It’s been called ‘the biggest open question in TV history’

When the “Sopranos” ended eight years go it just ended.

Tony Soprano buys a song on the jukebox, we see the camera deliberately track a suspicious guy in a “Members Only” jacket entering the men’s room, Tony looks up at his daughter, who’s arrived late – and then everything goes black.

It left an entire generation thinking they’d forgotten to pay the cable bill.

The most popular deconstruction of the scene is that at that moment, we are looking through Tony’s eyes, and that when it all goes dark it’s because he has just been dispatched by a bullet from the men’s room, and wouldn’t have heard or felt anything.

The question of whether Tony died or not has been debated ever since, and the show’s creator David Chase is trying one more time to drive a stake through it.

Chase told the Directors Guild of America magazine, “The biggest feeling I was going for was, honestly, don’t stop believing. It was very simple and much more on the nose than people think.”

But what Chase did not do in the article was answer the big question: was Tony killed or not?

I don’t think he’s being coy. I think it’s because he doesn’t know. I don’t think he wants to know.

For a writer like Chase, any contrived Hollywood closure is like Ipecac. He avoids it at any cost. And I get that because that’s how life is.

In fact, sometimes I think writers, and even commentators, spend way too much time composing some clever ending when what they really need to do is stop talking.