The episode won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series (One-Hour).
When Michael is attempting suicide again in his hotel room, the game show question is asking who wrote Slaughterhouse Five, and who its protagonist is. Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist who became "unstuck" in time, and the novel is written by Kurt Vonnegut. Similarly, Desmond became unstuck in time in the episode The Constant (2008).
The song playing when Michael gets into the car at the beginning of his flashback is "It's Getting Better" by Cass Elliot, the same musician that performed "Make Your Own Kind of Music", the song Desmond listened to in the hatch in Man of Science, Man of Faith (2005) and in the pub in Flashes Before Your Eyes (2007).
The alarm buzzer heard on the freighter at 4:00 minutes in is the the same alarm buzzer that was used in "The Hatch" when the clock would get below a minute and would need to be reset.
When Michael talks to Ben on the boat, he is wearing a Turtle Beach Ear Force X11 headset, which is a gaming headset.