Tony Soprano Lives!

Film and media critic Martha Nochimson caught Chase off-guard recently during a coffee shop conversation. Though the creator of the HBO TV series did not offer any details, he did confirm to her that the final episode’s infamous fade-to-black did not mean to suggest that Tony would go on to soon die. The writer’s immediate reaction:

Fine. Tony’s not dead. But what do we do with this bald fact? And isn’t Chase’s flat response exactly the point? The mere answer doesn’t really go anywhere unless we consider it as a part of the larger context of The Sopranos, and as a part of the much bigger story of Chase’s art…

When I asked Chase about the cut to black, he said that it is about Poe’s poem “A Dream Within a Dream.”