The stress Tony is going through begins to take its toll, and the hit Junior has ordered doesn't help.
Plot
Tony is severely depressed. A lithium dosage problem has left him barely functional. He sits in his backyard in a bathrobe while Carmela holds the household together and hides the extent of his condition from the crew. In this fog Tony begins having long, warm conversations with a young Italian woman named Isabella who is apparently staying next door at the Cusamano house. She is a dental student from Italy, and their conversations are gentle and maternal in a way Tony has never experienced with his own mother.
Junior Soprano and Livia, unaware of Tony's incapacitated state, have finalized plans to have him killed. Two assassins ambush Tony in the parking lot of a pharmacy. Tony, still slowed by the medication, manages to react using his car as a weapon. He escapes with minor injuries. One shooter is killed. The other flees. The FBI picks up fragments of this on surveillance.
Tony recovers and pieces together what happened. When he looks for Isabella he discovers she was never there. She was a hallucination generated by the medication interaction and his longing for a nurturing figure his actual mother never provided. Tony begins to suspect the hit was arranged from inside. He looks at Junior with new eyes.
Credits
Written by: Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess
Directed by: Allen Coulter