Onion rings and other things

So David Chase has finally broken his vow of silence, even a little, to talk about the onion ring scene in "The Sopranos" series finale for the forthcoming "The Sopranos: The Complete Book," and Entertainment Weekly has an excerpt of it.

Chase gives interviewer Brett Martin a few more clues than he offered me back in June, but still refuses to answer fans' two biggest questions: 1)Does Tony live or die? and 2)Either way, what did that whole scene mean?

In addition to disavowing the Last Supper theory and most of the other elaborate over-analysis of that scene, Chase says a few things that could be parsed for further study. First, on the matter of closure, he says:

There was nothing definite about what happened, but there was a clean trend on view � a definite sense of what Tony and Carmela's future looks like. Whether it happened that night or some other night doesn't really matter.

Then, while saying that there's no elaborate puzzle to be solved, he references the hit on Gerry the Hairdo and how it happened even before Silvio was aware it happened. Martin starts to ask whether Chase is implying that Tony was killed, but Chase interrupts:

I'm not saying anything. And I'm not trying to be coy. It's just that I think that to explain it would diminish it.

Finally, in discussing how he had the idea for the scene years in advance, he explains:

As I recall, it was just that Tony and his family would be in a diner having dinner and a guy would come in. Pretty much what you saw.

The "guy" in question is clearly the infamous "Man in Members Only Jacket" (who, once again, had never been on the show before and was not any kind of relative of Phil Leotardo's).

I still stand by my "Tony lives" theory, and that what Chase was trying to show was how the rest of Tony's life will play out -- how every open door, every passing human, could signal the threat that finally kills him -- but the reference to the Gerry the Hairdo hit certainly has my wheels spinning. Did Chase give too much away to the interviewer and then try to over-correct once he realized his mistake, or is what we saw all there was to see?

Whatever Chase meant, looks like the 15 Minutes of Fame Tour may get one last encore; I'm tentatively scheduled to be on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" on MSNBC tonight. If the interview actually happens, I'll post in the comments about the rough time I should be on.