In one scene in the episode, Marge begins hallucinating after drinking from Springfield's water supply, which has been spiked with LSD by Springfield's rival town, Shelbyville. The Fox network's censors wanted the scene to be cut from the episode because they did not like the idea of Marge "getting high" on LSD. David Mirkin, however, defended the scene and argued Marge was not "doing it on purpose", so the censors ultimately allowed the scene to remain in the episode.
The episode begins with the Simpson family watching a news broadcast in which Kent Brockman calls the United States Army a "kill-bot factory". David Mirkin said this was a joke the staff "particularly loved to do" because it pointed out how negative and mean-spirited news broadcasts can be, and how they are seemingly "always trying to scare everybody" by creating panic and depression.
The mailman who takes out an assault rifle and fires back at Ned is a reference to the wave of shootings committed by enraged postal workers from 1986 to 1993. The phrase "going postal" had been coined by the St. Petersburg Times in December 1993, just three months before this episode.
Ned's dream about shooting people from the top of a tower is based on the 1966 Charles Whitman incident at the University of Texas in Austin.
In season three, the staff wanted to take a deeper look at the relationships of the characters. One of the things they wanted to explore in particular was what Homer and Flanders have in common and how they could turn into friends.