Word: mobbed
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...broader sense, The Sopranos is about male baby-boomer American leadership in an age of irreconcilable demands and diminished expectations. As a Mob boss and a family man, Tony is caught between what he is and what he imagines himself to be. He cannot muster the stoicism the past demanded of men nor the sensitivity the present does. He whines to his therapist and "goes about in pity" for himself (the quote is from an Ojibwe proverb that Tony reads and that he believes applies only to other people), yet he longs for the days when men were strong...
...crime family is thinking about his legacy. (Fair warning: here's where the spoilers begin.) In the first new episode, Tony, still feeling the effects of having been gut-shot by dementia-addled Uncle Junior, is celebrating his 47th birthday. Later there's a reference to one of his Mob peers, who died at 47. No one connects the dots explicitly, but the parallel is not lost on Tony. "My estimate, historically, 80% of the time, [a Mob boss] ends up in the can," he tells his brother-in-law Bobby (Steven R. Schirripa). "Or in the embalming room"--that...
Could it be curtains for Tony? It's possible. His battered insides are giving him agita, and there's still trouble with the Brooklyn Mob, whose leader can't forget the murder of his brother by Tony's cousin. Death on The Sopranos can be operatic or bathetic; in the first two episodes screened for critics, one mobster dies in a bloody shooting, another ignominiously of cancer. It's also possible, given creator David Chase's distaste for tidy endings and moral lessons, that Tony could stroll off into retirement as others pay the bill for his deeds...
...probably remember how Scott Helvenston and his three colleagues died. Video of their killings made newscasts around the world on March 31, 2004, when a Blackwater security convoy was ambushed by gunmen in Fallujah, Iraq. The four men were dragged from their cars, mutilated by a mob and set on fire. The torsos of Helvenston and fellow Blackwater employee Jerry Zovko were hung from the green steel girders of a bridge on the edge of town. In Fallujah, it's still known as Blackwater Bridge...
...loss not just for four families. It was a turning point in an already foundering war. An ecstatic mob in the center of a major Iraqi town had torn Americans limb from limb in front of rolling cameras. A series of catastrophic recriminations followed. Muqtada al-Sadr, emboldened by the attack, called for the first Shi'ite uprising against the occupation. U.S. Marines retook Fallujah but flattened parts of the city in the process and set the stage for future cycles of invasion and uprising that have scarred the city--and the country--ever since...