Notes for season 1 episode 1 “Pilot”
00:20 After a clean-shaven flashback, we meet Reece looking rough, sporting a hobo look that would probably cost about £600 to reproduce at All Saints.
00:30 It’s apt that we start with public transport. After I’d seen a couple of episodes, I started describing it to people as the pseudo elevator pitch of “Knight Rider… but without the car”.
00:40 Anton and his gang bump into Reese on on their way to kill John Wick’s dog. Anton casually mentions he’s going to be obtaining new guns next week for no reason other than to clumsily provide an explanation for a future scene.
02:15 Carter watches a few seconds of CCTV video of Reece brawling with Anton’s gang to determine it’s a fighting style not taught in the “regular army”. Because it’s an elite close-quarters combat style that trains you to knee your opponent in the stomach.
02:55 “Seems like the only time you need a name now is when you’re in trouble.” says “Reese” a character whose name is never actually revealed over five seasons.
03:30 The show, and especially the pilot, makes a point of using antiquated tech in a world being watched over by an advanced AI. Possibly to demonstrate power disparity, or to reinforce the “future is not evenly distributed”. Carter shows Reese the low resolution CCTV footage on a big-ass on a wheel-in CRT TV, like you might have seen in school in the early 90s. Not implausible in 2011, but it seeds the idea that the police don’t have access to the state of the art.
04:10 They do have access to real-time fingerprint lookups (AFIS) with a plausible looking Windows app, which they’ve made TV-cool by just polarising it. Take that, Mark Coleran. Incidentally, the same year this episode was shown, the FBI had begun replacing IAFIS with its far more Big Brother Database’y “Next Generation Identification“
08:40 We get to hear the series title “person of interest” used in dialogue – on a TV news report being played on a 30-40 year old CRT TV in a hotel. In the fancier hotel Finch is playing the wiretap recording using a 1970s portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. Very “The Conversation”.
11:20 Some of this hits a little different after 2020. Not only the idea that a government might have information that could save lives and deliberately not act on it, but also asking the question “what would you if you could act in a way that could save lives” has, in some way, been answered by everyone who lived through a pandemic.
12:30 Reese in a brown leather jacket. The character goes through a number of outfits in the pilot before the iconic suit-no-tie look. Maybe it’s like an RPG where in the early game you’ll keep swapping out clothing for better armour stats, until you’ve finally got an epic set.
13:00 Finch brings Reese to the abandoned library hideout and shows him the Crazy Wall. We see The List, a number of social security numbers printed on “green bar” tractor feed paper. Except the paper is much narrower than usual fanfold list paper, and the text is in OCR-A, not something that looks like a dot-matrix output, at a resolution under the usual 80 columns a line printer would produce.
14:40 While remote access to phones has been a perpetual issue, the “Bluejacking” in the show (where a character’s phone is able to control another phone after a short period of proximity) seems to be derived from actual bugs being exploited around 2005 (“bluesnarfing” allowing files to be downloaded, and “bluebugging” allowing access to calls/microphone/etc)
16:40 Reese is shown wearing a bluetooth earpiece – which I’m fairly sure most people considered regrettable… right up to the launch of AirPods in 2016.
21:50 Reese accosts Michael Pope, who gets away by shouting to nearby workmen “he’s trying to take pictures of me”, causing them to stop working and approach, ever vigilant to the threat of public photography.
21:51 Reese drops cell-phone as tracker in Michael’s sling backpack. Which is what you had to do in fictional scenarios before AirTags became a thing. Also, when did sling backpacks become a thing? Where they still new in 2011?
22:30 Somehow Reese has worked out where and when to hijack Anton’s dad’s gun shipment. (How? Did he hack Anton’s online calendar and find the entry for gun deal?) Anton’s dad is “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” star William Sadler in the briefest cameo.
23:54 Like most of the bespoke app interfaces on the show, the real-time location tracking map looks terrible. Designed apparently for an EGA palette.
24:20 Reese conspicuously loads a weapon while in the back of taxi, and tells the driver to keep the change – thus benefiting from the omerta that binds all cabbies and good tippers.
24:30 The video game Watch_Dogs is clearly inspired by the show (after the first gameplay video was shown, I described it as “third-person of interest”) and the scene where Reese shoots a smoke grenade into a moving car was definitely something they used.
25:30 Dirty cops were inevitable in this show. It’s the Gotham City principle – fictional vigilantism is only tolerable if the fictional authorities are perpetually corrupt.
29:15 How do the cops know about what happened during Anton’s gun deal. Did they report the theft of trafficked weapons to the police? Did they post about it on some underworld version of NextDoor? “Beware: my stash of firearms just got stolen by a white guy”. I get that there were multiple knee-cappings and police were probably called to the scene, but why wouldn’t Anton remove the remaining guns before the cops arrived?
30:00 I heard the blu-ray commentary track on this episode a few years ago. The one thing I remember that Jonathan Nolan (who grew up in London and Chicago) wrote an alleyway scene. Then, when preparing to shoot on location, the location scout explained that New York doesn’t actually have the alleyways that people imagine it does. (I feel that Marvel comics have lied to me.) If you check the location they’re apparently at in the show (corner of Remsen Avenue and Avenue D) in an online street view, you’ll see a distinct lack of noir-ish alleys.
35:10 Finch looks at a photo of Wheeler, complete with “red eye” retina reflection, a signifier we read as an old fashioned photograph, not digital image capture.
36:00 The use of Massive Attack’s “Angel” here is one of the best use licensed music tracks in television.
(Oh, this took longer than I was expecting… hopefully future posts will be briefer.)