The title is a reference to 'Huis Clos', the 1944 existentialist play by Jean-Paul Sartre, which is most often translated into English as "No Exit". The premise of the episode is similar to the play's - in both works, several people are confined to rooms they are unable to leave and as a result have sometimes painful conversations that they would not otherwise have had. Toby and Will's conversation refers to the play without naming it, and Will repeats its famous line "Hell is other people."
Towards the end when Debbie, the President's secretary, is coming back to the office, you see her fix the stuffed animal on her desk that was knocked over. It is a stuffed Alpaca which she said she raised in her backyard right before taking the new White House job.
Actor Richard Schiff, who portrays Toby Ziegler, said that he gave "brutally honest" comments to the writer of this episode, Debora Cahn, which "kind of left her in tears." His comments were about scenes between Toby and Will Bailey, played by Joshua Malina. Schiff explained, "She's never, you know, not good as a writer. But she didn't go as far as I
thought she could have with two characters that don't like each other, stuck together... So, she ended up going really deep
and ended up coming up with stuff that was way beyond what I had even imagined. And the fact that tears happened only means that she cares very deeply about her work."
Unlike the majority of West Wing episodes, this episode's title is not spoken outright by a character. "No Exit" is a play written by Jean-Paul Sartre. It was originally published in French under the title "Huis Clos." In the play, three people arrive in Hell and find it to be much like a hotel when they are all put in a room together. Sartre strays away from the conventional ideas that Hell was all about fire and pitchforks. The theme of the play is that Hell is other people. So in the play, as in the episode, the people who are stuck with one another torture each other. Also, Toby (Richard Schiff) and Will (Joshua Malina) actually do discuss Jean-Paul Sartre during their confinement.
Tularemia,Francisella tularensis, is known as Pahvant Valley plague, but is better known as Rabbit Fever and is not to be confused with what is generally known as The Plague (the Black Death, killer of 1/3 of Europe), Yersinia pestis, as seems to be implied by the doctor's reference to it in this episode. Its symtoms include fever, lethargy, anorexia, septicimic signs and inflammed lymph nodes that sometimes suppurate - which does look like the bubonic plague. The respiratory signs the doctor mentioned, however, are not associated with Tularemia or Bubonic Plague. Plague used to be said to have the bubonic strain and a respiratory strain (which was a more certain death than the bubonic) but that has since been disproved by analysis of Yersinia pestis. It is now thought to be likely that other illnesses contributed to the dramatic loss of life. Interestingly, in September of 2005 Tularemia was detected on the Mall in Washington, D.C after an anti-war demonstration. No infections were reported, however.