Gina Bellman only makes a short appearance in this episode as she was pregnant during filming.
Hardison says he went to Second City in Chicago when Eliot questions his ability to do an accent; Second City is an acting school/collective and many of the people in the Leverage pilot, The Nigerian Job, were from there.
Nate's cover is an insurance agent named Sterling, a reference to Jim Sterling, an insurance investigator and the team's antagonist, played by Mark Sheppard.
The flashback of Parker breaking a man's finger and hitting him with his own case before stealing the case is a scene originally written and filmed as a flashback from the pilot episode, The Nigerian Job; it appears in the DVD set as a deleted scene from that episode and from another episode later in season one. The flashback of Parker stabbing the mark with a fork is from The Stork Job (not a deleted scene).
When arriving at the laboratory, Hardison who has assumed the character 'Iceman', says "the iceman cometh". This is a famous play by the American playwright Eugine O'Neill, written in1939 and premiered in 1946.