“The Sopranos” is well-known as one of the most important series in not just HBO’s catalog of prestige television but also as one of the most pivotal and influential shows of all time. However, that doesn’t mean everyone agrees on its legacy. Even over 15 years after the series finale first aired, fans are still arguing and theorizing about what the show’s infamous cut-to-black ending really means.
While the debate generally falls into two camps as far as “The Sopranos” viewers are concerned, with the main speculation being whether the ending means Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) dies or if it just means that things go on as they always have, a Twitter user has suggested that there may be a third interpretation for Season 6, Episode 21 (“Made in America”).
Investigative reporter and ESPN writer @TJQuinnESPN thinks that it is actually the viewer who is killed off in the final episode of “The Sopranos.” “At the moment the screen goes black, and the music stops, the shot is of Tony. It’s not his POV when it goes black; it’s ours,” Quinn proposed. “Tony didn’t get whacked; we did. David Chase had enough of his audience, and he put one in the back of our heads. We saw black. We stopped hearing the music.”
Could David Chase really have meant to kill the audience?
While there’s a certain poetic irony to “killing the audience” for a show by ending a series, could that really have been David Chase’s intention at the end of the beloved HBO series? The creator and showrunner has remained as tight-lipped as possible about what actually happened in the final scene of “The Sopranos,” though he has let slip that it was a death scene.
Though the camp that thinks Tony died in the final shot of “The Sopranos” has taken that as proof that they’re correct, T.J. Quinn argues that this is not the case. “It doesn’t matter if Tony is dead or alive. That wasn’t the point,” he explained. “And, yes, Chase seemed to slip when he said in an interview that this was a death scene. But he never said it was Tony’s death.”
Even if many fans may scoff at Quinn’s take on the ending of “The Sopranos,” it is certainly an interesting theory at the very least. Thus fans may introduce this idea as a third possibility for what occurred in the series finale of the crime drama, at least until Chase soundly confirms what really happened in the show’s final scene.
