Commenting on an episode in Year Three (there were eight years total), I wrote of a scene involving a younger member of the gang conspicuous mostly for his fearless swagger. He is enraged when a girl utters an obscenity at his expense. In some detail, we are shown how he hits and clubs her -- to death, we discover moments later when Tony comes on the scene.

Tony is angered by his lieutenant's loss of control and hits him hard enough to cause Tony's wrist to swell. Moments later, Tony wearily laments the transgression of his junior killer, who in beating the girl mortally committed an offense against the Soprano protocols. The reproach brings instant surrogate action, and we have the pleasure of viewing the quick execution of retributory justice, though for some reason, the viewers were deprived by Mr. Chase of a nice visual of the execution.

The sophistication of the Mephistophelian creator of "The Sopranos" was never underrated. The language is purely instrumental, even when the dialogue is between Tony and his resourceful shrink. What the language itself doesn't communicate, facial muscles eloquently tell us. There is no face in Madame Tussaud's that combines better than Tony Soprano's the acceptance of irony, the grit of resolution, the trivialization of theft and murder. There is true underworld humor, and you are free to liberate yourself from the drag of orthodoxy as one more pistol shot explodes into the face of a character whose time is up, and who falls under the wheels of a car on the move.

If one of the burly men had opened up in the restaurant with an Uzi, ending the lives of all four of the Sopranos, you'd have felt a quiver of moral relief. Instead, you were reminded by that blank screen that that kind of thing goes on and on, and reminded, also, of its bewitching power to entertain a spellbound, onanistic audience.