Was the Last Scene of the Sopranos a Dream?

 

Was it all a dream? Sounds cliché I know, but in this video I'm going to talk about the dream sequences in the Sopranos and how they might connect to both Tony's coma and the end of the whole show.

There are many dream sequences in the show. Christopher has a dream, Dr Melfi has a dream, but most of the dreams are Tony's. Now in the real world, you may take your dreams seriously and look for signs and how they may affect your life or messages from your subconscious, or you may think dreams are merely a way for your brain to unpack the senses you've experienced in recent waking life and are not all that important. That's fine either way, but we as the audience have to look at Tony's dreams as having been deliberately written by the writers to convey some signs and messages meant for us.

One of the most dream centric episodes is the Funhouse, the last episode of season two. In this episode, Tony gets food poisoning and repeatedly goes in and out of dreams. Some of these dreams are simple, wanting a better relation with his family and a bright, seemingly simple future. Others involve Dr Melfi. Most of the dream is centered around Big Pussy being a rat. Tony's subconscious couldn't be more clear about this, and he even talks to Big Pussy who appears as a fish, about to go to sleep. Of course it's a lot more than a dream that leads to Pussy's demise.

Other deceased people appear in Tony's dreams as well, like Gloria who committed suicide, and Ralph Ciferetto, who Tony kills in a fight, as well as his own cousin who was also killed by Tony, though he seems to take on a different role in the comatose dream world after Tony got shot, as even Tony himself does. His dream self seems to be unsure of his own identity and he is mistaken for a man name Kevin Finnerty. Perhaps the name, which sounds like infinity is a reference to eternity.

Which leads me to Tony's coma. Tony is about to go into the house, where there is a what is likely a family reunion, as in an ancestral family reunion. He sees a woman, whose face we don't get a glimpse of, only that the hair is definitely not Livia, Tony's mom. Perhaps a grandmother, or perhaps a spirit guide ready to take you to the next room. Tony doesn't ever let go of the suitcase and he never chooses to walk into the house. However, the light engulfs him, and our POV returns to what Tony sees and he sees himself go into a bright white light. Typically, the belief is that going into this light leads to your death. Walking into it is releasing yourself from this world. It's as if there is a point when you are faced with the light, that you may not have any choice in the matter. The light may simply pull you in. Into... what, is the question.

Tony's coma then leads me all the way to the last episode Made in America. I've unpacked this scene in another video where I go into who I think had Tony killed and why, the link will be in the description. This video received hundreds of comments of people telling me who they think did it, and the thing is, they all have a point, and anyone's interpretation is a valid opinion.

But the last episode, and the last scene specifically may be too complex to get a simple take on it at face value. It has symbolism, it's a little surreal, and it cuts to black, the music stops mid beat and that's all she wrote. We don't hear a gunshot. Bobby surmised that when you die, specifically if you get murdered by the mob, you won't even hear it when it happens. In this scene with Silvio, takes a few seconds to register that the man in front of him was just shot. So it's definitely possible he was shot.

Or did any of it really happen? Before you tell me the trope of it all being in a dream is cliche, stop and think about the show you've been watching. With all the dreams we've seen again and again, taking part inside the head of the characters dreaming. We are an omnipresent audience. We don't just see what these characters do, we occasionally see inside their minds.

The theory: Tony Soprano died in the hospital. The scene we saw was not a fade out from the blackness of a coma, it was a fade into the white light of the afterlife. He went into the light, and everything we saw afterward was in his head, like an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

That was a story about a man about to be hanged whose mind concocted an elaborate escape story which we the audience see. We see for the better part of a half hour, in the Twilight Zone version of this story Season 5 Episode 22, how the man escapes against all odds from his execution after having plunged into the river below the bridge when his noose rope breaks. There is even the parallel between that episode and the last episode of Sopranos in that the man runs to his wife, who seems to be out of reach. He runs and runs and yet she stays so close but so far. Which is similar to Meadow having trouble parking. It's so simple, but yet she tries to park and can't seem to get it right, while Tony waits inside. In the Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the man finally reaches his wife, but is snapped backward, and the scenes cut to his execution by hanging. In reality only a few seconds had elapsed, it was all in his head. In the Sopranos, just as his daughter was about to enter, Tony too may have been snapped back as soon as he sees her enter. All of this, too, going back to the hospital scene could have been in his head.

What we saw was Tony fading into white light and returning to the hospital room, which mimics the scene in Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge when the man plunges into the water. Then we experience a mostly normal show the rest of the season, with some exceptions. Tony wins incredibly big repeatedly on the roulette table, the game with the worst odds for a casino player. Paulie sees the Virgin Mary, a cat seems to be the reincarnation of either Aidrianna or Christopher, a man explains how everything is connected, how we are all one thing, which might be Tony's mind trying to explain his remaining existence.

At Holsten's when he looks up, he sees Meadow, whose voice seemed to save him from dying in the hospital, but in this theory, helps him to cross over into the next stage, limbo or purgatory, which is what we've been seeing. The people in the restaurant represent people in Tony's life, people he may have screwed over, people who worked for him. Then, once again, his daughter, who he was probably closest to throughout the show, his voice of reason, a voice he should have listened to more, the sight of her sends him into the next stage. And since none of us can know what that is, it goes black, rather than fade to white as we saw earlier. And Tony moves on, having left this earthly plane succumbing to his gunshot wound, and everything we've seen since could have occurred in mere minutes of our time.

Obviously this is not meant to be the end all be all of the Sopranos ending theories. The ending cuts to black, and is open to interpretation. This is just one more possibility. What do you think?

Full video: https://youtu.be/vKndQERAOsA