On this day 19 years ago, one of the greatest runs in television history came to an end.
On June 10, 2007, Tony Soprano walked into Holsten’s diner and never walked out.
That’s right, folks, today marks nearly two decades since The Sopranos last aired, with “Made In America” giving us the exact type of cliffhanger that David Chase loved to tease his audiences with.
Whether you believe Tony was shot, died of a heart attack, or the cut to black was really just the end of the show, with the New Jersey mob boss living out the rest of his days a paranoid shell of his former, season one self, the rampant theorizing is part of what made the show a massive hit.
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In that vein, here are five more fan theories from “The Sopranos” that make the show even more engaging on subsequent rewatches.
As Tony’s crew and friend circle starts to shrink as the show goes on, our panic attack-prone paisan becomes increasingly paranoid and scrambles to find a successor.
Unfortunately, the best he can do is his drug addict “nephew,” Christopher Moltisanti.
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Tony does his best to groom Chrissy as his “hair apparent,” but despite his best efforts, Moltisanti remains an unreliable junkie until season six, when he makes an earnest attempt to get clean.
Towards the end of the season, Chris relapses and starts using again, leading to a car crash that leaves him maimed, giving Tony no other option but to whack his underling.
But in the scene before the car crash, we see Tony and Chris at a meeting with Phil where the two are discussing business, and it’s here where we are given clues that Chris may be a rat.
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During the meeting, Chris is seen wearing a cap promoting his new movie, “Cleaver.”
Other than the fact that Chris is only seen wearing a cap one other time in the show (during the pilot), the choice of headwear may be a callback to season five, when Soprano associate Jack Masserone was seen wearing a wire in his ball cap right before he was taken out by a few of Tony’s flunkies.
Chris would have had plenty of incentive to flip, as his relationship with his uncle had all but disintegrated by this point in the show, and between his drug use and myriad crimes, there is a good chance he slipped up at some point.
If that’s the case, Tony got extremely lucky suffocating him before he was able to say anything too incriminating on tape.
One of the more annoying side characters in the show, Noah Tannenbaum is Meadow’s obnoxious boyfriend she meets in college during the first half of season three.
Throughout their relationship, Noah’s cocksure attitude rubs plenty of viewers and characters the wrong way, including his proclamation that he intends to “punch (Tony’s) f—ing lights out,” but Meadow is head over heels for him regardless.
Everything is fine and dandy until Meadow spends the weekend at home, leaving Noah to deal with her manic-depressive roommate, Caitlin.
After Meadow makes it back to Columbia, her normally straight-A student boyfriend starts making a stink about getting a C on a paper, and grows distant with Meadow, eventually breaking up with her in the library of all places.
He blames the poor grade on Caitlin, saying her incessant yapping caused him to lose focus, even revealing his overbearing father had a restraining order filed against her.
All of this feels like a convenient excuse to make a clean break with Meadow without having to reveal the fact that he cheated on her with her roommate.
The show does a pretty good job of not-so-subtly hinting at it, too.
In the scene where Caitlin walks into Noah’s room after learning Meadow is out of town, she asks if she can stay so she isn’t lonely, to which Noah begrudgingly obliges.
Since the show is often more about what you don’t see, there’s a heavy implication that the two slept together, especially since the next time she sees Meadow, she’s in an unusually chipper mood.
Maybe this is just a way for fans of the show to hate on Noah even more, but I can totally see this being a possibility and it’s one of the more plausible theories.
The murder of Adriana La Cerva, longtime girlfriend of Chris, in season five is one of the most shocking and heartbreaking deaths in the entire series.
After Ade outs herself as a rat to Chris, he is faced with an impossible choice: run away with his woman and become an informant himself, or sell her down the river to curry favor with Tony and protect the New Jersey crime family.
Unfortunately for Adriana, Chris chooses the latter, and everyone’s favorite mob WAG is dragged out to the woods by Silvio and shot offscreen.
There are several moments in the subsequent season devoted to different characters coping with her death, including the mobsters who orchestrated her demise.
