The Sopranos Ending: No, Nobody In It Understands It Either

Over a week since it was broadcast, the world is still stunned, angry and confused about the anticlimactic final scene of the last episode of The Sopranos - but the good news is that none of the Sopranos cast have an effing clue about it either.

Although you'd expect that Sopranos bigwig David Chase would have explained to the cast of The Sopranos exactly why 86 hours of ever-growing tension ended with a preposterously cheesy piece of 1980s power ballad, a man looking at a door and ten seconds of blackness, it turns out that they're in the dark as much as the rest of us, with even James Gandolfini - Tony Soprano himself - admitting that he's more than a little stumped at the way the show ended. And he's not the only one - personally we're furious that the last scene of The Sopranos didn't even begin to reveal if Tony Soprano and his family ever got off the island or if the smoke monster ate them or whatever.

People just can't stop talking about the ending of The Sopranos, or - if they do stop talking - it's only so they can go onto Wikipedia and call David Chase a homosexual for not really explaining much. It's been a week since the deliberately vague finale of The Sopranos confused everyone, and still nobody's any the wiser. Did the 10-second blackout mean that Tony Soprano got shot by the man in the toilet? Did it mean that the rest of his life would be spent constantly looking over his shoulder? Did it mean that not even David Chase at his most sadistic would ever dream about letting viewers sit through an entire Journey song?

Nobody knows. And, for once, we don't mean 'nobody' as in 'a bunch of morons who watch too much telly', we mean not even the actual people who were in The Sopranos know what the ending was supposed to signify. While we're still maintaining that, following the Sopranos ending, Meadow runs into the restaurant and does some form of sexy poledance in her underwear, James Gandolfini won't be drawn on the matter. E! Online quotes:

"You have to ask David Chase about that. Smarter minds than mine know the answer to that. I thought it was a great ending… The ending was exactly what it should have been."

And nobody else from The Sopranos seems to want to hazard a guess either, possibly in case they're wrong and Chase bans them from any movie of The Sopranos that he may be planning:

Edie Falco says she was equally in the dark about the last scene. "I think the ending was just great. I mean that. I have never second-guessed David Chase, and I'm not about to start now… Yes, I was at that table, but I have no idea what happened after the screen went blank." Steven Van Zandt, whose consigliere Silvio Dante was last seen comatose in a hospital, was even more blunt. "A conventional ending would have been a fraud," he said.

Yeah, we can't even begin to tell you the amount of times we've felt defrauded by the way some books and films have satisfying conclusions. For example, the ending of The Usual Suspects pissed us off so much by not just cutting to black right before the identity of Keyser Soze was revealed that we burnt down an orphanage out of spite. And then we kicked a dog over because the final scene didn't even have any power ballads in it.

In fact, The Sopranos should be congratulated for this bold new method of storytelling, and that's why we're urging all our readers to go to their local library right now and rip out the final page from every single book there, as a sort of tribute.

Read more:

Sopranos Goodfellas Say Good Ending - E! Online