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I’m loathe to take issue with Heather Havrilesky and Michael Berube and sound like a hack at the same time, but there is another factor to be taken into consideration when assessing the “did Tony die at the end of the Sopranos” question — crass commercialism.

Artistic considerations are well and good, but The Sopranos exists for HBO primarliy as a profit center. And while killing Tony Soprano off may have been the most artistically sound ending (and I think it was — not only was it karmic justice, but sending him off to jail or putting him in the witness protection program really only engender more questions than closure) it would also be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. For now contracts may be expiring, participants looking forward to greener pastures and everyone is no doubt burned out and looking forward to “moving on.” But all those things can change over time as creative juices start flowing again the idea of a reunion payday starts to look good to everyone involved (and I think David Chase’s comments support this view).

Berube:

Now, the fact that Chase didn’t even give us a gunshot to go on, no clue that Tony really dies — well, so what? Are there really ghosts in The Turn of the Screw, or is the governess mad? (That debate has been going on for more than a century now.) We’re left to wonder whether we’ve been duped into thinking that Tony dies because all the staging in that final scene — the brief shots of each of the restaurant patrons, the focus on the guy going to the men’s room, the closeups of Meadow having trouble parking the car — feels like the generic suspense-creatin’ mechanisms that precede a catastrophe. We stop and ask ourselves how much of our reaction depends on those narrative mechanisms. And so the ending becomes, in a meta- way, not Chase’s “final fuck you” to the viewers (as so many pissed-off viewers have said) but, rather, a form of what did you expect? — except that it’s a real question, not a rhetorical one.

It might not be utterly brilliant or anything, but it works for me. . . .

Considering the fact that Chase’s hands were probably no doubt tied by the necessities of a financial future (his own as much as anybody else’s), his ability to work around that and at the same time deliver an emotionally satisfying ending may in fact qualify as brilliant. Tony dies and lives at the same time. It’s a tough to serve two masters in a case like this and make them both happy, but I think Chase managed just that.

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