Bada bing, bada boom—Tony Soprano’s fate has finally been revealed.
After 14 years of speculation, The Sopranos‘ creator David Chase has officially confirmed, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, that Tony did in fact die at the end of the series’ finale in 2007. Though the seven-time Emmy Award-winning writer always envisioned killing off Tony, it did not go according to his original plan.
“The scene I had in my mind was not that scene. Nor did I think of cutting to black,” Chase explained of the famously divisive ending, which cuts to black so abruptly, some viewers at the time thought their cable had gone out. “I had a scene in which Tony comes back from a meeting in New York in his car. At the beginning of every show, he came from New York into New Jersey, and the last scene could be him coming from New Jersey back into New York for a meeting at which he was going to be killed.”