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In fact, it's more relevant than ever. The new episodes have a few World Trade Center references, and Chase cut the Twin Towers from the credits, where they used to be visible in the rearview mirror of Tony's car. But the disaster really echoes in more oblique ways, as when Carmela badgers Tony to start estate planning in case anything should "happen" to him. "Watch the f______ news," she says. "Everything comes to an end!"
The Sopranos has always been masterly at being timeless and up to the moment at once. In the late '90s, the show was a tale of moral struggles in boom times. It analogizes even better to the white-collar scandals of 2002. "The Enrons, the Grubmans and the Global Crossings ... those guys are bigger criminals than the Sopranos," says Pantoliano. "The thing I like about The Sopranos is that if you cross someone, there is retribution. If you are a rat, you will be punished."
The new episodes are not perfect--a storyline about a Native American protest over Columbus Day is uncharacteristically heavy-handed in airing Italian-American and other ethnic grievances. But they are close enough. Chase says he already knows how he plans to end the series, and the looming fed investigation and conflicts with the New York Mafia point toward a climactic showdown. But even as the cordon tightens around Tony, the show's emotional range expands. For all its flashy violence, it has become a work of aching sadness and irony about people who can't say what they feel and so express themselves with bullets and money. In the season premiere, Tony's nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli) finds an ex-cop who, Tony tells him, killed Chris' father when he was a baby. Chris realizes that Tony--the closest thing he has to a father--may be lying to him, using him, but he sadistically kills the cop anyway. Then he visits his mother, tries fumblingly to talk to her about the dad he never knew and asks her to make him a fluffernutter. The cliche is to say that you don't know whether to pity or despise him. But really you know you must do both. F. Scott Fitzgerald said the mark of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at once. It is also the mark of a first-rate TV show.
Yeah, yeah, you say, but who gets whacked? Well, there is an affecting, resonant death in the opening episodes (sorry, I'm not saying who), but it comes in a traffic accident, not a Mob hit. That's the trick of The Sopranos: it pulls you in with the tease of intrigue and death, and it ends up enthralling you with the passion and sadness of ordinary life.
Still, Chase and his stars are adamant about ending the show after next year's season 5 (though they leave open the possibility of Sopranos movies). There will be loose ends to tie up, and a producer who is willing to kill his baby won't hesitate to kill characters. "There are actors who don't know it," says Chase, grinning, "but because of the needs of the story, the Angel of Death hovered right over their heads and then moved on." Nobody is safe, because The Sopranos, bless its criminal heart, is not safe TV. --With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner/New York and Sonja Steptoe/Los Angeles