Actually, a personal friend of mine from high school was whacked by Tony or Tony’s crew. He played Jack Massarone. But he was killed off screen.
Alright, I know this is a zombie, but I finally got a round to watching The Sopranos and I can’t get the ending out of my head. I agree with the general sentiment that Tony died but ultimately it doesn’t really matter because his life was basically over one way or another.
But I want to talk about how the whole scene begins. Tony walks into the diner, it shows a close up of his face, then a wide shot of the diner (his view). Then it cuts back to his face, and then it cuts back to that same view of the restaurant only Tony is sitting down at a booth. It’s a weird edit, and I have a hard time believe it was unintentional. AS pointed out above, the general flow of this scene is that everytime it cuts a close up of Tony’s face, the next shot is Tony’s POV. So it literally looks like Tony’s POV is seeing himself sitting in the restaurant.
And that takes to back to beginning of the season, when Tony is in the coma. The finale of the coma is Tony going to “Kevin’s” family reunion. The implication is that if he goes into the reunion and see’s his family, he’s dead.
So, my theory is this: Tony gets shot right after walking into the restaurant. The entire final scene is one last dream sequence as he dies. He sees his family (in the reverse order that he loves them) and once he sees Meadow he finally done, lights out.
That would have been consistent with SOP: it’s bad to kill someone with his family present, and the longer Members Only guy waited, the better his face would be remembered. But Phil had been hit in front of his wife and grandkids, so…
Bumped.
The Chevy ad from the Super Bowl last night:
And a side-by-side comparison to the original:
Since this thread/topic was revived, I don’t think anyone linked to this interview with David Chase from November 2021 (though the book mentioned is also mentioned in the OP of this thread/topic), which seems to answer the question definitively.
The 2018 book The Sopranos Sessions was written by guys who wrote, at the time of the show, for the New Jersey Star-Ledger , the paper Tony always read, Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall. They interviewed you and asked you to talk about the June 10, 2007, series finale with of course, “Don’t Stop Believin’” and the famous cut to black. You said, “Well, I had that death scene in mind for years before.” A) Do you remember specifically when the ending first came to you? And, B) Was that a slip of the tongue?
Right. Was it?
I’m asking you.
No.
No?
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.
So, they want the truck to be associated with mobsters, then? No thanks.
Maybe they should have went all-in and have it shown blocking a bridge, or running down protestors.
It doesn’t answer the question definitively because Chase was on the Talking Sopranos podcast after that and he called bullshit on the interview. When he referred to Tony’s “death,” he was talking about a couple of alternate endings he was thinking of way back when, one of which included Tony’s death.
Chase on the TS podcast, “I never said what happened Tony. I said what the two alternates were that I was gonna do, but I had discarded years before.”
So the OP of this thread is wrong.
Honestly, I think it’s best that the ending be ambiguous, because Tony’s fate is never to know when the hit might come.