Rob Bowman credited Brent Spiner for making the episode work, giving one example, "He did the one scene in his own office with Brent sitting down and Lore discussing what it's like to be human. He did one side, we shot through a double, then turned around, read it the other way and shot the other half of it. Those two characters in those scenes are different people... he really painted those characters differently."
According to Wil Wheaton, the stand-in actor used in this episode really irritated Brent Spiner, and was never used again. He described the stand-in as looking like "a break dancer doing the Robot" whenever he had to portray Data or Lore, and said that "I think the guy was really into playing an android, and his enthusiasm got cranked up to eleven, but by the end of the week, pretty much everyone wanted to deactivate him and sell him to the nearest Jawa."
This was the final episode of Star Trek written by Gene Roddenberry before his death on October 24, 1991.
The script made mention of Isaac Asimov and the Laws of Robotics, something which had been suggested should be included at some point in the show as a spoken credit, in a memo dated October 28, 1986, from executive producer Robert H. Justman.
Data's creator's name is Noonien Soong, similar to the name Khan Noonien Singh. Gene Roddenberry actually used these names in the hopes of contacting a WWII buddy with a similar name with whom he had lost contact.