Basically Chase allowed everyone to write their own ending. Mine is for Tony to end up face down in the onion rings, but then I’m a hack writer.
I interpret the ending as Tony dying, but NOT because he got whacked. The sudden cut to black suggests maybe he had a massive brain aneurysm or somesuch.
I enjoy the notion that after all the drama and mayhem and murder, his death is caused by something that has nothing to to with his being a mobster. I think he’d be quite disappointed that his demise was so unspectacular.
He was whacked by the guy who went into the men’s room.
Maybe Meadow is so full of emotions because she knew she was about to go in and whack Tony. Yeah, he’s her father, but business is business.
AKA, pulling a Gigi.
Then again, maybe Christoper saw it coming with his “The way you fuckin’ eat, you’re gonna have a heart attack by the time you’re 50” call out. A funny moment in the show, in real life not so much.
As much as I love Breaking Bad, I agree, and the show should have ended with him in isolation, huddling over his barrel of money. Everything up to him running away was perfect.
As to “The Sopranos,” Tony does not die. He also doesn’t not die. He’s alive when the show ends, and that is all you know, and all the show tells us. Nothing anyone says afterwards changes that.
I thought it was calamari.
I just saw Hollywood on Netflix, and a scene in the penultimate episode struck me as a possible comment on the Sopranos ending.
An agent who’s finagled his way into being the producer of a movie, where the climactic scene is the protagonist climbing to the top of the Hollywoodland sign to kill herself and whether she’s going to jump, suggests at an editing screening that the movie end with her jumping but then landing in a swimming pool in an Ethel Merman-style swimming scene, so that the audience doesn’t know whether she’s lived or died. The editor tells him in no uncertain terms that it’s the dumbest idea that he’s heard in nearly 40 years of editing movies. 
Nope. Onion rings.
Holsten’s is a diner and ice cream parlor, not an Italian restaurant. They don’t have calamari on the menu.
I’ll bet Tony was all set to order the house special or the cheese steak.
Well, the large majority of mobsters either went to prison or were whacked. A notable exception was Charles Luciano who died of natural causes a free man in Italy, thus proving once and for all that he deserved the name, “Lucky” Luciano.
I wondered about that what percentage got whacked…I looked and found this. Color me surprised.
Using CTRL-F
“natural causes” 127
“executed” 5
“assassinated” 83
“disappeared” 1
“suicide” 2
“killed by law enforcement” 9
“cause of death disputed” 1
“serving life sentence” 32
“international fugitive” 7
“retired” 9
“cause of death unknown” 1
“serving” 51, (-32 life) = 19 serving less than life
“murdered in prison” 1
So died of natural causes/retired 136 (46%)
Killed/suicide/disappeared 101 (34%)
In prison 51 (17%)
Fugitive 7 (2%)
Uncertain 2 (1%)
Joe Bananas also managed to retire to Arizona without getting whacked. He died of heart failure at 97.
Missed some…
“at large” 12
“disease” 1
“on trial” 3
“Witness Protection Program” 2
“imprisoned” 7
And I noticed some of the “natural causes” are
“natural causes in prison”-25, so 102 must be natural causes outside prison
I hope I got them all.
I expected mostly Paul Castellano type deaths, but on second thought, John Gotti didn’t get whacked—he died of throat cancer in prison.
I think it was a failure to have “go to black” indicate Tony’s death because the series is not just from Tony’s perspective. We’re not seeing the show through his eyes. He is the center of the story, but we see many scenes which he is not a part of. The audience knows many things that Tony doesn’t. In the final scene we see Meadow’s experience parking the car which Tony wouldn’t know. Even if Tony’s view went to black, there’s no reason that the audience’s view would also go to black.
The scene seems to imply that the guy in the Member’s Only jacket killed Tony. He is shown several times right before the scene ends. He is shown standing up, Tony looking up at him, him walking towards the table, and walking past the table into the bathroom. Traditional foreshadowing would imply that he was going to be involved with the story somehow. Tony looked up when Meadow walked in. That may have distracted him and he didn’t notice the guy coming out of the bathroom.
You can see the scene here: The Sopranos - Final Scene [Complete] [HD] - YouTube
However, in this particular scene, there is a clear alternation between showing Tony, and then showing his viewpoint. It is obvious that this is done very deliberately.
Chase deliberately put in a lot of hints to imply that Tony might be whacked. But they are all hints, and nothing is explicit. As we’ve been saying, the finale is set up so you can believe what you want to believe.
There was an openly gay mobster and he did not get whacked, at least not for being gay. Don’t know if he’s still around .
Are you thinking of Robert Mormando? I don’t see anything on his present status. I’m not sure if he was open about being gay before his arrest, but being a rat would get him killed too.
Vito Spatafore’s story in Sopranos is based in part on that of John D’Amato, who was whacked for being bisexual in 1992.
If you subscribe to the theory that the cut to black is David Chase whacking the audience then there’s your reason. In fact, considering the way you describe why you think the ending is failure (it’s a failure because we’ve seen perspectives other than Tonys), it seems like you should actually consider it a success for that reason.