The final scene of the Sopranos has been the subject of much debate since it aired. I read a great post several months ago located at The Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of "The END".
I tend to agree with the author of that article when he states:
Tony was killed.
However my question is, has David Chase ever commented on the ending to give an indication to what actually happened to Tony Soprano?
Chase is on record as saying that
Tony did not get whacked
From the same piece:
"There are no esoteric clues in there. No 'Da Vinci Code,"' Chase states matter-of-factly.
And he feels the show concluded on a hopeful note.
A.J. will "probably be a low-level movie producer. But he's not going to be a killer like his father, is he? Meadow may not become a pediatrician or even a lawyer ... but she'll learn to operate in the world in ways that Carmela never did.
"It's not ideal. It's not what the parents dreamed of. But it's better than it was," Chase says.
As for the blackout midway through Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," Chase had wanted the show's ending to be even more abrupt.
"Originally, I didn't want any credits at all," says Chase. "I just wanted the black screen to go the length of the credits - all the way to the HBO 'whoosh' sound. But the Directors Guild wouldn't give us a waiver."
The choice was an artistic one, and was not meant as a slap in the face to fans.
David Chase accidentally let slip by calling the final scene a "death scene" in a 2019 interview with Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, authors of the book The Sopranos Sessions:
Alan Sepinwall: When you said there was an end point, you don’t mean Tony at Holsten’s, you just meant, “I think I have two more years’ worth of stories left in me.”
David Chase: Yes, I think I had that death scene around two years before the end... Tony was going to get called to a meeting with Johnny Sack in Manhattan, and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting, and it was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting. But we didn’t do that.
Matt Zoller Seitz: You realize, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene.
[A long pause follows]
David Chase: Fuck you guys.
'Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point.' (David Chase)
Like Chase said, if Tony died or not is not relevant at all. In my opinion The Sopranos is a show about an America on its way to a postmodern/postethnic society.
An America where A.J. doesn't have to be an Italian-American mobster like his father anymore.
An America where Meadow doesn't have to be the Italian-American housewife cooking pasta for twenty people on Sunday like her mother.
At the end it's a question about what we believe and how we want to live.
In my opinion it’s an existentialistic ending.
