During surgery, Charles mentions a vacation home in Hyannis Port, Mass. that his family enjoyed when he was a child until a large family moved in, often playing touch football in the yard. The disturbance prompted the Winchester family to move out. The unnamed family that Charles refers to is the Kennedy family who rented (1926) and then purchased (1928) a summer cottage at 50 Merchant Avenue in Hyannis Port. The timing is consistent with Charles character, who would have been about 10 years old at the time the Kennedys moved in.
The song Charles repeatedly whistles throughout the episode is from "La Traviata," an opera by Giuseppe Verdi.
At around the 3:25 mark, Mike Farrell and Alan Alda both begin to say the same line to David Odgen Stiers - "You sip it through a fuse"- but Farrell stops when he realizes it's Alda's line.
In the Officers Club, Maj. Winchester, who calls almost everyone at the 4077th by their last names regardless of familiarity, refers to Sgt. Zale by his first name, Zelmo - one of very few people, if not the only one outside of Klinger, to ever do so.
The episode's title is a reference to the title of William Shakespeare's play "The Merchant of Venice"