The title is from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act I sc v: "Come, let's away, the strangers all are gone." It also appears in King Lear, Act V sc iii: "Come, let's away to prison; We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage”.
The opening song is “UFO”, a 2023 song by Olivia Dean, which talks about the feeling of not being in control when one is newly in love - appropriate to describe what’s happening between Caleb and Tamira.
The Deltan race was first seen in TMP with Ilia. Deltans are a very sensual and sexually open people, and to prevent issues with non-Deltans obsessing over them, those who join Starfleet have to take oaths of celibacy so as not to take advantage of sexually immature species.
Tamira’s neuroinhibitors start to flash; she wears them because she claims she feels emotions more intensely than other Betazoids (SFA: “Beta Test”) and that it can harm people if she loses control.
Betazoids are telepathic with others of their own species. However, they can teach this to people they are intimate with or close to, as Deanna Troi did with William Riker (TNG: “Encounter at Farpoint”).
The toy bear is Caleb’s toy Scrap, which he used as a diversion 15 years prior to escape from Pikaru (SFA: “Kids These Days”). He experiences flashbacks to those events.
Ship graveyards can be either actual graveyards where the wreckage of ships is left as a memorial to those who died there like the location of the Battle of Wolf 359 (TNG: “The Best of Both Worlds”, Star Trek Online), or junkyards/depots where old ships are abandoned (TNG: “Unification”).
The USS Miyazaki (NCC-316606) is presumably named after famed anime director Hayao Miyazaki (or his namesake city in Japan). This is the first we’ve heard of the “Singularity Drive”, although the Romulans famously used a quantum singularity to power their warp engines in the 24th century.
Kelrec was previously referred to as Commander, but now Nahla calls him “Chancellor”, so it may be that commander really is his rank after all. The mission, to repower Miyazaki and reboot the computer, bears some resemblance to reactivating the USS Hathaway in TNG: “Peak Performance”, although that was in preparation for war games.
The new “plasma-based” life support system is reminiscent of the force-field-based life-support belts used by Kirk & Co. during the animated series, starting from TAS: “Beyond the Farthest Star”.
This is the first time we’ve heard of ghan’aq, presumably a Klingon drink.
This is the first appearance of the Furies, although an ancient collective of races named the Furies or the Host were the antagonists in the Invasion! series of Star Trek novels.
Latinum (or gold-pressed latinum) is a currency most often used by Ferengi. The latinum itself is liquid and then encased in relatively worthless gold. Its value comes from the fact that latinum apparently cannot be replicated.
We last saw Nus Braka escaping Athena in a lifepod at the end of “Kids These Days”. Sector 119 is first mentioned here on-screen, but a planet in Sector 119-D was the setting of the Gold Key Star Trek comic story “Dwarf Planet” in issue #25 (1974).
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…” was an aphorism quoted by Spock in ST II to Kirk, who finished it with, “… or the one.” Of course, Kirk risked everything to save Spock in ST III “because the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many.”
“The hills are alive with the sound of murder,” is an obvious take-off on “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The Sound of Music, but I first read it as "the streets are alive with the sound of murder," in the book Sing along with Mad (1970), as part of a parody of the musical set in the world of organised crime, written by the great Frank Jacobs and drawn by the equally legendary Al Jaffee.
Añejo means “aged” in Spanish and is used to refer to (in this case) aged tequila or aged rum.
Vance here uses “T-Tauri System” as if it’s a proper name. Although TNG: “Clues” uses “the T-tauri system” several times, the dialogue makes it clear that it’s a type of star rather than the name of a star system and the crew are using “the” just to identify the relevant system that contains that kind of star. In fact, Data notes that unstable wormholes have been mapped near 39 T-Tauri systems.
Nus is apparently short for “Nustopher”. Taygeta is a trinary star system in the constellation of Taurus, with Taygeta V featured in the TOS novel Tears of the Singers by Melinda Snodgrass.
A hengra, also known as a hengrauggi, was a creature from the ice planet Delta Vega (not to be confused with the planetoid Delta Vega from TOS: “Where No Man Has Gone Before”), seen in the Star Trek (2009) movie.
Stardate 898898.3 translates to 3221, which is about 30 years in the future from SFA, so that can’t be right, especially when it’s said that Miyazaki hasn’t been operational for a century. The stardate should be in the 768000s.
Nus plays with a golden version of the NX-01 Enterprise.
A trauma loop is when an individual becomes stuck and re-experiences or re-enacts traumatic events over and over again. It is usually self-perpetuating, like a person who has been abused might unconsciously seek out situations where they will experience the same kind of abuse again. Nahla mentioned previously that she lost her son because of the Burn, but here we get some more detail.
Psilosynine is a neurotransmitter linked to Betazoid telepathy (TNG: “Dark Page”). As we saw in “Beta Test”, Tarima’s father, President Emrin Sadal of Betazed, is deaf. We find out why here.
The Furies are part-Lynar, which makes their inner ears sensitive to high sonic frequencies. Lynars were mentioned in TNG: "Chain of Command" by Picard as "a kind of Celtrine bat" (native to Celtris III).
The Intrepid-class USS Sargasso referred to here is not the 24th century class that the USS Voyager belonged to, but that of the 32nd century Voyager-J, first seen in DIS: “Die Trying”.
We see a trail of green blood at B’Avi’s mouth. Vulcan blood is copper-based, hence the colour.
We get a mention of Discovery, so she must have finished her retrofit (“Kids These Days”).
Nus’ final message to Nahla, where he rages about the self-righteousness of the Federation, is similar to Eddington’s speech to Sisko in DS9: “For the Cause”, accusing the Federation of being more insidious than the Borg in assimilating cultures.
The sound of the Furies screeching plays over the end credits.
