The episode marks the first appearance of Frank Langella as Gabriel, mentor of Elizabeth and Philip. Beginning with this episode, Lev Gorn, Costa Ronin, and Richard Thomas are credited as series regulars.
According to Joel Fields, the theme of this season is suggested in the last scene from last season: Now that they're genuinely married and truly committed to trying to hold this family together, what happens in a real marriage with real kids whom you love when your worldviews diverge? What do you do when your fundamental values about what you do with your children are different? How do marriage and family sustain those conflicts.
The episode mostly takes place in November 10th, 1982. It can be deduced from the TV news announcing the death of Leonid Brezhnev who was a Soviet politician who led the Soviet Union as General Secretary of the governing Communist Party (1964-1982) and as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1960-1964, 1977-1982).
The Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) was a conflict wherein insurgent groups (known collectively as the Mujahideen), as well as smaller Maoist groups, fought a nine-year guerrilla war against the Soviet Army and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside. The Mujahideen were variously backed primarily by the United States, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and the United Kingdom; the conflict was a Cold War-era proxy war. Between 562,000 and 2,000,000 Afghans were killed and millions more fled the country as refugees, mostly to Pakistan and Iran. Between 6.5%-11.5% of Afghanistan's population is estimated to have perished in the conflict. The war caused grave destruction in Afghanistan and is believed to have contributed to the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War, in hindsight leaving a mixed legacy to people in both territories. Due to its length, it has sometimes been referred to as the "Soviet Union's Vietnam War" or the "Bear Trap" by the Western media.
Erhard Seminars Training (EST) was an organization, founded by Werner Erhard in 1971, that offered a two-weekend (6-day, 60-hour) course known officially as "The est Standard Training". This seminar aimed to "transform one's ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself".