The music at the end, as Gibbs and Dawson go horseback riding, is an acoustic version of the NCIS main title theme.
When Gibbs tells Trooper Dawson a story about his daughter Kelly, she wonders if "horse sense" runs in his family, which he denies. In season one's "Hung Out to Dry (2003)", Gibbs tells Kate Todd that he comes from a "long line" of horse traders.
There are two actors with ties to the NCIS universe. Elisabeth Röhm two months earlier played a different character in the same television universe. On Hawaii Five-0 (2010) in 2016-2017, she played a semi-recurring villain that is still at large. That series had a 2011 crossover with NCIS: Los Angeles (2009) which is a spin off of this series. Kym Jackson, who played Phoebe, also appeared on the NCIS LA spin off twice in 2013 as a different character.