Let’s get one thing straight. Tony Soprano didn’t die at the end of The Sopranos. He sat down with his family, put Journey on a jukebox and chomped on some onion rings. Then the screen went black. What happened after that – whether Tony was assassinated by the bloke who walked into the toilet moments before the blackout, or if he lived and had to listen to Meadow discuss her terrible parallel parking – is an unknown and will always remain so. As it should do.

At the end of last week, a book – released to coincide with the show’s 20th anniversary – made headlines for an interview with the series creator, David Chase, by the TV critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz. During the interview ,Chase referred to the final scene as the “death scene” and the “fatal scene”. That was enough for those who have trawled for an “answer” to what happened when the screen went black in June 2007 to start the ending engine up again. The Times dedicated a story to whether or not the issue of Tony Soprano’s fate had finally been put to bed. Of course, it hasn’t and isn’t. In 2014, the Vox writer Martha P Nochimson claimed Chase had told her that Tony wasn’t dead. Finally, there was an answer. Until Chase released a statement saying the story was untrue and that the “final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer”.

The best culture doesn’t hold our hand and map out every twist and turn. It is opaque at times and ambiguous. There’s mystery. There are lingering doubts and unanswered questions. Just like in real life. Does not knowing for sure what Rosebud meant make Citizen Kane a terrible film? Would you respect David Lynch’s Twin Peaks more if he revealed that Dale Cooper is definitely trapped in an endless loop of pain and apple pies? Should fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey feel robbed because of its cosmic ending?

Dr Melfi would probably call this obsession with Tony’s fate an obsession with closure. When asked whether people who have spent hours and hours trawling over that final scene to try to “prove” that Tony is killed are wrong, Chase said: “I don’t know if that’s my job. They’ve interpreted that scene that way. That should be a good thing, that there’s different interpretations.” In other words, the ambiguity is the whole point.

Unfortunately for The Sopranos, so much oxygen is dedicated to the ending that it’s easy to forget that Chase created seven seasons of the most well-wrought, funny and still mind-blowingly innovative television that has ever been created. In the “death scene” interview, Chase also mentions how parts of the final season were influenced by a combination of: Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, The Godfather, the power of dreams, and the song All That You Dream by Little Feat. Chase created a multi-layered world of intricacies that commented on everything from the myriad flaws of psychoanalysis, issues of race and class, homophobia, 9/11, the dangers of rampant machismo and creeping gentrification in New Jersey. And yet despite all that, the ending is something some fans just can’t get past.

Other shows from the so-called second golden age of TV don’t have that problem. Breaking Bad tied everything up in a horrible bloody bow. The Wire was surprisingly conventional when it bowed out. Mad Men left the cynical ad man Don Draper on a Malibu cliff-top meditating while simultaneously coming up with the “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” advert. Were they all perfect endings? No, but they are what the people who created the shows we loved chose them to be, and constantly rehashing and complaining about them is one of the worst excesses of bad fandom. Even when a finale is demonstrably bad – take the case of Seinfeld which has an ending that Larry David openly regrets – we as viewers have entered into a contract with the creative forces behind the show to accept their decisions, good and bad.

There is another option. A future of choose-your-own-adventure Bandersnatch-style shows in which we’re the director. But imagine if The Sopranos was down to us rather than Chase. Would you choose to have Dr Melfi tell Tony about her rape and see her attacker killed? Would you alter Christopher’s intervention scene? What would you change about the Pine Barrens episode? Chase knows his world better than we ever could, and that’s why we loved it.

The Sopranos finale is the ultimate mic drop. It was a masterstroke that ended the best television show that’s ever been created. Ultimately, if you didn’t like the ending of The Sopranos, you’re not a real fan of The Sopranos. Or more accurately, you never really understood Chase’s creation in the first place.