I didn’t start watching the Sopranos until the second season, I think, was totally confused for the next two seasons, but finally, I think, got it (that is who everyone was – well, most of the people – and how they relate to each other.) at some point in the 4th.

The show gets a lot of hype, but for once, it’s deserved. The show also gets criticism – for somehow "glamorizing" Mob life, which it doesn’t deserve. The rap has often been that the Tony Soprano character is all cuddly and stuff, which works to mitigate his evil in the perceptions of the viewers. I’ve never seen that – never seen Tony as a folk hero, as a positive figure. He’s a sociopath, Carm is an enabler who profits from his sins, now, it seems, with a fairly clear (aka deluded) conscience. This has never been difficult for me to grasp.  The initial series selling point – that it would be a kind of cute gloss on Mob life refracted through (then) 20th century suburbia, eventually proved to be flawed as well, as the Sopranos moved into the realm of metaphor, not of the banality of middle class life as a sort of Godfather’s American Beauty, but of the basics: the pull between good and evil, and most particularly here, the question of choice and free will. The life is self-destructive (not to speak of destructive of others) – the main characters see this, now and again…but then they immerse themselves right back into it and turn firmly from any glimmers of conscience they have left.

More discussion and spoilers after the jump.

Which is why this last season is going to be so fascinating (I hope) – you could even see it last night in the premiere. In a sick, but totally karmic turn of events, Tony is shot by his senile uncle, the titular head of the family, a man who, in the first season had planned with Tony’s own mother to have him killed.  Whom Tony is refusing to put in a nursing home because, we can guess, he’s wary of the consequences – it was putting his mother in a home that raised her ire 5 seasons ago. But the consequences follow, nonetheless – not of one particular act, but of the whole cycle of events – this family, to which Tony is inextricably tied, a theme that’s echoed through the episode in the tragic struggle of Eugene to try to free himself. That’s it, to me, in a nutshell. It’s not about fate. It’s about building up a web of evil, seeing a glimmer of goodness here and there, knowing that it would be better outside the web, but falling back, in resignation, despair, and the lust for the perks of evil, right back into the web.

Thoughts?

Oh, and to get a glimpse of what might be coming…here is the text of the voice over piece/chant in the opening scenes – William Borroughs reciting, I presume, the words of William Borroughs on various deaths of various types of souls.