Michael McKean, playing Morris Fletcher (who switches bodies with Mulder), has appeared together with David Duchovny in Saturday Night Live (1975), David Duchovny/Rod Stewart (1995), in an X-Files sketch as the Cigarette Smoking Man.
This is the first time we ever get to see Mulder's bedroom.
Fletcher comments that Saddam Hussein is really a dinner theatre actor named "John Gillnitz." The name, used frequently in the show, is a combination of the writers names: John Shiban, Vince Gilligan, and Frank Spotnitz.
The Little A'Le'Inn, in which Mulder meets Morris Fletcher and Mulder's contact, is a real bar/restaurant/inn in Rachel, Nevada, established in 1990.
In December 2023, Daniel Wu wrote in the Washington Post that a country song that can be heard briefly in this episode (as JoAnn Fletcher enters a bar) had been the subject of twenty-five-years of speculation and searching among a few X-Files fans. Wu reported that after a fan named Lauren Ancona discovered that the song was not listed in the episode's credits, on IMDb, or in the music-finding app Shazam, she tweeted about it. The tweet quickly went viral, and eventually led to Dan Marfisi and Glenn Jordan, who in the 1990s had been LA-based musicians whom the X-Files producers had hired to write the original song, titled "Staring at the Stars." Wu wrote, "'We got a directive ... for a country song that could be about an alien or a human being,' Marfisi said. 'And we had to do it really fast.' The two quickly put together a soothing country track with a soft drumbeat and pedal steel guitar that hid an extraterrestrial theme in the lyrics, sung by Jordan: 'In my memory you are moonlight, starlight/With big dark eyes that send me out of sight ...' 'What they wanted us to capture was something that just said 'country bar,'" Jordan said. "Putting the lyrics on about [aliens] was just kind of a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek thing.'" About the viral response to the search for the song, Marfisi said, "It's so weird and wonderful. . . . I'm just kind of loving what's happening. People are talking about Glenn's and my song? That's what you want when you're a musician. You want people to listen and get something from it."