Who is the victim here, and who is the villain? The feds call the Sopranos' house "the sausage factory" and make rude cracks about Anthony Jr.'s weight. They invade the privacy of anybody who happens to be in the presence of a Soprano, getting an earful of Meadow's depressed roommate and an eyeful of Carmela's tennis partner, Adriana (Drea de Matteo). They decline to warn Tony about a plumbing disaster waiting to happen that they came across while planting the bug. The feds are so unlikable that by the end of the episode, we're ready to believe that eavesdropping is more morally repugnant than murder.

The second episode, "Proshai, Livushka," breaks that spell, though, with a torrent of reminders that Tony is no Mr. Nice Guy. If the opener was about "nothing" (to borrow a page from the "Seinfeld" playbook), this episode is about everything. Chase ties up loose ends; springs a couple of surprises (one of which involves Marchand); introduces a potential new adversary for Tony (Ralph Cifaretto, played by that baby-faced sly fox Joe Pantoliano); and brings back Tony's shrink, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), and his overdramatic con artist sister Janice (Aida Turturro) for their first appearances of the season.

The episode builds to a harrowing emotional climax at a memorial service for Livia (I don't think I'm giving anything away here, folks) in which Carmela, unable to hold her tongue any longer, dares to speak the truth. Falco delivers a glorious aria of pent-up frustration and anger as Carmela says everything one isn't supposed to say about departed "loved" ones. The scene rivals anything from the first season in the way it absolutely nails the depth and complexity of dysfunctional family ties.

To understand where "The Sopranos" went wrong last season, you need to go back to its debut season and remember where it went right. That much-lauded first batch of episodes introduced one of the most richly imagined adult dramas American viewers had ever seen. Shot through with black humor and often unsettling parallels between family and la famiglia, "The Sopranos" was a superb work of pulp fiction that carried the emotional heft of classic American myth. It was "The Godfather" of the small screen.

Indeed, Tony Soprano descends from a long line of charismatic outlaws -- from James Cagney in "Public Enemy" to the Corleones in "The Godfather" saga. (He has a little bit in common with Eminem and Allen Iverson, too.) With "The Godfather," director Francis Ford Coppola showed us why the allure of gangsters is so strong; those guys had a code, a loyalty, a bond, that so many of us have lost in our own families and our own lives. "The Godfather" also romanticized and universalized the mob experience by equating the old-school Corleone mischief with immigrant ambition and the pursuit of the American dream. You didn't have to be a made man to identify with this desire for a place at the table, a piece of the pie.

"The Godfather" put us inside the mob. "The Sopranos" took that intimacy even further, putting us inside Tony Soprano's head, making us privy to the anxious mobster's sessions with his shrink. Thanks to psychoanalysis, that great equalizer, Tony's worries were hardly distinguishable from the worries of any American family man and middle manager at middle age. Chase's Freudian approach gave Tony an excuse to avoid blame for his crimes, and gave us an excuse to forgive him: He was the victim of bad parenting.

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