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This marks the first appearance of the Romulan Cloaking Device, a useful little plot device that will eventually fall into the hands of the Klingons, and will also play a key role in The Enterprise Incident.
The influences of submarine movies like Run Silent, Run Deep are strong in this episode, with the cloaked Romulan vessel playing the role of submarine.
This episode featured Mark Lenard as the Romulan commander. He would later play Spock's father Sarek, and later complete the Star Trek alien hat trick by appearing as the Klingon commander in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
A fact established in this episode, and key to the plot, is that humans have never seen Romulans before, despite a history of previous warfare. This in turn affects the use of the Romulan race in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode Minefield. When the Enterprise blunders into a minefield laid around a planet belonging to the Romulan Star Empire, the Romulans remain unseen due to an unlikely incompatibility of viewer technologies, never encountered before or since with hundreds of other races.
In case anyone cares, the Stardate here was 1709.1.
A SanjuroE Star Trek node rescue.
Some info adapted from The Star Trek Compendium (Allan Asherman, Pocket Books) | 
