The tape Lear is listening to is from Day 29 of the exile. Lear mentions that the stardate is unknown. While this may harken back to the TOS Writer’s Guide where (to let writers off the hook for not being consistent with stardates from episode to episode) they say that stardates depend on a variety of factors, including the velocity of the object and its positioning within the galaxy, surely the position of Ceti Alpha V would be known? Unless Lear is just being lazy and not wanting to calculate it.
McGivers says Khan avoided her for three weeks after discovering her communicator, which happened last episode. That means that KHA: “Paradise” (and Hugo’s death) took place about a week, give or take, into the exile.
Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan, near the Kazhakstan border. As far as I’m aware, although there are forests in the mountains nearby, there were no jungles filled with deserters and death squads in the 1990s, although car bombs in 1999 were attributed to Islamic militants.
Richter’s flower is identified by Ivan as a corpse flower, or a carrion flower, which describes several species which smell of rotting flesh to attract flies for pollination. His description of a red flower about three feet around is similar to Earth’s rafflesia kerrii, whose blooms are about that size.
Richter and Sylvana allude to a place where he was bullied, and possibly raised. In “Paradise” we find out that Khan liberated child Augments from a laboratory, and in SNW: “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” we see the Noonien-Singh Institute where a young Khan lives, c.2022, together with a cohort of at least 6 other children.
McGivers tells the Augments the tale of Scheherazade, the storyteller of the Arabian story cycle The Thousand and One Nights, which gives the episode its name. McGivers also echoes the senior staff of Enterprise are discussing Khan from TOS: “Space Seed”, namely that there were no massacres under his rule, and no wars until he was attacked, although Spock points out that there was little freedom as well.
Socrates was indeed accused of not worshiping the gods of Athens and corrupting the minds of the city’s youth. What Khan and McGivers leave out is that he was tried and sentenced to death for that, of which he executed the sentence by drinking a cup of hemlock. Plato was Socrates’ pupil, and one of the main sources for an account of the latter’s life.
McGivers’ observation that Kirk didn’t even know her name before that day is essentially correct, as Kirk mispronounces her name to Spock as “McGIHvers”.
The theme of a seeming paradise hiding dangerous lifeforms is a feature of TOS: “The Apple”. The “insect” that attacks Sylvana is christened the Ceti eel, which will of course eventually be Ceti Alpha V’s only surviving indigenous lifeform and the cause of McGiver's death.
Hugo and Joaquin have died so far, bringing the population of Khan’s colony down to 71.