Well, that was a sensational episode of The Sopranos last night, and its brilliance was a great relief after the weird, meandering and creatively starved pointlessness of last season’s story arc — in which not one, but two, mob bosses had extended stays in the hospital and Carmela went to Paris for a journey so excruciatingly boring that you hoped somebody from the New York mob might have followed her from the States to whack her in the Tuilleries.

“You Sopranos,” said rueful Soprano brother-in-law Bobby Baccala last night, “you go too far.” That was just before he hauled off and slugged Tony, who had been making obnoxious jokes about his sister Janice’s trampy ways. The fight that ensued between the two fat, powerful men was astonishing — they were like rhinos butting tusks. The animalistic quality of the characters on The Sopranos is the key to understanding the show’s moral framework. They are just like us, only without restraint. And contra the messages of the last half-century that restraints on human behavior are limiting and neurosis-inducing, The Sopranos gives us a glimpse of what actually happens to people who have an extremely glancing relationship to self-control.

The only thing I worry about is this: Last season’s Sopranos started out great as well, with the episode where the demented Uncle Junior shot his own nephew Tony in the stomach, thinking he was an old associate coming to steal his money. And then it went all to purgatory. There are only eight more episodes left of what is, despite its longeurs, surely the greatest show in the history of television — let’s hope creator David Chase knows where he’s going this season.