Tony Soprano not dead — not bad for a fictional character

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◊ Here’s brief update to a another post regarding the final episode of HBO’s hugely successful series, The Sopranos.

According to series creator and main honcho David Chase, the abrupt ending to the final episode of The Sopranos, in which Tony looked up to the camera and then the picture went suddenly black, was not meant to indicate that Tony had just been killed. This and other bits of interesting information comes via an interview in the The Sopranos: The Book: The Complete Deluxe Edition, a book with a title nearly as long as the final season of the show. [Read a related story that appeared in The Daily News here.]

With a murky ending that seemed to support differing interpretations, fans of the series have hotly debated what was supposed to have happened in the last moment of the show. Many were not shy about saying they wanted to believe that Tony had just been the victim of a mob hit.

Apparently, Chase is mildly annoyed that so many fans of the series wanted to see Tony meet his demise. Of course, he had littered the script with many apparent clues, and so it was not that surprising that ardent fans of the show were able to find clues to support whatever opinion they had about Tony’s fate. But there were also plenty of red herrings. Who could say–other than Chase himself–what the intent was?

Taking another look at the finale in relation to the series as a whole, the best evidence that Chase intended simply for the series to stop, rather than for a dramatic murder at the end of the episode, may have been the music. Known for carefully selecting the exact music he felt was appropriate for given scenes, Chase chose the old Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’” to close out the show. After all, this is the song with the words “Oh, the movie never ends, It goes on and on and on and on.” And that’s apparently what David Chase intended for his characters.

Of course, the show is literally fiction, and so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to get very worked up about what writers do or don’t do with the characters. As entertainment, it’s hard to quarrel with the production that The Sopranos gave us. Yet, the stories were perhaps less fascinating than the characters, who were as finely drawn and three-dimensional as any appearing on screen in recent years. Regardless of what we were supposed to think happened to the characters after the filming stopped, the characters themselves were so memorable–and the actors’ performances so convincing–that The Sopranos rises well above the ordinary.