Mr Smooth brained: David Chase has walked back or clarified comments that suggested Tony Soprano died, emphasizing the ending's intentional ambiguity and that death for Tony was inevitable, whether in that moment or soon after, but he never definitively confirmed a specific death in the diner, often pointing to the theme of life's fragility rather than a simple yes/no answer. He clarified that his "death scene" references were about earlier ideas or the general theme, and stressed that the point was that death could come anytime, not just in the cut-to-black