It is the rare television show that can spark controversy seven years after its finale, but naturally The Sopranos would be the one to do it. Vox believed that it had finally explained the inexplicable conclusion to the show, getting a nod out of David Chase when he was directly asked if Tony Soprano was still alive. Unfortunately, for those who really, really need answers to every last question posed by the universe, no matter how small, Chase immediately retracted. He released a statement through a publicist that was somewhere in between a prophecy and a riddle:
A journalist for Vox misconstrued what David Chase said in their interview. To simply quote David as saying, "Tony Soprano is not dead," is inaccurate. There is a much larger context for that statement and as such, it is not true. As David Chase has said numerous times on the record, "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.
The spiritual question may have no right and no wrong answer, but there is a right answer to what happened to Tony Soprano, which is simply that he neither lived nor died. Here is the basic fact forgotten in the fury of the debate that has followed this exchange: Tony Soprano is a character. I once knew a professor of literature who told me that the entire purpose of teaching undergraduates was so that they could learn that characters written down on paper or shown on screens were not the same as actual people who walked around in the world. Apparently not enough people have learned this lesson. It is possible for characters to be both alive and dead. Not people.
To reiterate: Tony Soprano is not a person.
The decision to end the show in the middle of the action, in hindsight, was a stroke of pure brilliance on Chase's part. It turned Tony Soprano into a Schrödinger's cat. If you don't know that particular thought experiment, you can watch an explanation here. But the basic idea is that there is a cat in a box with a bomb that goes off 50 percent of the time. Until somebody opens the box, the "reality" of the cat is equally living and dead, existing in a state of pure probability. Schrödinger used this experiment to explain the nature of "quantum entanglement." It also works well at explaining inconclusive narrative.
The point is this: Asking David Chase won't solve anything. There is an idea out there that opening David Chase's brain would be like opening the box that contains Schrödinger's cat, and we would know, once and for all, whether Tony was alive or dead, one or the other. That's simply untrue.
David Chase is done with Tony Soprano. He was done seven years ago. He has created the black box and the bomb with the cat in it. Now even he doesn't know if Tony is alive or dead. We're all just going to live with that fact, like we're going to have to live with being unable to observe the workings of the atom without disturbing the reality of the observed object. Terminal uncertainty haunts the observation of elementary particles and also fat gangsters on television.
