Spoiler Alert! What really happened to Tony Soprano at series end?

The Sopranos creator David Chase accidentally spoiled the infamously cryptic series finale during a leaked interview for The Sopranos Sessions, his book celebrating the Emmy-winning HBO mob drama. At the end of 2007’s final episode, titled Made in America, Tony Soprano is eating out with his family amid a turf war between the New Jersey and New York Mafia families while an enemy hitman waits nearby. The screen then fades to black as Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ blares on the soundtrack, leaving it ambiguous whether the show’s star gets whacked — until now.

… (SPOILER ALERT) In the roundtable discussion, co-author Alan Sepinwall asked Chase, “When you said there was an end point, you don’t mean Tony at Holsten’s [the diner], you just meant, ‘I think I have two more years’ worth of stories left in me.'” Then Chase dropped the bombshell:

"I remember talking with Mitch Burgess about it, but it wasn't – it was slightly different. 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."

"So the point of the scene is not 'they whacked him in the diner?' " the author asked. "It's that he could have been whacked?"

"Yes, that he could have been whacked in the diner," Chase said. "We all could be whacked in a diner. That was the point of the scene. He could have been whacked."

Later in the interview, Zoller Seitz asked Chase how he responds to fans who are sure Tony died in the diner – and if they are "incorrect."

"I don't know if that's my job," Chase said. "They've interpreted the scene that way. That should be a good thing, that there's different interpretations."

When Zoller Seitz pressed if these fans are wrong, Chase declined to answer

… Co-author Matt Zoller Seitz chimed in: “You realize, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene.” Chase dropped an expletive upon realizing his blunder. And just like that the mob-show creator spoiled a plot point that’s been debated for years by everyone.


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