Another popular argument against the idea that Tony was killed in the final scene is that Chase would have shown MOG shoot Tony if he wanted us to believe that Tony died. After all, any death of a major character on the show has always been explicitly shown to the audience. However, Tony is not just any other character on the show. The viewer has been primarily following his story and has been inside Tony‘s head. Tony Soprano may be the most famous gangster in television and film history. Millions of fans have wondered what his death would “look like”. For this reason Chase cannot kill him in a cliché manner. A quick bullet to the head just does not work for Chase’s purposes. It is not an ending worth the character. We have also seen Tony shot on two previous occasions. Consequently, Chase crafted a way to show Tony’s death without showing anything explicit. More importantly, he avoided any of the cliché’s of a gangster’s on screen death. He created something no one could have predicted, a POV sequence that puts the viewer in Tony’s eyes at the moment that he is shot. David Chase had no interest in showing Tony dead and bloody and his family screaming in horror. Besides, David Chase already showed you what this would look like just a few scenes before when Phil Leotardo is killed right in front of his family. Instead, Chase creates a jarring cut to black through Tony’s eyes that is far more satisfying intellectually and emotionally. More importantly, it has never been done before and could not be predicted by anyone upon the first viewing. It is one of the great deaths in cinematic history. It is the anti-Scarface ending. Instead of a bullet ridden corpse we get to experience death as Tony would experience it. Tony Soprano and “us” never saw it coming