BRAD GREY (executive producer, co-founder of Brillstein-Grey): We talked a lot about it. There were a couple of different potential ways the series could end. We all know with the Mob it always ends one of two ways—it’s “the two forevers”: you either go to jail or you die. That’s the way it works in that life.

ALLEN COULTER (director): If you think about it, every other solution would have been predictable: Tony’s going to get killed; Carmela’s going to get killed; they’re going to kill each other. Meadow is going to turn him in; he’s going to go to prison. Or “I knew it! I knew Tony was going to get killed by Paulie Walnuts!” You name the solution, somebody thought of it. I would venture to say no one, in the entire world, thought of the solution he came up with.

MATTHEW WEINER (writer, executive producer): I loved it … It worked for me because—there’s only three possibilities: he goes to jail, he gets killed, he goes on. One of them is going to happen, you’re going to pick one, and who’s telling a story like that? What I think David was saying was that it doesn’t really matter. Tony’s with his family and your time with him is done. You tuned in here, and now it’s over. For me, I just loved that there was such an interactive quality to it. But the way the public behaved, it was like somebody took the bottle away from a baby. Outrage and shock.

LORRAINE BRACCO (Dr. Jennifer Melfi): I would have wanted it to end differently, but God knows we’ve talked about that ending for five years now—we’re still talking about it. People stop me in the street. “Did you get the ending? Did I miss something?” I thought it was very, very shrewd.

MICHAEL IMPERIOLI (Christopher Moltisanti): I thought it was a great ending. A lot of people hated it and thought it was a cop-out, but I thought it was the proper way. Knowing David Chase, he never liked to wrap things up neatly. I never expected it to be either a cliffhanger so people would wait for the movie or wait for another season or just some like really final thing. But I think he’s dead, is what I think. David was trying to put us in the place of the last things you see before you die. You remember some little details and something catches your eye and that’s it. You don’t know the aftermath because you’re gone.

TERENCE WINTER (writer, executive producer): I watched 18 different versions of the last scene of the series finale. All very subtle variations on each other, but that was so painstaking, shot by shot by shot, and it took David weeks I think to put that ending together. I thought it was great. What I always took away from it was: when you’re Tony Soprano, even going out for ice cream with your family is going to be fraught with paranoia, and whether or not a guy comes out of that bathroom that night, eventually somebody’s going to come out of the bathroom somewhere. Maybe it happened that night, maybe it didn’t. But his legacy is paranoia and just that horrible distance that he lives in. I was shocked that people were so angry. It upset David that people would think, Oh, he’s trying to fuck with us. That it was David’s “Fuck you” to the audience. And David’s like, “I’m trying to entertain people. I’m trying to do something different that you haven’t seen before. I’m not trying to fuck with the audience.”

JAMES GANDOLFINI (Tony Soprano): When I first saw the ending, I said, “What the fuck?” I mean, after all I went through, all this death, and then it’s over like that? But after I had a day to sleep, I just sat there and said, “That’s perfect.”

STEVEN VAN ZANDT (Silvio Dante): I had to go on one of those nationally syndicated shows the next morning, so I heard from the whole country how upset they were. So I just started asking people, O.K., what’s your ending? Does the family get wiped out? Is that what you want? You want the kid to get killed? Tony to get killed? The wife? O.K., so what? And nobody could really say. I said, “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. The director said cut, the actors went home. That’s what happened.” It’s a TV show. It’s a fucking TV show, O.K.?