Background Information
- This episode derives from a short story by screenwriter Bloch, titled "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper", published in 1943 in the magazine Weird Tales. In the story, two men discuss a history of serial murder, and speculate that the Ripper may be a practitioner of occult arts whose murders are sacrifices to keep him eternally young.
- Around the same time that Bloch was writing this episode, he was asked by Harlan Ellison to write a sequel of sorts to "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper", extending the Ripper into the future. The story, "A Toy for Juliette", was published in the Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967. Ellison wrote a continuation of Bloch's story for the same anthology, "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World".
- The entity's description bears a striking similarity to the Horla from Guy de Maupassant's short horror story "Le Horla". The story had been adapted for the film Diary of a Madman a few years before the Star Trek episode was produced.
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