Beverly D'Angelo appears as Carisi's mom in this episode. In the early seasons of SVU, D'Angelo had recurring appearances as defense attorney Rebecca Balthus. Her last appearance before this episode was in Season 9.
This episode marks the 500th on-screen appearance of Olivia Benson on SVU (not counting crossover appearances on other shows).
This episode marks the first appearance of one of Carisi's parents, in this case his mother, who meets Rollins for the first time. Carisi has met both of Rollins' parents, though it was before they were dating. He met Rollins' mother Beth Anne in season seventeen's Maternal Instincts (2015) and her father Jim in season twenty-two's In the Year We All Fell Down (2021), respectively. In fact, when Carisi meets Rollins's father, he assumes that they were already dating only to find out from Amanda that they weren't. Jim then tells Amanda that Carisi is a nice guy and implies that the men she had dated before were losers.
Carisi mentioned that his boss, Lorraine Maxwell, was intrigued by the idea of charging rape as a hate crime, though she had to remind him about the lack of precedent. Like the victim in this episode, Maxwell had been assaulted by a member of a Harvard University final club, which was mentioned also in the episode "If I Knew Then What I Know Now (2022)." A previous SVU ADA, Kim Greylek, had mentioned she had wanted to be the first ADA to charge rape as a hate crime (in the Season 10 episode "Trials (2008)") though she never got the chance.
When Detective Rollins asks Brad what kind of mood his friend Austin was in, he deflects the question and says, "I can tell you what her mood was: DTF." DTF is short for "Down to F**k."