THE SOPRANOS. 9 p.m. Sunday, HBO.
'IS THIS IT?" Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco) asks her mobster husband as they're awakened by a furious banging on their door in the opening minutes of Sunday's "The Sopranos."
Yep, this is it.
Call it the seventh season or the hind legs of the sixth.
Call it anything you like.
But as the final nine episodes of the HBO drama get under way this weekend, know that this is, at last, the beginning of the end.
People who've been longing to see "Sopranos" creator David Chase pull the trigger on one character or another, people who are dying to know if Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is going to get out of this alive and especially people who are still waiting for the Russian to come out of the woods - not gonna happen, folks - may not be thrilled to learn that Sunday's episode largely takes place at a cabin in the Adirondacks.
There will also be karaoke.
(Insert your chosen epithets here. Take as long as you like.)
Now, if you're finished screaming, let's talk about why "Soprano Home Movies" - which actually begins with a flashback to 2004 - is a much better idea than it might sound.
"The Sopranos," after all, has never just been a show about whacking. Or about resolving things. It's also not been a show about second chances, even if some of its characters are deluded enough to believe in them.
But we all know that when a post-shooting Tony spouts the rhetoric about every day being a gift, he's indulging in the same sentimentality that keeps him from fully acknowledging that his mother never loved him.
It's still all about mom.
Livia - and sadly, Nancy Marchand, too - is long dead, but you can her voice in Sunday's episode, coming both from her daughter, Janice (Aida Turturro), and from the son whose years in therapy haven't been enough to erase the poison of his upbringing.
Tony Soprano may be a mobster because his father was.
But he's a monster because of his mother.
Beginning with Season 1's "College," in which Tony took time out from some father-daughter bonding with daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) to strangle a mob snitch, the show's finest episodes have been the ones that focused on the hopeless divide between its central character's highest aspirations and his worst instincts.
I've been rewatching Season 1, and what strikes me now about "College," though, isn't the divide itself but how much it's widened since.
The snitch, after all, was a snitch - someone who'd presumably been as bad as Tony, then turned on former friends and fled to a new life and a new identity in Maine.
Moreover, he had recognized Tony and was fully prepared to kill him.
Shocking at the time for the personal way the violence played out, the episode's almost a quaint artifact now.
Not only have we seen Tony do worse things since, but we've seen him do them for far worse reasons.
On Sunday, he does something truly despicable to one of the few people in his life who can still lay any claim to innocence.
He does it out of anger, out of wounded pride, and out of a deep well of meanness that it doesn't require Tony's shrink, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), to trace directly to his mother.
And what he does doesn't require him to lay a hand on his victim.
I can't pretend to know where any of this is going. Tony's thoughts on his own final exit, expressed in a conversation with his brother-in-law Bobby (Steven R. Schirripa), don't seem out of line.
But as I listen to Bobby and Janice's young daughter singing about "four little ducks" - echoes of the birds whose leaving triggered Tony's first panic attacks all those years ago? - I'm satisfied, at least, that "The Sopranos" hasn't lost touch with its roots. *
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