Notes for season 2 episode 4, “Triggerman“
06:14 Standard villain phone opsec: put ’em all in a box in a public bar.
16:37 It seems that Finch’s lockpick skills have improved since since last season?
17:18 So one of Finch’s data forensics techniques here is to grep a harddisk for “Meet me”. Well, if it works, it’s not stupid.
It doesn’t work.
19:40 Annie’s desktop image is of the New York skyline. Finch explains that by measuring the pixel locations of landmarks with known height (Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Citigroup Building) he can calculate the height and location – with trigonometry (thus introducing word play into the episode title).
Standard hashtag OSINT Bellingcat shit, right? Except it’s not actually simple to find the location and height of a lens with trigonometry. You’d still use the known points/locations of the buildings in the picture, but instead use a photogrammetry technique called resectioning which involves a lot of matrix transformations.
23:00 Reese gets shot at close range! But then you see him get up, and open his shirt. It’s the standard movie convention to communicate that he was wearing body armour. Except it looks just like a white undershirt?
Concealed body armour is a thing, of course. I went down a bit of a rabbithole trying to work out what sort of body armour a committed suit-wearer would have been in 2012, and ended up watching absurd promo videos for Colombian armourer Miguel Caballero.
41:40 It’s not clear why the bounty hunter kills Riley. Why wouldn’t he just leave after getting paid?