Kiss and make up. Kill each other. Fucking, write an opera together. I don't care, but when that door unlocks you two better have figured it out…
Left to run her deceased father's noodle shop, Cat Novak faces an uncertain future. And to make it more complicated, Heck is there. Her best friend, with whom she has entirely too much history and just a whole metric ton of unresolved... stuff. But it seems, from beyond the grave, that her dad has one last surprise for the both of them.
- The title for this episode is from “Over My Head” by Lit.
- No-Shit Novak and his restaurant are heavily based on Shopsin's Grocery and its proprietor, Kenny Shopsin. Specifically the massive menu, abrasive customer service, and strict rules for customers.
- Cat is short for Caterpillar, a nickname given to her by her father for her penchant for crawling all over as a toddler.
- Heck's nickname was originally short for "Hecatoncheires", the one-hundred handed giants of Greek myth. But in universe it became an ironic nickname about Heck never swearing.
- The episode was restarted from scratch three full times, and ideas of abandoning the Noodle Shop premise entirely were considered on a notepad document, before the script finally clicked into place.
- One of the earliest versions of the script had Cat as a high-powered lawyer who had a fancy job on Terra, coming back to Delaney to deal with the Noodle Shop after her dad's death, and meeting Heck, the handy-woman who had been helping keep it running.
- The ship's official registration under Cat and Heck's management is "NS-84 Noodle Shop Around the Corner" which is a blatant reference both to the Jimmy Stewart film The Shop Around the Corner and You've Got Mail.
- The episode was also heavily inspired by the video game Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
- Scott Paladin was initially voicing No-Shit Novak but when Ella Watts was cast as Cat, the role was offered to Vic Collins to better match accents between father and daughter.
- The puffed spinach linguine Heck mentions in the episode is a reference to the spinach puffs in The Emperor's New Groove.
- Cat's line, "Well the label's gone, and it's green", is a reference to Star Trek: The Original Series.
- The mention of the “whales” blocking the sun from Delaney is one of the few bits that came from a previous version of the script where it was set in the present and those were a pair of Vista ships, stolen for the Peregrination by Grey and Link with the assistance of Heck.