While driving, Livia forgets to shift her car into reverse and badly injures a friend of hers to whom she has just given a ride; she is forced to move into the Green Grove retirement community.
Although Tony himself tells his mother, "You've got to stop with this black poison cloud, because I can't take it anymore," he cannot bear hard words about her from Dr. Melfi.
In the Bada Bing, when Georgie Santorelli, the bartender, clumsily uses the telephone in a manner similar to Livia, Tony grabs the handset and beats him with it.
[1] Drea de Matteo, who played the restaurant's hostess in the pilot episode, appears in a new role as Christopher's girlfriend, Adriana La Cerva.
Alan Sepinwall wrote of the episode that "some of it – particularly anything involving Tony and Livia […] feels fully-formed and very much of a piece with what we would come to know as one of the greatest shows ever made.
And some of it is David Chase still fiddling with the knobs and levers"; Sepinwall considered the family-oriented scenes strong while viewing the subplot about the car theft as "still on the broader, lighter end of the comedy spectrum, […] It's not bad, but it's not quite right, either.