During the repairing of the suit, Bruce also recalls a past experience where he was in a life-threatening situation where only Robin could save him. It's unknown when exactly Bruce's experience took place or which Robin was the one in the story. The story either took place during Batman: The Animated Series with Dick Grayson or during The New Batman Adventures with Tim Drake. However, there were at least two instances where the original Robin saved Batman's life. One was in "Night of the Ninja", where he saved Batman from Kyodai Ken, and in "Second Chance", where he stopped Two-Face's thugs from killing him, though this could also be an off-screen confrontation.
Shriek's plan of holding Gotham ransom and demanding Batman in exchange for the city's safety is repeated by the Joker in the The Dark Knight. While Shriek threatens to make humans unable to communicate with each other, the Joker threatens to kill important city officials each day until Batman reveals his secret identity, and the Gotham citizenry is as ungrateful as they are here, still demanding that Batman surrender, labeling him as an "unimportant outlaw vigilante" even though he saved the entire city from Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins. Again, Batman comes very close to revealing his secret identity but Harvey Dent, determined to catch Joker without sacrificing Batman, passes himself as Batman at a press conference. Also, just like in The Dark Knight, Batman fights the main villain in a skyscraper at the climax of the story.
The title is a reference to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which the ruler of humanity, Nimrod, builds a giant tower to Heaven to prove his greatness, and God punishes his arrogance by causing all his people making them unable to understand each other's speech, which in turn causes them people to scatter far and wide (the Bible's explanation for the number and diversity of languages and nationalities in the world). Unlike the story, it seems that what Shriek causes to happen is people speak in garbled voices, rather than another language that could eventually be learned and understood.
A similar scheme to Shriek's to make humans unable to communicate with each other was used by Ra's al Ghul in the comics story Justice League: Tower of Babel, published four months after this episode.