• The episode title is likely a callback to the TNG season two finale, “Shades of Gray”.

• Janeway records the stardate as 62091.1 in her personal log.

    • We learn that it is also the 14th anniversary of Janeway receiving her first command, the USS Voyager. We saw Janeway’s first day aboard the Voyager in “Relativity*, but no stardate was given for that date.

• ”This isn’t your first rodeo.” Chakotay is referring to the VOY episode, “Rodeo” where the Voyager encountered the ancestors of a group of humans who’d been abducted to the Delta Quadrant from the American west in the 19th century, and assimilated by the Borg.

• The conversation in Janeway’s ready room took place before the the cliffhanger of the previous episode, “Brink”, which we then seen repeated here.

• The Emergency Janeway Hologram expresses envy regarding the Doctor’s mobile emitter. Though the Doctor’s emitter originated on the 29th century timeship, the Aeon, mobile emitters are in use in the early 25th century, as seen in PIC season three, some 16 years after this episode.

• ”It’s been a while since I piloted, uhm, anything.” Wesley Crusher frequently served as conn officer while he was an acting ensign aboard the USS Enterprise D.

• ”I’m a doctor, not a covert operative.” The Doctor is padding out his stats as the character who uses the ”I’m a [occupation], not a [different occupation]” construction the most across all of Star Trek.

    • The Doctor did serve as a spy for Overlookers in “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy”, and again in “Renaissance Man”.

• ”Before you were a Traveller, you were a Starfleet officer…” While Picard did make Wesley an acting ensign in “Where No One Has Gone Before”, and then a field promotion to ensign in “Menage à Troi” he did go to Starfleet Academy as a cadet in “Final Mission” and technically never actually graduated.

    • ”…and from what I hear, a heck of a good one.” A large percentage of the officers on Voyager were former terrorists pressganged into being her crew, so Janeway’s standards might be a bit skewed.

• The Doctor disguises himself as Admiral Janeway to distract Ascencia. He did so previously in “Renissance Man”.

• ”As we used to say on the farm, ‘Let’s free the chickens from the coop.’” Ignoring the fact that no one has ever said that Janeway was established to have ”grown up around farmers” in “Resolutions”.

    • Riker claimed in “Lonely Among Us” that humans ”no longer enslave animals for food purposes.”

• Janeway set her combadge to overload, causing an explosion. We’ve previously seen combadges used to create a personal forcefield in “A Fistful of Datas”.

    • Janeway claims the exploding combadge was an old trick from her time at the Academy, which would explain why she had to repeat her second year three times, as we learned in “In the Flesh”.