Knowing that they would have an episode airing after the Super Bowl, Chris Carter flipped the production order and put this episode on instead of the originally slated Never Again (1997). It proved a canny move as it's a straight monster-of-the-week story unencumbered by the show's mythology. Gillian Anderson has said if she had known this was going to happen, she would have played it differently in Never Again (1997), an episode in which Scully acts very out of character.
This is the highest-rated episode in the show's original 9-season run, with an audience of 29.1 million.
Bill Dow appears in "The X-Files" eight times in guest appearances. This is his second as Dr. Burks.
As usual when John Shiban, Vince Gilligan, and Frank Spotnitz wrote an episode together, they named one of the characters "John Gillnitz" (a combination of their names) as a private joke. In this case, the lucky guy is one of the victims.
The first time that Joel Ransom was director of photography on the show. Ransom would go on to photograph all the remaining episodes of Season 4 and the whole of Season 5, returning again in 2016 to shoot the six episodes of Season 10.