Did David Chase explain the ending of Sopranos?
The Sopranos creator David Chase has addressed Tony Soprano’s fate in the controversial series finale before, but he provided some additional details in recent weeks.
When HBO’s The Sopranos wrapped up in 2007, the one question fans kept asking was, “Did Tony Soprano die?” The consensus from viewers is that Soprano had been murdered right as the show cut to black, though the show itself never quite confirmed this. Chase admitted that he had planned to kill off Tony Soprano at the end of the show, but the plan was very different from the well-known cut-to-black that had fans befuddled at first when it hit television.
Chase admitted in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that Tony Soprano’s death was going to be in a fashion similar to the show’s iconic intro. “Because the scene I had in my mind was not that scene. Nor did I think of cutting to black. I had a scene in which Tony comes back from a meeting in New York in his car. At the beginning of every show, he came from New York into New Jersey, and the last scene could be him coming from New Jersey back into New York for a meeting at which he was going to be killed.” Doing so would have made it poetic in a way to see Tony Soprano leave the same way he entered.
The Sopranos had dropped hints throughout its tenure that Tony Soprano would wind up dead even if they would never show it. It had been mentioned in earlier episodes that the way the characters view death is that life would all of a sudden cut to black out of nowhere when it comes, much like how the show itself cut to black when viewers least expected it. Also, at the start of the show’s series finale, Tony laid on his bed in a fashion similar to someone who would be lying in their coffin during their funeral while dealing with the war between the mob families in New York and New Jersey. Of course, while it all hints that Soprano died, The Sopranos, which thrived in its ambiguity, never outright revealed if that truly was the case.
If Chase had gone the route that he did, the show’s ending may not get the praise it gets today because it doesn’t have that lack of clarity regarding what truly was Tony Soprano’s fate. While it would end poetically to have him die the same way he was introduced, fans wouldn’t still be guessing to this day if his death had truly happened like many believe it has. By going the route that they did, The Sopranos created a finale so impactful that fans still discuss it to this day. It was the first show to say that a television series doesn’t necessarily need a concrete conclusion to be received well by fans.
Of course, the finale was not received well when it first aired because viewers had never seen anything like it. They wanted a definitive conclusion, not one where it was up to them to decide what Tony Soprano’s fate was. Since then, fans to this day have come to conclusions regarding shows that had much more straightforward finales than The Sopranos. Until El Camino confirmed it, a portion of the Breaking Bad fanbase still believed Walter White had survived the events of the show’s finale, even though he would have gone to jail or died of cancer if that was the case. While The Sopranos created one of the most discussed finales ever conjured up, it’s fair to say that the choice they made changed the scope of television.
