It was one of the most hotly debated mysteries in TV history and — bada bing! — it’s been solved.
Seven years after the finale of HBO’s “The Sopranos” left fans stunned and slack-jawed, wondering whether Tony was whacked after a famous cut-to-black, series creator and director David Chase has finally broken his omerta over the controversy.
Asked by a film critic during a recent interview, “Did Tony die?’’ Chase fumed at first, saying, “Why are we talking about this?”
But when Vox interviewer Martha Nochimson admitted to being “just curious,” the director shook his head and for the first time came clean, ending years of speculation.
“No. No, he isn’t,” Chase replied, refusing to elaborate.
He also wouldn’t say much else about the ending of the mob series’ 2007 finale in an ice-cream parlor in Bloomfield, NJ. Chase offered only that it had something to do with the Edgar Allan Poe poem “A Dream Within a Dream.”
“What more can I say?” he said.
Chase’s revelation on the “did Tony or didn’t he?’’ question went against what some cast members had speculated.
“My opinion is that . . . we were in [Tony’s] point of view in the last moments of his life, and that’s it,” Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher Moltisanti, said earlier this year.
The murky ending irked not only fans, but even “Tony” himself, the late James Gandolfini, who played the panic-attack-prone Mafia-family boss.
“When I first saw the ending, I said, ‘What the f–k?!’ ” he told Vanity Fair in 2012.
“I mean, after all I went through, all this death, and then it’s over like that?”
Chase shrouded the final scene in even more mystery when his publicist released a statement late Wednesday that cast doubt about the character’s fate.
“Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point,” the statement read. “To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of THE SOPRANOS raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.”