No one really knows what happened on The Sopranos after that infamous black cut. But series star Lorraine Bracco has her own idea of what happened after the screen suddenly went black.
TV fans will never forget how the iconic HBO crime drama ended after six seasons — Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) sat alone in a diner booth, waiting for his family to arrive. But when the diner doors opened, the final scene just… ended. The screen went black. People have debated what it meant for years, and creator David Chase waited until 2021 to seemingly confirm that the black cut meant Tony was killed, but Bracco, who played Tony’s psychiatrist Dr. Melfi, revealed on SiriusXM’s The Spotlight with Jessica Shaw what she thinks happened after the final scene, including the fact that Tony is still alive.
“Honestly, I think they ran into each other in restaurants and stuff like that,” Bracco said of Tony and Dr. Melfi’s future after the final scene. “I don’t know. I think part of me wants to believe that she left him for a while, and they got back together, got back into therapy. I can believe that.”
Bracco admitted that she never asked series creator Chase what happened to Melfi after her final appearance on the show. “No, I never asked,” she said. “And that’s a really good question. I’m going to call him right now.”
Sopranos creator David Chase returned to the diner where the infamous final scene was filmed. Dr. Melfi and Tony formed a unique bond over the course of the series, as she knew he was a gangster and a psychopath, but continued to see him as her therapy patient. However, when her fellow therapists find out that she is treating a known sociopath, she becomes embarrassed to turn Tony down as her patient because psychopaths tend to use what they learn in talk therapy to become even more psychopaths. Their final scene features Dr. Melfi literally closing the door on Tony.
Bracco said she was “heartbroken” after filming the final scene because she didn’t like how things played out between Dr. Melfi and Tony.
“I wasn’t too happy with the way David ended the story either,” she added. “I thought it was terrible and wrong. I was angry. I said to him, ‘How can you invest five years in someone’s life and then just walk away?’ I said, ‘That’s not cool.’ And you know, that was it.”
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