Well the Sopranos is finally over. And I’d be lying if I said that I was not very sad. It is rare that a TV show comes along with such brilliant dialogue, dark humor, real violence and a storyline that held my attention for 8 years straight. When the screen went black on Sunday (or Monday here in Shangers), it was the end of what may just be the best drama of all time. And just as you thought that David Chase played one final trick on his audience, by leaving the ending ambiguous and not giving a definitive conclusion to Tony’s life, it’s possible he actually played a much bigger trick than anyone thought. There is a theory sweeping the internet that would mean we got it all wrong. That there was an ending and we just didn’t see it. As Tony and his family sat at the Jersey diner, eating onion rings and listening to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” as Meadow struggled to parallel park her BMW, Tony’s life was about to end. Now I’m not sure if this is true, but here’s the theory: The man at the counter who kept looking at Tony was none other than Nicky Leotardo, Phil’s nephew who appeared in a previous episode. Not only this, the black guys who enter the diner right before Meadow were the same black guys who shot at Tony in Season 2 and clipped him in the ear. And to top off this semi-plausible theory, the trucker in the diner wearing the “USA” hat was the brother of the trucker who Christopher robbed and killed in Season 2. If this is true, the question isn’t whether Tony gets killed so much as it is who killed him. I’m not sure about all this. I don’t remember these characters well enough. But after thinking about this episode long and hard, I’ll tell you why I think Tony gets killed. What turned out to be the most important conversation of the entire series took place between Tony and Bobby on a boat in the Adirondacks. The scene was even included in a flashback in the episode before the finale. Bobby asks Tony what it would be like to get whacked. Tony responds, “You wouldn’t even know it had happened. Everything would just go black.” As Tony sits at the table, the viewer gets to see the world through Tony’s eyes– always paranoid, always afraid that someone, either from his past or someone he has never met, will whack him. And as Meadow pushes the diner door open and Tony looks up, surrounded by those could-be hit men, it all goes black. He didn’t even know it had happened. A perfect way to end a perfect show.
•AP: Do Diner Extras Know the Ending
•WaPo: Sopranos Fans Seeing Red