David Chase Accidentally Gave Away the Mystery of the Sopranos Ending

“What happens at the end of The Sopranos?” is a question people have been asking since the second The Sopranos ended in 2007. Everyone involved has been mum for 13 years, telling you that what happened after the infamous cut to black was for you to decide. But David Chase accidentally gave away The Sopranos ending intended meaning during an interview for The Sopranos Sessions, a companion book to the beloved series, as reported by The Independent.

Alan Sepinwall [co-author]: When you said there was an end point, you don’t mean Tony at Holsten’s, you just meant, “I think I have two more years’ worth of stories left in me.”

Chase: Yes, I think I had that death scene around two years before the end… 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.

Matt Zoller Seitz [co-author]: You realise, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene.

[A long pause follows]

Chase: F*** you guys.

So Chase confirmed what you probably thought, that the cut to black the show ended on was meant to represent Tony getting killed. Everyone was very coy about that scene and had opinion son what it meant, but come on, we all knew. If it wasn’t meant to be Tony’s death, there wouldn’t have been armed guys about to bust in and shoot him. Chekhov’s Gun extends to Chekhov’s assassins here, there’s no reason to show them if you weren’t supposed to put together they were going to shoot someone.