Most specifically, Carmela's breakdown -- and breakout -- of last season recalled issues that have been in play since a Season 3 episode, "Second Opinion," in which Carmela sees a psychiatrist who urges her to stop taking her husband's "blood money," to take her children and end her marriage. "You can never say that you haven't been told," the doctor says ominously. Back in 2001, Carmela wrapped herself in a duvet and sulked, but chose to stay with Tony. "The shrink had told her that she was not just an enabler, but an accomplice, and this was her chance to get out," says Lawrence Konner, who wrote the episode. "She's wrapped up on the couch in the end because she knows she didn't do what she should have. She recommitted to the contract she had with Tony: I will be your accomplice, but I get stuff for it." In this case, the stuff was a little more of her husband's blood money donated to Meadow's Ivy League college, Columbia.

"Lots of men didn't like that episode because it was a chick flick," says Konner, who, as a former staff writer for "Family" and the co-screenwriter of last year's "Mona Lisa Smile," has written plenty about chicks. "I heard it from men," he says. "'It was too soft, no hookers, nobody got killed. Who gives a shit about the dean of a college?'"

But women liked it -- a lot. And it sowed the seeds for much of what has since transpired on the show. It was just that Ivy League education that Carmela finds herself paying for, before her separation at the end of Season 4, as Meadow moves silkily out of her teenage petulance and into her life as a well-educated young woman with a worldly boyfriend and a mild interest in social justice. Carmela is unable to get comfortably situated in her daughter's new life. When she offers, in the penultimate Season 4 episode, to cook something for a dinner party at her daughter's apartment, Meadow replies, "I'm doing everything myself." When Carmela worries about the apartment door being propped open, her daughter's boyfriend proclaims, "I'll protect her, don't worry." Over dinner, the young students patronize Carmela in a conversation about "Billy Budd" and the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, whom Carmela incorrectly assumes is a woman. If her own daughter doesn't need her to cook, protect her, or help her with her schoolwork, what is Carmela Soprano good for, anyway?

Carmela is so clearly discomfited by her daughter's self-sufficiency, romantic life, and poise, that Meadow actually calls her on it. Over their traditional mother-daughter tea at the Plaza, she shouts, "Are you jealous? ... You're the one who wanted me to go to an Ivy League school! ... Maybe I should go to Montclair State and drop out like you did." Later, in bed, an unusually concerned but typically clueless Tony tries to comfort his wife by telling her, "[Meadow] is a smart, beautiful, independent woman you created. Isn't that what you dreamed about?"

"Yes," Carmela replies, like an unhappy and unconvinced robot.

"What we've got there is the envy of one generation for the next," says Barreca. That envy, she says, works in poetic counterpoint to the envy of the show's male mafia generation for its predecessors. "With Tony, there is a nostalgia for his father's way of life. The good old days [of La Cosa Nostra] are gone. Men are losing their hold on power; the women are gaining it." But to see that inappropriate maternal envy played out is jarring and compelling, "precisely because it is so taboo and unspoken," says Barreca.

Meadow also got to throw some confused anger right back at her mother at the end of last season, as a daughter whose surprisingly advanced understanding of what was happening between her parents conflicted with her heartbreak at seeing it go down. While she mopes around the house in her underwear and hugs her father desperately when he announces he's moving out, Meadow also screams at Carmela, "Jesus, how could you eat shit from him for all these years?" Meadow is a female "Sopranos" viewer: horrified that Carmela has taken so much for so long, but furious at her for actually putting a stop to it.

It's that bewildering contradiction of feeling that makes the family dynamics of the show so real, what sucks us into Tony and Carmela's knotty tangle of a relationship. "You know what I don't understand?" Carmela screams at Tony after learning of his affair with a one-legged Russian. "What does she have that I don't have?" He replies that he can talk to his mistress. "What about the thousands of other pigs you had your dick in?" she shoots back. "Were you best friends with all of them too, you fucking hypocrite?" He tells her she knew what she was getting into when she married him and chides Carmela for "acting all surprised and miffed when there are other women on the side." She says he tries to buy her off with rings and beach houses. He sneers, "Yeah, 'cause what you really want is a little Hyundai and a simple gold heart on a chain."

They're both right. Families are so brain-bendingly difficult to portray -- let alone navigate in real life -- because there is rarely clarity. One of the pleasures of the Mafia genre that provides the backbone of "The Sopranos" is that it is usually clear-cut, structured, male. There are rules and hierarchies; there is good, there is bad; and then you shoot the guy. But Tony Soprano, who weeks before had killed Ralphie with his bare hands, cannot bring himself to hit his wife, even after she has quite literally invited him to. "Did you want to hit me, Tony? Go ahead!" she snarls early in the episode. And then later, in the pool room, she taunts him with more: "Can I tell you something, Tony?" she says, turning toward him with a miserable glint in her eye. "For the last year, I have been dreaming, and fantasizing, and in love with Furio." She is provoking a murderer, pricking his most explosive core. But he can't do it. He charges her; grabs her, even. But his fist plunges through the wall of his own house, a full foot from his wife's face.

The conflict we see playing over Tony's face after he pulls his fist out of the chipped plaster -- conflict that we never see when he's giving orders to kill a guy -- makes the real domesticity of this drama resonate. It's messy and there are no answers. "Part of the lure of the show is that it unearths some uncomfortable stories from the abundantly comfortable suburbs," said Cassidy. "Carmela appeals because we recognize ourselves in her, even if we personally will never hide assault rifles before an impending FBI raid."

For viewers, the giant gray area that is the Soprano marriage is distressingly problematic: Who the hell are we supposed to be rooting for?

"I will be heartbroken if they don't end up together," says Barreca, whose most recent book is called "I'm With Stupid: One Man. One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up." "I don't care if she's saying she doesn't want him anymore, I don't care who he's slept with. That was about appetite and power, and she was in a powerful position in that relationship with Furio. It's really hard to tell who's calling the shots with them, which is what makes it so perfect."

Perhaps it is the tense power seesaw between Tony and Carmela that makes them vibrate like tuning forks when they are in the same room; or maybe it's just some great chemistry between Gandolfini and Falco. Either way, every scene they have together feels intimate and familiar. Barreca agrees: "Those scenes were like listening to your parents fight, when you're both horrified and compelled to keep listening. I couldn't believe that she was willing to go as far as she was. I wanted to put my fingers in my ears and rock back and forth. I didn't feel a sense of feminist triumph."

So it may not be empowering. But it is engrossing, and confusing, and genuine. And who said that good female narrative has to be empowering, anyway? Better that it be smart and give us something complicated to chew on. "That's why the show is such a treat," says Barreca. "You get so tired of being served the dishes you've helped to prepare. It's so good when someone makes you something you've never tried before."

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