' Showrunner And Star On The Premiere's Villain Twist. Maybe the ending is moralistic, but not in the way that some of the people who need Tony to be dead might frame it.

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