At the beginning of this episode, and continuing for much of Season 9, the real-life Iolani Palace in Honolulu, which had served as the setting for the fictional Five-O police unit, was undergoing extensive renovations for the American Bicentennial. This episode shows the exterior of the building heavily cabled and roped-off, and the television crew could therefore no longer use the building for interior or exterior filming. Instead, a nearby structure known as the Territorial Building (which in real life also housed Hawaiian government offices) was shown to be the temporary location of Five-O headquarters. By coincidence, the CBS lease on the buildings at Fort Ruger where the series had had its sound stages had also expired, and so the production of the series was actually moved to the Territorial Building. Toward the latter part of the 1976-77 season, the location of the Five-O offices was once again depicted as being in the Iolani Palace.
This episode (and season) mark the sixth time that the opening theme song was re-recorded to sound noticeably different. (The first time was at the beginning of Season 2, the 2nd time at the beginning of Season 4, and the 3rd time was at the beginning of Season 5. From season 7-12, each season has altered the theme to differentiate each season.
At the 1996 Five-O convention, Kam Fong (Chin Ho) said that when he was in Hong Kong making this show, he was more popular with the locals than Jack Lord. In an interview from around 1977, Fong said that in Hong Kong, there were two versions of Five-O broadcast on local television, one in English and one with Chinese dubbing.
David Tomlinson noted his appearance in this segment with considerable displeasure in his autobiography, saying that Jack Lord had been among the most unpleasant actors he had ever worked with.
This show was filmed before, but aired after, the death of Chinese Communist Chairman Mao Zedong (the show ran just a few days before Mao's widow and three other extreme radicals known as the Gang of Four attempted a coup bent on restoring the horrors of the Cultural Revolution). This makes this show and others featuring Wo Fat in the 1970s ("The Jinn Who Clears the Way" and "Presenting ... in the Center Ring ... Murder") particularly fascinating because Wo is presented as a dedicated Maoist who becomes progressively more upset with his own country, to the point where he acts against it. (Here he operates from Hong Kong, which was a British dependency at the time but was almost exclusively Chinese.) Wo then disappears entirely until the very last show, "Woe to Wo Fat," where he is on a remote island which is evidently his self-proclaimed independent country.