Tony faces various degrees of challenges with his children and also around his immediate environment. He has issues with his son who constantly is unbecoming at high school and also faces challenges from Ralph who makes him go out of norms of the Mafia Code.
What's remarkable about [producer David] Chase's work on Sopranos is his ability to maintain the show's crucial duality: We don't want Tony to be caught and punished, but we always know he should be.
"Mr. Ruggerio's Neighborhood" is a slyly confident, funny return to the world of The Sopranos, an episode that takes a cue from, well, Hitchcock to talk as much about our relationship to the show as anything else.
Overall, The Sopranos returns in better form this year than it did at the start of its second season. New territory is explored and Chase seems more willing to push the Soprano story forward. It's not sitting in neutral by any means.
It's their moral ambiguity that most grounds them in reality and makes them so fascinating that missing even one episode is unthinkable. Every move they make, every step they take, we'll be watching them.
The nice thing about The Sopranos is that everything -- every subplot, every minor character, every musical cue (the premiere's highlight: Tony, singing along in the car to Steely Dan's ''Dirty Work'') -- yields results
It goes beyond The Godfather because it's punctuated with smiles, and set to a score that uses the music of big-name artists in an unusually creative way.