Towards the end of the final season, a cat starts showing up around the Bada Bing.
When it starts behaving strangely — including staring at a picture of Chris after he’s been killed — Paulie starts to believe the cat is Chris reincarnated.
Tony dismisses this as a coincidence, but fans took it a step further: what if the cat is actually Adriana?
Think about it, the cat is staring at a picture of Chris because she feels a mixture of betrayal and mourning for the man she was supposed to spend her life with.
In addition to this, Adriana was often seen wearing leopard-print tracksuits in addition to other feline-themed apparel, so it would make sense that she would come back in her next life as a cat.
Not the most concrete theory, but a fun one nonetheless.
The last two(ish) seasons of “The Sopranos” deal almost entirely with Tony’s adversarial relationship with New York capo-turned-boss, Phil Leotardo.
Phil and Tony butt heads over a litany of issues, but one of the big hangups between the two of them in the first half of season six revolves around one of Tony’s top earners, Vito Spatafore, being outed as a gay man.
With how macho the mobsters all are, this causes a ton of consternation, both within the family and across the river in New York, especially considering Vito is married to Phil’s cousin.
Many of the crew members are disgusted by Vito’s homosexuality, but Phil seems to take special exception to this revelation, going out of his way to demand Tony take him out and becoming violently angered even at the mere mention of Vito’s name.
Phil is ultimately the one to whack Vito while he’s in hiding, too, taking great pleasure in being the one to snuff out this perceived slight on the mob’s honor.
While most would chalk Phil’s zeal up to just being an old-school kind of guy, some fans postulate that the Shah of Iran is actually a closeted homosexual himself, and there are a few examples to back this up.
For one, Phil spent “20 years in the can,” as he puts it, and even Tony mentions that some guys who spend that long in prison end up “compromising.”
There’s also the idea that he is so angered by Vito only because of his own latent homosexuality, and his violence toward the man is only projection on his part.
Other examples include wanting to turn the TV off when there’s a bodybuilding competition on and how he acts during the hit on Vito.
Phil seems to revel in the vicious beating of Vito in his hotel room, almost in a perverse way, as he grips the sheets while watching his crew members take Vito out.
He even emerges “out of the closet” when he and his crew ambush Vito at his hotel, so the imagery speaks for itself.
I’m personally not a fan of this theory, as it’s a little too “on the nose” and takes away from some of Phil’s mythos as an old school, stuck-in-his-ways wise guy, but to each their own.
This one is my personal favorite, and involves one of the most laugh-out-loud hilarious characters the show had to offer.
Carmine Lupertazzi Jr. is portrayed as an absolute buffoon, the pampered son of New York boss Carmine Sr.
Through his constant malapropisms and inability to read the room, Carmine Jr. is even referred to as “brainless the second” by Tony, so his intelligence is dubious at best.
When his father dies, a power vacuum is created as a new boss waits to be named, with both Carmine Jr. and longtime friend John “Johnny Sac” Sacrimoni vying for the crown.
Carmine ultimately drops out of the race, ceding to Johnny Sac, but remains a key figure and even plays intermediary for New York and Jersey on multiple occasions.
But what if the “dumb guy act” is exactly that: an act?
Fans often cite Carmine’s perceived screw-ups during multiple sit downs with both mob families as him manipulating each party.
In a meeting with his father and Johnny Sac late in season four, Lupertazzi purposely lets information about Tony slip to put the squeeze on New Jersey.
It’s played as a moment of jealousy when his father compliments Tony, but some fans aren’t so quick to view it as unintentional.
In a season six sit down between Phil and Tony where Carmine acts as mediator, things seem to be going well until he “accidentally” brings up the death of Phil’s brother Billy (47-years-old, just a kid).
This sets Phil off and craters any progress made between the two sides.
The theory is that Carmine is actually pulling strings behind the scenes to start a war between New York and New Jersey, with him coming in at the end to pick up the scraps.
Running with this theory makes re-watches of “The Sopranos” even more entertaining, and there’s even talk that Carmine was the one who orchestrated a hit on Tony at the end of the series finale.
