Lycia Naff provides the voice of Captain Sonya Gomez, having earlier played the role in two second season episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987). In those episodes, Ensign Gomez is a rookie engineering officer aboard the Enterprise-D.
Tendi makes reference to visiting the "rubber ducky" room. Designer Michael Okuda has a habit of hiding rubber duckies in the systems display graphics of Starfleet ships. This is the first show to acknowledge it in dialogue.
Lycia Naff appeared in two Season 2 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) before appearing here as the same character, Sonya Gomez (then an ensign, now Captain of the Archimedes), a gap of 32 years between appearances as the same character. This breaks the previous franchise record held by John Colicos and Charlie Brill, who went 28 years between their appearances as Kor and Arne Darvin, respectively, on the original Star Trek (1966) series and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993). In that instance, however, both sets of appearances were live action, while in this case the reprise was voice-only, so the record for a gap between in-person appearances on Star Trek still belongs to Colicos and Brill.
The Archimedes is sometimes erroneously identified as an Excelsior-class ship or an Excelsior-class refit. Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan confirmed on Twitter that it is actually an Obena-class ship (named for art designer Nollan Obena). While the shape of the secondary hull and certain features like the impulse engines at the back of the saucer recall the Excelsior, the overall size of the ship is much larger, and the warp engines and shape of the saucer section more closely resemble the Sovereign-class.
Mariner mentions the possibility of the Cerritos receiving a new captain who is "some weirdo with a riding crop." Lawrence H. Styles, the first captain of the then-experimental Excelsior, carried a riding crop with him during his sole appearance in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984).