The title of the episode is a parody of the 1997 book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a memoir by the French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. The book, in part, describes Bauby's life after suffering a stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome (a condition in which a patient is aware and awake but cannot move or communicate due to complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body except for the eyes). This episode first aired in the United States on September 12, 2010. It resumed the fourth season after a nine-month interruption.