After speaking Chinese and being questioned by Beckett, he says "TV show I used to love." This is a reference to Firefly where it was common for characters to speak Chinese.
This was the first episode of the third season to not have the introduction montage of the show's premise.
Castle alludes to a rockslide trapping someone on a mountainside, forcing them to gnaw off their own arm to survive. This episode was aired just days after the release of the movie "127 Hours" (based on the autobiographical "Between a Rock and a Hard Place") which dealt with a solo wilderness rock climber who had to whittle off his own arm which was pinned under a boulder.
When Castle and Beckett's car is disabled, the scenery background and camera angles are intentionally similar to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Lance Henriksen appears in this episode focused on aliens and the paranormal, wherein Rick Castle can often be heard whistling a tune similar to the theme song to The X-Files (1993), a series famous for its paranormal subject matter. Henriksen also appeared on The X-Files -- and its spin-off series Millennium (1996) -- as FBI profiler Frank Black.