Having watched the Sopranos again, from start to finish, ends with the series finale, “Made in America,” and the controversial, iconic final scene: Holsten’s. “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the juke. The rising tension as the family, Carmella, AJ, and then Meadow–struggling to parallel park–trickle in late. The lone customer, his sidelong glances, sitting at the counter and then going into the bathroom. Cut to black.

Back in 2007, I watched it the night it debuted. My oldest son had popped out of bed and came down the hall, and I picked him to lull him back to sleep and stood in the hallway, watching. When the credits rolled, my mouth was agape and I needed to talk to some adults pronto.

So… did Tony Soprano die?

This question still lingers some 13 years later. Much has been made of an interview that Chase did with TV critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz. Chase had conceived of Tony’s death at the hands of the New York family years prior, with Tony driving through the Lincoln Tunnel to a sit-down, and not coming back. He refers to it as “that death scene,” and Zoller Seitz nails him:

“You realise, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene,” prompts co-author Matt Zoller Seitz. There’s a big pause, then Chase replies: “F*** you guys.”

But the scene that Chase describes has almost nothing to do with the final scene of “Made in America.” Besides the predictive value of Chase saying he had conceived of killing Tony and visualizing a scene, and the cut to black, there’s not much that ties the two scenes together.

Let’s back up for a sec: we can whack this discussion into two camps:

1. Tony died in the finale, and;
2. Tony didn’t die.

TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall co-authored The Sopranos Sessions, and in an extended excerpt on Vulture, point out a couple of observations both for an against the case that Tony died in the final episode. First, there’s a “preponderance of imagery related to death”:

• At the episode’s outset, Tony is asleep–but appears to be lying in state;
• In a prior episode, Bobby Baccala says, “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?”–and then gets got in “The Blue Comet” episdoe;
• It’s cold outside at the end of the season;
• Less central to the point, but related in my mind, is the shooting of Gerry Torchiano [1]

On the other hand, Zoller Seitz and Sepinwall point out that the show has really never been cagey about anything. Yes, there are dream sequences. Yes, psychiatry is a–perhaps the–theme of the show. But as Sepinwall writes:

The Sopranos tended to keep its plot cards face up. You knew virtually everything important that was going on, not only with Tony, but with all his enemies and allies. At this moment in “Made in America,” nobody that we know of wants Tony dead. Phil is gone, Butchie made peace with New Jersey, and anyone else who might wish Tony a violent end is out of the picture.

This is the spirit in which I spent the final minutes of the show: Phil was dead, and even Butchie, who had encouraged Phil’s most murderous impulses, wandering from Little Italy only to find himself in Chinatown, backs down from going to the mattresses and even tells Tony that he can do what he needs to do regarding Phil.

Tony was able to breathe freely, if but for a time.

There is a third camp, though. It’s a path that students of the liberal arts and literature, for example, would embrace, and the philosophically minded as well. And that path? It doesn’t matter. We. Don’t. Know.

Consider this conversation with Chase and Jeremy Egner from The NY Times.

I think the point isn’t whether or not Tony was killed. It’s the uncertainty that’s the point, and the way the scene’s crazy tension makes us aware of the passage of time and how choices shape the brief bit of life we get. Most people can’t control when or how they die, but the choices are ours. Is that totally off base?

No, that’s not off base at all.

I think there’s some hope in it.

You’re the first person who’s said that. There is some hope in it. “Don’t Stop Believin’” is the name of the song, for Christ’s sake. I mean, what else can you say?

Chase wrote an expository of the direction of the final scene for the Directors Guild of America, and he avoided the issue almost entirely.

Either it ends here for Tony or some other time … I thought the possibility would go through a lot of people’s minds or maybe everybody’s mind that he was killed … Either it ends here for Tony or some other time.

Maybe knowing the answer isn’t the point. The point, in fact, is uncertainty. As James Poniewozik wrote in the Times:

But I don’t know the truth any more than you do. The ending of “The Sopranos” creates an atmosphere of tension in which Tony could die, or not. Then it leaves you without certainty; it leaves you knowing that you could die and never see it coming; it leaves you to wonder what ending you were hoping for and why.

It’s fun, yes, to discuss whether you think Tony was murdered that night, why “Don’t Stop Believin’” was on the jukebox, if the guy in the Members Only jacket was there to kill him–or not. But it’s not the point. One more quote, from Zoller Seitz in The Sopranos Sessions from the Vulture excerpt:

But what he said, specifically — and he was directing it toward everybody — was, “Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point. To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.” I think the most important two words in those two sentences are “spiritual question.” And if we fixate on anything other than that, we’re missing the point.