Tony’s “Family” is in bad shape by the end of the series, IIRC. Uncle Junior is suffering severe dementia, Christopher and Bobby (Tony’s BIL) are dead, and Silvia is hospitalized (in a coma maybe?). The only captains still around that I can recall are Patsy Parisi and Paulie. And Paulie is an idiot.
And his real family isn’t in that great of shape either. Okay, he’s back with Carmella. Meadow has drunk the Kool-aid and is on her way to becoming a mob lawyer. A.J. is a depressed useless idiot. And Janice is becoming another Livia.
“Whether Tony Soprano Is Alive or Dead Is Not the Point.”
Chase has been saying this consistently since the show ended, and it’s kind of too bad people won’t listen. It wasn’t supposed to be a mystery or a code or anything else. He ended it the way he did for a reason and he talks about that in enough depth in this interview that the point should remain obvious. So I’m not at all surprised he’s now making his own statement refuting what the reporter said. Look at the paragraph before the big “he’s not dead” thing:
The writer ignored that, so I bet her subject is pissed. Chase deliberately didn’t show Tony’s death on-screen, and my reading of that was that he’s dead, but they deliberately didn’t make it clear. If you want to interpret it another way - that it’s about paranoia and fleeting moments that escape our grasp and the lack of concrete endings, for the most part, in real life - you’re not wrong. The show itself is a lot more important than its final moment in isolation.
I read a very persuasive analysis of that final scene. There were many elements cited that “hinted” at Tony’s death, but the most convincing one for me was that the in the final shots, there is an alternating point of view, from Tony’s to a third person POV. At the end, when it’s time to switch back to Tony’s POV, the scene instead goes black, because he no longer has a POV, because he’s dead.
They had a good run and made some truly excellent television. Even if it’s time to stop, you don’t kill off the lead character of a multimillion dollar franchise.
Things need to be left open and I thought the ‘fade to black’ did that admirably.
Yeah, I can’t think of a single critically acclaimed drama that just went off the air this year and killed its main character and several other major players over the last few episodes. That never happens.
I thought it was obvious he died due to the foreshadowing conversations about when you die you just go, how bosses either end up dead or in prison, etc. Plus the way the scene was shot was blatant, especially with all the little Godfather references and the members only callback. But interpreting it as he has to live the rest of his life super paranoid and all these threats are just in his mind is more cerebral and sophisticated I s’pose.
YES!! THIS!! In an earlier episode Bobby and Tony contemplate what the end must be like. Something about it all goes black. Nothing ambiguous about the ending. Chase is pulling a Lucas.
You’re not. It’s just that there was never any concrete reason to expect one. And by the end of the series there weren’t enough characters left to make a movie anyway. They’d killed off Bobby and Silvio and Christopher and Phil and Vito and probably a few other people I’m forgetting. Maybe I was too understated in that last post, but just this year a different series offed its lead character in a far more definitive way than the Sopranos.
No reason to expect some kind of sequel? Other than the fact that it would have made buttloads of money for everyone involved even if it was terrible? Sometimes art is influenced by factors that have nothing to do with plot. lol.
No, there was never any reason to expect a movie. There were hypothetical reasons you could convince yourself they might make a movie if they wanted to, but they never even tried to follow through. And guess what? They never made a movie. So it’s not true that the lure of more money is irresistible.
Adrina, who was a (at least potential) FBI informant at the end. Big Pussy, Vito, Ralph, Richie (we buried him on a hill, under a tree) and probably one of the most important, Johnny Sack. He provided that tit for tat with Tony, little civil wars in the family without full out, going to the mattresses blowouts messes. They didn’t get along, yet, didn’t really respect each other either.
(FTR, it’s been a long time since I watched the show, so forgive me if I’m off on some of the details).
If Tony’s dead, who whacked him? Phil Leotardo was the only one with a major beef against Tony, and he’s already been whacked, with the assistance of the other Lupertazzi capos.
A lame way to go? like pretty much all the other mob bosses go? (either that or the tedium of jail).
Whacking him in a mundane, matter-of-fact way, in the same mundane way he himself dealt out death, that seems to me to be perfect.
How could it have ended any other way? Who else lived out their mob-based life in the comfortable bosom of a loving family?
No, they said all that needed to be said and exposed the squalor of the mob and the hypocrisy of any “code of honour”.
He had to die, anything else would have been a cop-out.
Im sure I read the same analysis. It was a very influential article shortly after the series ending. But I have since come to this conclusion; if David Chase needed the money in later years he would have pulled out all the stops to bring the series back, and im sure Chase could easily have given that final scene in the cafe a different interpretation. No series creator worth their salt wants to risk another Bobby Ewing.
It’s very difficult to have pull off an ambiguous ending, and seeing as there have been multiple proofs that the guy is dead, but not one proving he is still alive, it seems he didn’t pull it off.
Our desire for an ending is a part of our desire for storytelling. We add endings to real life to make them better. Ambiguous endings turn stories on their head.
The Sopranos held itself out as a traditional story, but then goes all existential with its ending. That’s why the ambiguity doesn’t satisfy, any more than getting a sudden twist tragic ending satisfies. That’s what leads to finding proof, and we’d better not find it.
I believe the consensus is pretty much that Tony died, and the author doesn’t like that, and so said the opposite to try to get back the ambiguity he wanted. It was just a single line with no explanation, that could easily still be interpreted as Tony being dead. “He lives.” Okay, and he does in a literary sense.
