This season, Tony's family problems are compounded by the sudden arrival of his older sister, Janice (new cast member Aida Turturro), who has been living on the West Coast for 20 years, putting a continent between her and the old lady. Janice, who has taken the Hindu name Parvati, is a pot-smoking, Birkenstock-wearing, free-spirited con artist. She tells Tony that she's come back home to assume her share of the caretaking burden, but Tony suspects that she's out for a piece of the inheritance if Livia kicks. Watching Janice struggle to keep her temper and play the part of the loving, serene daughter while Livia pushes her buttons, it's hard not to see things Tony's way. This could turn out to be a fight to the death for the female power in the family.

And Turturro insinuates herself wonderfully into the mix; Janice and Tony get on each other's nerves with pitch-perfect sibling antagonism. When Meadow (who is all attitude this season, and quite taken with her boho aunt) gets caught throwing a party in Livia's old vacant house, Janice offers Tony and Carmela some spiritually enlightened parenting advice: "There's a Zuni saying: 'For every 20 wrongs a child does, ignore 19.'" To which Tony responds with a sneer, "There's an old Italian saying: 'You fuck up once, you lose two teeth.'"

Meanwhile, on the business side, Tony has been elevated to street boss by Junior's incarceration, but he's being forced to devise more and more scams to throw the Feds off his scent. In one of these diversification moves, Tony takes over a brokerage firm, installs cokehead/aspiring screenwriter Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) as "SEC compliance officer," and uses it to launder money through the stock market. Then there's the problem of Pussy Bompensiero (Vincent Pastore), the Soprano soldier whom Tony erroneously figured for a government rat. Pussy went on the lam, but now he resurfaces with a story about being in a Puerto Rican clinic for a bad back. While his story checks out, Tony can't shake his suspicions about the man he affectionately calls "beached whale."

In the Jan. 23 episode, Tony gets a new headache in the form of Richie Aprile (David Proval), the older brother of deceased capo Jackie Aprile. Richie, who has just gotten out of prison after 10 years, wants his rightful share of the action, which he feels Tony has usurped. The yoga-practicing, grudge-carrying, possibly pyscho Richie chafes at taking orders from Tony. He's positioning himself as a threat and, to make matters worse, he's doing it from the inside: He used to date Janice, and the two may be getting close again.

But the really bad news for Tony is that he has to face all of these crises without the services of his shrink, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), who is hopping mad at him for making her go on the lam after the attempt on his life (he feared that she might be targeted for knowing too much). The estrangement is taking a toll on both patient and doctor. Tony is suffering from anxiety attacks again (he has one while he's behind the wheel, apparently brought on by listening to "Smoke on the Water"), so he goes to see another shrink, but the doctor refuses to take him on as a patient ("I've seen 'Analyze This' -- I don't need the ramifications").

As for Melfi, she's secretly seeing patients in a roadside motel room (a sly allusion to Tony's boorish equation of her services with those of a prostitute last season). But she's also having troubling dreams about Tony and his well-being, and her conflicted feelings send her to her own shrink (played by film director Peter Bogdanovich), who suggests that she's attracted to him -- something we've known since the episode last season where she defended Tony a little too fiercely to her ex-husband when he dismissed Tony and his ilk as a stain on the reputation of all Italian-Americans.

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