According to a making of documentary, when filming on the Planet Terra Nova set, they had parrots, one of which had learned the word "CUT". He would call this out just after the director Charles Crichton would yell "action". The parrot was replaced.
Although this episode had been the second one produced, it was the first to be scored, due to additional scenes being filmed for Breakaway (1975) after this episode was shot, which was why a few music tracks from this episode showed up on "Breakaway". Also, one music track from Gerry Anderson's UFO (1970) appears here (which originated on the Andersons' Stingray (1964)), as Helena's about to be thrown across the room in Medical. The guitar track with Lee Russell going berserk was done by Vic Elms, his lone contribution before the soundtrack for Ring Around the Moon (1976) and after the guitar sections of the show's opening and closing theme music.
Filmed January 14th to the 30th 1974. Writer Johnny Byrne admitted that the episode had been hastily written, as there hadn't been any scripts ready after Breakaway (1975) had finished filming. Since this had been the second episode produced, Terra Nova was expected to be the planet introduced on "Breakaway" (Meta), but Byrne had written it to be a random planet. Dialog was added to show that they'd been in space for a while and had encountered planets previously. Scripts had to be written in a way that the episodes could be shown in any order after "Breakaway" (ironically, ITC had distributed the episodes throughout the U.S. in pretty much the same order through the '70s). Ultimately, this episode was judged to consist of a weak story, resulting in its appearance being in the middle of the running order.
The music video for Kansas: Dust in the Wind (1978) begins and ends with clips of the planet's surface from this episode (in the wind).
This was the second episode produced and the first to feature Clifton Jones as David Kano, who was actually in the script as Benjamin Ouma.