Notes for season 1 episode 4 “Cure Te Ipsum”
01:30 The episode’s first “obsoleted thing” makes an appearance, the pager. (Broadcast pagers, rather than the local pagers you see in food courts, etc.) It’s plausible that hospital staff were using pagers in 2011 but they’re slowly on the way out.
Up to 2019 it was estimated that the NHS in the UK was using about 10% of the world’s remaining active pagers. It’s now been a year since the 2021 deadline of the pre-covid edict to replace them with smartphone apps such as Pando.) Even the bird watching alert systems seem to have transitioned to mobile apps.
(It’s not really clear why Finch swaps her pager, though. Maybe the replacement had a location transmitter or a bug or something?)
03:20 Around this point I think I’d stopped thinking of Finch and Reese as weird stalkers, and more like the angels from Wings of Desire. Following people around the city, watching them from rooftops.
05:10 Reese attacks the cellphone gun holster guy on the basis that he might be armed, which feels a little hypocritical.
05:50 Reese correctly assumes the benzodiazepine in the suspect’s wallet is for drug-rape. Although, presumably, there are statistically more people who carry it due to an anxiety disorder or insomnia or something.
07:20 Reese goes gloveless when “digital black-bagging” the homes of people who are about to be involved in a violent crime, almost like he’s trolling the police fingerprint analysts at this point.
09:10 One thing that seems remarkable about this as a “date rape” episode is that, despite being set in an iPhone era, there’s no dating app element involved at all. But in 2011 this episode predates the wide use of geosocial apps like Tinder. (For some markets, at least. It seems remarkable that “Grindr but for heteros” was still a plausible elevator pitch for about three years.)
14:00 Installing a security keypad in clear view of anyone looking through the window feels like a risk the company that installed it should have been aware of.
16:30 I wouldn’t have picked up on this in 2011, but the use of “committed” in “she committed suicide” inadvertently conveys a judgment (if not legal, then moral) which is at odds with the sentiment. Especially given how he uses the knowledge of Reese’s suicidal struggles in the first episode.
17:20 Carter visits the house of Finch’s on-the-spot paralegal alter-ego. If it’s not his, then… did he have someone rent an apartment and set-dress it to look like a paralegal’s (with law books on the shelves) in a day or two? Is there some unseen team of people taking on inexplicable tasks on weird whims of their billionaire boss?
28:50 We see that we are listening to an answering machine tape from 1997, which Kate has kept for 14 years. The prop is a PhoneMate 6800 or 6900 dating from the mid-to-late 80s – and despite being “digital” it uses C-60 audio cassettes.
31:25 There’s a partial QR code in the background outside Benton’s apartment building. It’s not relevant to the episode, but it feels like 2011 was near the Peak of Inflated Expectations for QR codes.