The Mob boss begins to question the loyalty of his minions, trusting blood relatives most and upset that his newly freed cousin chooses massage therapy over massaging cash in a scheme to sell airbags from stolen cars.

....The Sopranos will be back for a sixth and final season, Chase says, mainly because he couldn't wrap up story lines for all of its sprawling cast. But fans already used to Sopranos withdrawal symptoms will have to endure another long wait: The show won't resume filming until next April, which means at earliest a fall 2005 debut. Chase has said the final season would replace a long-simmering Sopranos movie, but he's willing to revisit that idea as a prequel to the series.

Chase has the series ending all figured out, but all he'll say is the end closes a circle. "Tony will ruminate on some of his family history. There are things that were done early on, which I think as time goes by will be regretted, and cause other things to be done."

Few will admit it, but among those whose characters remain alive, there's keen interest in how they'll end up. "We've thought about it," says Michael Imperioli, who plays Christopher and wrote five of the show's scripts. "Knowing David, I know it's going to end tragically, and it should." [USA today] The NY Times has a preview today as well:

"The Sopranos" returns for a fifth season with all of its early verve and none of the torpor that weighed the show down last year. Its creator, David Chase, is cocky: the first episode posits a bear that wanders into the Sopranos' backyard, terrifying A. J. and Carmela. The furry intrusion signals that things are about to get wild in this ruptured family, that the breakup has unleashed forces beyond their control. But it also contrasts rather comically with the ducks that so lyrically flew away from the Sopranos' backyard pool in the first season, driving a bereft Tony into therapy.

Most of all, the bear is a rather crude reminder to viewers: "The Sopranos" is no ordinary television show.

But of course the pleasure of the series is that for all its subtleties and license with language, sex and violence, "The Sopranos" is a television drama, one that follows the basic formula even as it riffs. An intimate moment follows an action scene, a horrible act is leavened with comic relief. Devotees keep ramping up the comparisons to Shakespeare or Tolstoy. On "Star Trek," the interpersonal strains on the U.S.S. Enterprise were pushed aside whenever a new planet came into view; on "The Sopranos," the family melodrama never entirely eclipses the family business.

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