This episode was originally scheduled to be fifth, but was switched to be fourth one week before airing.

Oscar Nunez does not appear in this episode.

Deleted scenes from this episode include Tony talking to the staff about Ed Truck, Ryan planning out his weekend in his head, and Michael complaining about Toby's grief counseling.

Michael: I don’t understand. We have a day honoring Martin Luther King but he didn’t even work here.
Jan: (On speaker phone) I understand how you feel, Michael. I really do. So would it be helpful to give everyone the day off?
Michael: You really don’t get it do you? You don’t understand these people. That is the last thing that they would want is a day off.
Jan: Well, what would you suggest?
Michael: A statue.
Jan: Of Ed?
Michael: Yeah.
Jan: I’m not sure if that is realistic.
Michael: Well, I think it would be very realistic. It would look just like him.
Jan: No, that’s not--
Michael: We could have his eyes light up; we could have his arms move...
Dwight: That is not a statue, that is a robot.

Dwight: When I die, I want to be frozen. And if they have to freeze me in pieces, so be it. I will wake up stronger than ever, because I will have used that time to figure out exactly why I died, and what moves I could’ve used to defend myself better now that I know what hold he had me in.

Michael: There are five stages to grief. Which are (reading from monitor) denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And right now, out there, they are all denying the fact that they're sad. And... that's hard. And that's making them all angry. And it is my job to get them all the way through to acceptance. And if not acceptance, then just depression. If I can get them depressed, then I will have done my job.

Michael: I lost Ed Truck... and it feels like somebody took my heart and dropped it into a bucket of boiling tears... and at the same time, somebody else is hitting my soul in the crotch with a frozen sledgehammer... and then a third guy walks in and starts punching me in the grief bone... and I'm crying, and nobody can hear me, because I'm terribly, terribly... terribly alone.

Dwight: When my mother was pregnant with me, they did an ultrasound and found she was having twins. When they did another ultrasound a few weeks later, they discovered that I had reabsorbed the other fetus. Do I regret this? No. I believe his tissues made me stronger. I now have the strength of a grown man, and a little baby.

Pam: Did I wake up this morning thinking I’d be throwing together a bird funeral? You never can tell what your day here is going to turn into.

When Rainn is stomping on the box after putting out the fire, you can see there wasn't anything put in it to simulate a dead bird.

When Karen stands at the vending machine, a bag of Herr's Salt and Vinegar (the brand she wanted) is visible on the left side of the machine.

Dwight says that the dead bird wasn't a songbird, but it resembles a sparrow, and sparrows are songbirds.

When Stanley throws the ball at Michael the second time, it's not expanded. But when we cut to Michael catching it, it is expanded.

Michael: I'm like Bette Midler, entertaining the troops.

Singer/actress Bette Midler was known for performing in USO shows during Desert Storm in 1991.

Pam: Let's see. I had this aunt, who I was really close to. She was this amazing female boxer. Um, anyway, she was injured in a fight, and she was paralyzed. So, you can imagine how upset I was when I found out that she asked her manager to remove her breathing tube so she could die.

Pam is describing the plot of the 2004 film, Million Dollar Baby.

Michael: Society teaches us that having feelings and crying is bad and wrong. Well, that's baloney, because grief isn't wrong. There is such a thing as good grief. Just ask Charlie Brown.

This is a reference to Charlie Brown's famous catchphrase, "Good grief!" Charlie Brown was part of the "Peanuts" series written and illustrated by Charles Schultz.

Jim: What’s up?
Karen: Oh nothing. I’m just out of Herr’s Chips.

Herr's is an actual Potato Chip company from Pennsylvania. In 1946, James Stauffer Herr bought a small potato chip company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and developed new cooking processes for making potato chips.

Ryan: A few years ago, my family was on a safari in Africa, and my cousin, Mufasa, was um, he was trampled to death by a pack of wildebeests, and um, we all took it really hard. All of us, kind of in the audience, of what happened.

Ryan is describing a scene from the film, The Lion King.

Audio: Pam sings and Dwight plays the recorder

The song they perform is "On the Wings of Love," written by Jeffrey Osborne.

This episode makes reference to Michael's old boss, Ed Truck. We got to meet Ed back in the Season Two episode "The Carpet."