Once the team figures out the unsub, Garcia says "She was doomed... Like red shirted ensign in Star Trek doomed." The unsub's father is played by Jonathan Frakes who played Commander Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987).
The Uncanny Valley is an idea created by Japanese robotics researcher Dr. Masahiro Mori in 1970. Dr Mori. made a graph showing vertically how well people accepted certain images and horizontally how human the images were. He found that people reacted well to other people (who both looked and acted human) and also accepted images that acted human but didn't look at all human (like talking animals in cartoons). However, many people were repulsed by images that looked almost human (like zombies or talking skeletons). The chart looked like a pair of hills (high acceptance) with a valley in between (revulsion), which Dr Mori called the Uncanny Valley. The word "uncanny" had previously been used in a similar way by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud. It has been suggested that this response may be due to evolutionary pressure to maintain distance from people who are diseased or injured in order to avoid danger.
In the prologue, Dr. Reid is playing chess with a boy. At one point, the boy asks him if there's anyone he's ever been beaten by and Reid replies that he used to play with an old coworker. He is talking about the former series lead Jason Gideon who always was shown playing chess with Reid up until his departure from the show at the beginning of Season 3. In fact, before finding Gideon's goodbye letter at the end of In Name and Blood (2007), Reid fell asleep in Gideon's office waiting for him to arrive so they could play chess. He never did.
The ruse that the unsub used to abduct the women is much like the one used by Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Buffalo Bill also was looking for a specific type and size of woman.
The drugs that Dr. Arthur Malcolm gives to his daughter Samantha are as follows: Clozapine for mood and schizophrenic disorders, Prochlorperazine for vomiting, Haloperidol for mood disorders, Thioridazine for mood disorders, Risperidone for mood disorders, Trifluoperazine HCL for mood disorders, and Chlorpromazine for nausea and explosive behavior.