This episode was inspired by an undeveloped Q episode for Star Trek: Voyager, thought up by John de Lancie who played Q, and was originally to have included a recurring character from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), Guinan.
Both David Livingston and Brannon Braga considered this episode to be very different from others in the Star Trek canon. Livingston remarked, "It is the only Star Trek show that I know of that has no science fiction. It is not a Star Trek show." Braga agreed, "Ultimately, it's a very unique, off-concept episode."
Shannon O'Donnell's statement that she watched the Apollo 11 landing on television in 1969 when she was 11 means she is 42 years old during the events of the episode and 92 in the photograph with her descendants.
This script (which first aired in 1999) predicted that the Y2K bug would not "switch off even a single light bulb," which was almost correct. A nuclear power plant in Japan had a monitoring computer go down briefly, and minor events elsewhere occurred, but nothing major.
According to the "Countdown to Midnight" of Channel 3, three minutes pass between Henry Janeway entering his shop with supplies (at around 12 mins) and leaving it again when going after Jason. In screen time, the two time indexes are exactly three minutes apart.