Last Night's Ziti Was Delicious

"If you have hollow point bullets in anything, take 'em out today."

And with that line of dialogue, all seemed right with the world. The Sopranos is (are?) back, and I've never been so happy to see someone get punched in the face or shot in the head. (How did your Easter Sunday go?)

I don't know about you, but to me, there's something so comforting about a show that takes almost twice as long to watch because I keep rewinding to see a key scene or hear a great line again. It's been too long - late August/early September; whenever Deadwood went off the air - since HBO gave me such a pleasure.

(If you haven't watched last night's episode yet, you might want to hold off on reading the rest of this post. I'm not sure I'll spoil anything, but probably will. And if you don't watch The Sopranos, you'll probably have no idea what the hell I'm talking about.)

My second favorite line of the episode was Carmela wondering, "Is this it?" when she and Tony were awakened by heavy knocking on the front door by the police. Maybe it was a little bit too clever, since this is the final season of the show, but Carmela surely echoed what many of us were thinking as the episode began. How exactly is this thing going to end? No matter how great this has been, we knew it wouldn't last. And the end will almost certainly not be pretty.

Some people might say this was kind of a slow episode, especially after such a long hiatus. (And if there are only eight episodes remaining after this, how fast will the entire story have to culminate?) But I think the tone reflected the contemplative mood of our beloved main character. Tony Soprano can see the end coming. He just doesn't know how it's coming. And after being shot last season, he's not sure if he's ready for it. But his arrogance and machismo won't quite let him accept his fate humbly.

Bobby Bacala, however, probably has more pressing concerns. Not only did he sucker-punch the boss, but he lost a small part of his soul (whatever remained after marrying Tony's shrew of a sister, Janice) after finally doing the one thing that may have truly kept him from advancing his career as a mobster: whacking someone. He also lost the front of his shirt during the hit, something that will surely become a key piece of evidence later in the season. (Such an outcome was basically foreshadowed in an earlier scene between Bobby and Tony.)

It's just another set of repercussions to consider, in what should be a final season full of them. So much has been built up. Man, I can't wait for the next episode.