Notes for season 1 episode 22, “No Good Deed”
01:05 Flashback to 2009, and Nathan Ingram walks through an apparently silent server room. somehow silent server room.
03:43 Finch checks his phone and then looks for a pay phone in order to receive a new number. Given the egress constraints established it shouldn’t really be The Machine texting Finch – it just calls the nearest payphone to him. Continuity-wise this could be explained away as Finch having a calendar alert for a pattern of regular calls.
06:12 Reese has got a case on his iPhone – which might have been of use in episode 7.
06:22 Finch mentions that traders place their offices with networking facilities in order to “get their trades in a few picoseconds faster” and this is a thing that is said about trading computers, and in a world of algorithmic trading it seems plausible. But it always seemed to me that ultra-reliable connectivity to a small number of addresses (the stock exchange servers) would be more important than latency, and therefore trading firms would reduce risk by reducing the number of “best effort” providers in their network path. Lower latency would merely be the side-effect of fewer interconnections, rather than the main target.
08:12 Apparently, after a decade working on a secret government data processing project for a decade, Finch needs to look it up what a SCIF is. The receptionist is played by Kate Bond who would go on to have a reoccurring role on the MacGyver reboot.
08:44 Apparently the secret facility will just install a randomly delivered coffee maker in its office without having it checked for bugs? They do, at least, plug it into an outlet labeled “Black Circuit” which in cryptographic jargon implies it’s on the outer, more public, edge.
15:54 Apparently they didn’t manage to find the bug on Peck the multiple times he came in and out of the NSA facility?
22:14 Reese finds the bug he’d planted Peck in the trash. But he just tosses it rather than keeping it to reuse later. He’s not paying, I guess?
22:48 This feels like the first time a character has discarded a phone that was forensically unrecoverable, rather than just snapping a flip phone into two pieces.
26:45 Flashback Finch explains how he’s protected the system from abuse by ensuring that only the Machine can perform changes on itself. Even in the world of computer security, let alone science fiction, this feels hubristic. Seems like not a day goes by in 2023 where I don’t hear about someone bypassing the protections on a public LLM chat bot.
27:35 “Any exploit is a total exploit.” Finch argues against backdoors, ironically to defend the integrity a system reliant on the misuse of surveillance access. The thought-experiment premise of the show thus far relies on accepting the surveillance of an incorruptible authority… but the cracks are beginning to show.
35:00 The idea of an NSA whistleblower meeting with a journalist to inform then of massive illegal mass surveillance became high profile just thirteen months after this episode aired, when Edward Snowden went public. Did Snowden, weeks into exfiltrating documents at this point, happen to tune in and see his fictional doppelgänger pursued by assassins?
36:00 Finch does a variation of the MST3k theme “Repeat to yourself: it’s just a show, I should really just relax” to Peck, but really to the audience. Stop asking questions about the practicalities of the premise. The surveillance is real, the Machine is a fiction.
38:40 The introduction of Grace Hendricks, played by Carrie Preston who I know as The Good Wife’s best character, Elsbeth Tascioni.
41:15 “I built an app that alerts me if I ever get within 100m of her”
41:40 I think this is the most “Doctor Who” Finch looks in the entire series.