He oscillates between intense verbal pyrotechnics, laughter, and silences, which might mean "I am listening to you" or "I am thinking." He is forthcoming, but tends to maintain a reserve about his own work, insisting that if he could say what it means then he wouldn't have to write it. When you're across the table from him, he makes an impression without making a commotion. And we have continued to exchange ideas through e-mails and discussions at Upper East Side coffee bars and restaurants. My earliest fascination with Chase, was, unsurprisingly, a result of The Sopranos, which led me to a couple of interviews with him at Silvercup Studios in 2005, for a book about gangster films I have long since published. Chase startled me by turning toward me and saying with sudden, explosive anger, "Why are we talking about this?" I answered, "I'm just curious." And then, for whatever reason, he told me. We were in a tiny coffee shop, when, in the middle of a low-key chat about a writing problem I was having, I popped the question. I had been talking with Chase for a few years when I finally asked him whether Tony was dead. Chase wasn't just playing with our heads when he designed the conclusion of The Sopranos he was part of the ongoing evolution of the American imagination In response to audience agitation to know what became of the mobster, and even the lobbying of Terry Winter, who wrote the episode, to give the incident closure in a subsequent episode, Chase replied, "I don't give a fuck about the Russian." Chase clearly meant that disappearance to be one of life's loose threads. It's an early "did he die?" series moment. Moltisanti and Walnuts are stunned when the Russian not only musters the energy to escape, but also disappears without a trace in a hail of bullets as they try to recapture him. For him, that kind of obsession is as misguided as asking, "What happened to the Russian in 'Pine Barrens'?" - a reference to a season-three episode in which two men in Tony's crew, Christopher Moltisanti and Paulie Walnuts, drive a Russian mobster they have severely beaten up to the snow-covered New Jersey Pine Barrens to kill and dispose of him. Watch Vox culture editor Todd VanDerWerff explain the controversy around The Sopranos's final episodeĬhase, he wouldn't tell. The questions have not yet stopped since the episode aired in June 2007. What did it mean? Was this Chase's way of artfully - or contemptuously, depending on your opinion of Chase’s attitude toward his audience - creating Tony's death? Some recalled that Bobby Baccalieri, Tony's brother-in-law, once said that when the bullet with your name on it arrived, you probably didn't hear it coming. At THIS moment? Then the credits rolled, and all hell really broke loose. Is my television broken? we wondered, each in our individual homes. Millions of television sets across America went dark and silent suddenly. Inside, Tony raises his head, and - CUT TO BLACK. Outside, Meadow burns rubber trying to get into a parking space and then runs across a street against the light as cars whiz by her. Tony (James Gandolfini), his wife (Edie Falco), and his son (Robert Iler) are waiting for his daughter, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), to join them for dinner at a popular restaurant, while a number of suspicious characters mill around. Instead of giving Tony a final scene in which he is either killed or arrested - the two possible fates Tony and his fans had imagined for him - the last episode ends unexpectedly during a domestic scene with an ominous tinge.
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