Director Rich Moore used screen position and character movement to mimic the time travel aspects of the plot. In the planning stages it was decided that actions that played to screen left would represent events from the past or a setback to the plot. Likewise, screen right indicated progress or moving past their problems.
This episode won an Emmy Award in the Outstanding Animated Program (Programming Less Than One Hour) category in 2002, marking the show's first win in this category.
The writing team came up with the idea for this episode when they were planning the three plot lines for Anthology of Interest II (2002). As the idea developed they eventually had so much material for it that they broke it out as a separate episode. The reason the concept was originally under consideration for the "What if..." scenario was that when Matt Groening and David X. Cohen originally created the show, they decided there would not be any time travel; however they changed their mind and decided to go forward with the idea.
The writers did not want to create a situation that would leave fans wondering why the Planet Express crew could not simply travel through time on a regular basis. For this purpose they chose to have it occur unintentionally during a supernova as that was deemed to be a suitably rare occurrence.
This episode borrows heavily from the rumors surrounding the famous Roswell Incident, including the capture of a live alien (Zoidberg), the recovery of strange metallic debris (Bender's body) and the "alien autopsy." It also bears a striking resolution to the "grandfather paradox" of time travel.