Tony Soprano Is Dead

For all those people out there wondering the fate of Tony Soprano, you can now be certain that he is in fact dead. In the diner, while eating onion rings, killed in front of his family. But the question still remains unanswered — who ended Tony’s life? His wife? Daughter? Space Aliens? MSNBC claims to know something you don’t:

One clue in particular, a flashback in the penultimate episode to a conversation between Tony and his brother-in-law about death, gained credence as an HBO spokesman called it a “legitimate” hint and confirmed that series creator David Chase had a definite ending in mind. “While he won’t say to me 100 percent what it all means, he says some people who’ve guessed have come closer than others,” HBO spokesman Quentin Schaffer told Reuters after speaking to Chase.

“There are definitely things there that he intended for people to pick up on,” Schaffer said. Chase himself suggested as much in an interview on Tuesday with The Star-Ledger newspaper of New Jersey when he said of his end to the HBO series, “Anyone who wants to watch it, it’s all there.” In the final moments of Sunday’s concluding episode, Tony, the conflicted mob boss who has just survived a round of gangland warfare, sits in a diner with his family munching on onion rings as the 1980s song by rock band Journey, “Don’t Stop Believing,” blares from a juke box.

Tension builds as a suspicious man wearing a “Members Only” jacket eyes Tony from a nearby counter before slipping into a restroom. Then, as Tony looks toward the restaurant’s entrance, the screen abruptly goes blank in mid-scene — with no picture or sound for 10 seconds — until the credits roll silently.The biggest hint, according to a consensus taking shape on the Web, is a scene from an earlier episode in which Tony and his brother-in-law, Bobby Bacala, muse about what it feels like to die. “At the end, you probably don’t hear anything, everything just goes black,” Bobby says while they sit fishing in a small boat on a lake. That scene is recalled briefly in a flashback played at the end of the penultimate “Sopranos” episode, as Tony is lying in the darkened room of a safehouse clutching a machine gun to his chest in the midst of a mob war.

I’d have to say, while I never watched this show very often, that Tony Soprano’s death probably is going to piss a lot of people off. He was killed and now there will not be a movie for you to watch.