[1] The episode was written by Gregg Kavet & Andy Robin and was directed by David Owen Trainor.
Elaine Benes has a tragic romance with a video store employee who shares her taste in movies.
George flies there to attend a meeting, and brings a tray of shrimp, prompting Reilly to repeat his "ocean" zinger.
On a subsequent visit to the video store, Elaine craves something lighter than the tearjerkers which dominate Vincent's picks.
Jerry is pressured into buying a high end racquet by the worker at a pro tennis shop, an Eastern European man named Milos.
She propositions him for sex, but recoils in shame, revealing that she is Milos' wife and was instructed to seduce Jerry by her husband.
He retains a lawyer named Shellbach, with Elaine as his executor, and opts to have his life support terminated in all but the most extreme cases.
Although the episode is credited as written solely by the writing team of Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin, the eponymous story arc was actually contributed by Peter Mehlman.
[3] Kavet and Robin consciously scripted the scenes where Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer try to talk George out of the "jerk store" comeback as a satire of the writing-by-committee method which was common in television (and which Seinfeld had just switched to after seven years in which individual writers and writing partners wrote their episodes largely in isolation).
[3] Regular Seinfeld director Andy Ackerman was on vacation, so the episode was directed by David Owen Trainor.
[4] El Niño was affecting the weather patterns in the United States, resulting in heavy rain in Los Angeles on the week the crew shot the tennis court scenes.
[5] Kavet and Robin were both big childhood fans of the TV drama Emergency!, and asked the casting staff to try to get Robert Fuller, who played Dr. Kelly Brackett on the show, to voice the doctor on the movie-within-a-TV-episode The Other Side of Darkness.
Club wrote, "Things are pretty disconnected in this episode, although Kramer, Jerry and Elaine all sorta come together by the end (just for a cheap, quick gag, but it's a decent one)... Elaine's romance with Vincent (played, oh so briefly, by a young Danny Strong) is more fun, although as a Phantom of the Opera spoof it feels very stale...
But I like the communication that goes on between them through the video aisles and Vincent's battle for artistic supremacy with the more middle-of-the-road Gene ..."[2] Nick Suss wrote for the site StoriesHouse, "Like most episodes of Seinfeld, The Comeback wove four plots together seamlessly while connecting each of them with conversation.