- Actor-Inspired Element: Adam's house was supposed to be in Nottingham. Following the casting of Bruno Langley, it was moved to Manchester.
- Awesome, Dear Boy: Simon Pegg jumped at the chance to play a villain on Doctor Who.note
- Completely Different Title: The Japanese title of this episode was "The Monster of the Space Station".
- Deleted Scene: Suki and the Doctor were delivered gold keys by courier, which provided them access to Floor 500.
- The Other Marty: Nicholas Briggs had recorded voice work for the Jagrafess, but his work wasn’t used for sounding too similar to the Nestene Consciousness.
- Recycled Script: This episode's production is, essentially, the power fantasy of every aspiring writer. Russell T Davies originally wrote the concept of "The Long Game" in the early 1980s and submitted it to the Doctor Who production office in 1987, hoping it would air for the Seventh Doctor. Whether it was ever read by Andrew Cartmel himself is unclear, but either way, his rejection advised him that his draft had good ideas but lacked a relatable touch like "a man and his mortgage, his marriage, his dog" instead. So Davies spent twenty years making TV about real people, before reworking the story for the new series and bringing all that experience with him. Long Game, indeed.
- Stunt Casting: Simon Pegg as the Editor. Instead of most cases, this happened out of necessity; Pegg was originally cast to play Pete, Rose's Disappeared Dad in "Father's Day", but scheduling conflicts came up.
- Technology Marches On: At the end of the episode, Adam is mortified by his mother snapping her fingers and activating his head-hole. Now considering that there's apparently a lot of overlap between holes' activation signals (the surgeon tells Adam that finger-snaps are the most common), wouldn't people be opening each other's holes all the time? With the advent of Google Glass
's use of bone conduction microphones, which allow for only one person to be picked up by the mic, this now seems out of place. Unless the Jagrafess suppressed that technology. - Throw It In!: For the life of him, Simon Pegg simply could not pronounce the Jagrafess' full name properly. The scene in the episode features the best take he could do, with the monster growling over the bits he got wrong.
- What Could Have Been:
- As mentioned above, this could have been a Seventh Doctor story...
- This episode was originally intended to be focused entirely on Adam, with the Doctor and Rose even more Out of Focus than they are in the finished version. When filming started and RTD saw how good Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper were, he felt he couldn't really justify sidelining them and rewrote it to give them more to do.
- The DVD Commentary includes the director making a weird statement that Adam was stealing the information so he could cure his terminally ill father, which there's no indication of in the episode itself, and is presumably an artifact of the original script which he doesn't seem aware was taken out. This was presumably to remove any audience sympathy for him so the Doctor wouldn't come off as a jerk for leaving him in the mess he made.
- Working Title: The Companion Who Couldn't, and Adam (the latter was meant as a Call-Back to "Rose").
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