according to stephens, the episode handles a horror-oriented direction on the season: "at the very beginning of the season, penguin has solidified his control upon gotham like never before. where he's kind of unionized crime. and scarecrow comes in to basically reintroduce fear into gotham and to remind people that the dark is still scary out there. and we're really going to fashion, especially episode 2, almost a horror movie episode where we really get to see scarecrow. i think he's like purely terrifying. imagine, rather than the other versions of scarecrow out there — because there are a lot of different versions — what if you just really tell scarecrow as a horror movie? because he could be scary as hell." executive producer danny cannon stated, "when the studio asks you to tone back because it's too scary, you know you've done something right!"