Anatole Blaylock was staying in room 4 of the Sleepy Rest Hotel under the name John Smith. Tom Baker, who played Anatole, was the Fourth Doctor on the BBC show "Doctor Who," and the Doctor's favorite false name was John Smith.
This would be J.D. Cannon's second, and final appearance on Remington Steele. He had appeared in the first season as a different character.
Steele tries to get the dog to obey with "Walkies! Walkies!" using a well-known command by dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse. In addition to publishing multiple books on the subject, she had a TV series Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way (1980), just a couple of years before this episode.
The way Steele commands the dog to "Sit!" (with the emphasis on the "t") is the same way Roger Moore's Bond uses to stop a tiger in Octopussy. It's another method of the then popular Barbara Woodhouse dog training method.
Steele mentions a thief nicknamed "renard" (the fox). In the 1999 Bond movie "The World Is Not Enough", Pierce Brosnan would be going up against a villain named Renard.