- Accidentally-Correct Writing: After the show aired, MI5 came to the studio asking how they came up with the nuclear submarine model. The director and the visual effects designer explained that they simply made a studio model based on extrapolations from publicly-available photographs, but made the propeller the way it was because the reference pictures they had didn't show the aft (for, as it turns out, painfully obvious reasons...) and they thought it looked suitably futuristic. By sheer happenstance, their model had the exact same number of blades as the real nuclear submarine's propeller, meaning they accidentally guessed classified information that revealed the sonar signal that identified British nuclear submarines.
- Actor-Inspired Element: The script originally had a speedboat chase, but Jon Pertwee suggested jet skis.
- Author's Saving Throw: The Doctor's line about the Silurians actually being called Eocenes was added by Malcolm Hulke after fans pointed out that the Silurian era could not have produced man-sized life. Hulke's script originally laid very heavily on the word to the point of Insistent Terminology, but much of this was stripped out by the director, who preferred to use the more neutral (and much less likely to be obsoleted again) "reptile".
- Backed by the Pentagon:
- The Royal Navy loaned the production crew both facilites and sailors for shooting. The RN realized it was a good deal all around: They got some extra combat training for the "squaddies", the lads got to tell their friends they were on Doctor Who, and the BBC got some semi-free extras. The fact that Jon Pertwee was a Naval officer veteran himself meant he got along particularly well with the sailors, including a 8 mm home movie of him having some fun with some sailors that appears on the serial's DVD as an extra.
- The producers got into a bit of a fix with the Royal Navy with their model prop of a military submarine, which had some vacuum cleaner fans slapped on to make it into a 22-propeller submarine. Which the Royal Navy were currently developing. In secret. The model was so close to the secret design that the Ministry of Defence feared that someone at the Doctor Who production office was trying to subtly sneak classified information to the Sovietsnote . You can imagine how shocked Barry Letts was when a pair of Ministry officials walked up to his office demanding answers.
- Beam Me Up, Scotty!: This was the only time in the Third Doctor's tenure that he ever said "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow," yet it's often treated as his catchphrase nonetheless.
- Creator Backlash: Director Michael E. Briant admitted that Malcolm Clark's choice of music, a highly experimental electronic score performed entirely on the "Delaware" (a modified EMS Synthi 100 that the BBC Radiophonic Workshop owned, a favourite of Clark's), was a mistake. Clark himself admitted he didn’t know what Barry Letts liked and wished he had tinkered with the score.
- No Stunt Double:
- Jon Pertwee did his part of the sword fight between The Doctor and The Master, the production note subtitles claim a double filled in for Roger Delgado for many shots.
- Pertwee also did his own driving in the jet-ski chase (in fact, Pertwee jumped at the chance to drive the jet-ski and loved it so much he bought one of his own). In fact, Pertwee was going to have a sequence right at the beginning where The Doctor would be waterskiing (that would be the excuse given to Col. Trenchard for him and Jo being late) but they ran out of time, disappointing Pertwee a little bit.
- Edwin Richfield (Capt. Hart) was actually allowed to fire the Bofors gun himself in character, rather than getting a lookalike from among the actual military personnel. He was given a crash-course on how to operate the cannon safely before the take.
- Katy Manning recalled that she and Pertwee did the abseiling stunt themselves, despite her having never done it before. She promptly took the skin off her hands as a result.
- On-Set Injury: Jon Pertwee injured his ribs during recording when he dived forward and fell on the sonic screwdriver prop, which was stowed in his breast pocket.
- Stunt Double: In the first episode, the script called for Jo Grant and the Doctor to climb up a ladder to get into a sea fortress. The ladder proved too slippery for Katy Manning, so stuntman Stuart Fell did the shot dressed as Grant.
- What Could Have Been:
- Episode One had the Doctor water-skiing as an excuse for Jo and him being late to the Master's prison. Bad weather ended up making the shoot impossible.
- The sea fort setting was a late change to the scripts: Malcolm Hulke had originally written this material for an oil rig, but Michael Briant was unable to obtain permission to film on one. And, according to the trivia subtitles, even if he had, Katy Manning would have to have been left behind, as at the time oil-rig workers had a superstition that claimed women to be bad luck on oil rigs, and so women were strictly banned from them until the later '70s (in a funny coincidence, the first woman granted the privilege of going on an oil rig would be Elisabeth Sladen, Manning's successor on Doctor Who, who was doing a BBC Schools documentary).
- Why Does it Have to be Water?: Roger Delgado, who couldn't swim, was not happy at all about having to float in the ocean for the rescue scene. For the ski-boat chase, they had to have Jon Pertwee chase a stunt double, as Delgado flat-out refused to shoot the sequence. In the floating sequence, Pertwee, sensitive to Delgado's distress, let him get on the hovercraft first and did everything he could to assist his friend and colleague during the scene.
- Working Title: The Sea Silurians.
- You Look Familiar:
- June Murphy (Maggie Harris) returns as Third Officer Jane Blythe.
- Donald Sumpter (Enrico Casali) plays Commander Ridgeway. Sumpter would later also play Lord President of Gallifrey Rassilon when Timothy Dalton was unavailable to reprise his role.
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