Notes for season 2 episode 5, “Bury the Lede“
06:30 It’s Clarke Peters from The Wire, which means this character is going to be more interesting than initially suggested.
08:54 Add littlenewyorkchildrensfund.com to the Warners domain collection.
11:22 Also add syncstoragesystems.com for the episode’s Dropbox-style service.
13:00 If the concern is that everyone’s on the lookout for “a man in a suit”, surely Reese could just wear jeans and a hoodie for a while? It seems too obvious?
15:00 The newspaper editor is all “We’re about to accuse someone of being the head of a criminal conspiracy based on hearsay? I’m sure it’s fine, we’ll run it on the website.” I can’t help but feel that there’s a dereliction of duty here?
15:34 Fictional online dating service match-heart.com is back. Maxine’s username, “GirlFriday1213” is a reference to 1940 movie “His Girl Friday”. If there’s one thing decades of American media have taught me, it’s that only the worst men are prepared to date a woman who works in publishing in New York.
15:55 It’s cringeworthy watching Finch (a man for who, as far as we know, only had one big romantic relationship… that he faked his own death to escape) doing a Bluetooth Cyrano routine with equally clumsy Reese. The bit about being seen with another woman to demonstrate social approval is one of those classic “applied social psychology” tips you’ll see on “dating for men” guides.
18:35 “…like something out of a comic book.” It’s hardly surprising when the show sometimes feels a bit Gotham City. The show was apparently conceived by Jonathan Nolan when working on The Dark Knight (which featured Batman hacking a network of personal cell phones into a city surveillance tool) and the set up might be easily described as “What if Alfred was the genius billionaire, and Bruce Wayne was just the ex-military guy he hired to punch people.”
21:25 As an example, this bit at the docks is reminiscent of Batman Begins, right down to Reese employing a Batman-esque voice.
23:01 Maxine strikes me as the sort of operator that would know not to agree to an FBI interrogation without a lawyer present, but apparently not?
24:30 The show makes reference to “disposable cell phones”, although disposability isn’t really a property of cell phone hardware – they’re not biodegradable. In context the term is being used to reference unregistered cell-phones and that, by implication, not providing attribution to authorities is inherently wrong. Unfair, but in line with the tone of the show.
27:32 Despite an automated message stating the message service is not available for the tipster’s unregistered number, Maxine is still compelled to voice her frustrations into the phone.
32:31 Finch mentions that he’s hacked into a social media site, “shotshuffler”, and reenabled the facial recognition system that had been switched off due to a lawsuit. This feels like a reference to the controversy surrounding Facebook’s auto-tagging facial recognition system, which was disabled for EU users a few months before this episode aired.
Of course all the debates about online facial recognition were made almost moot by the emergence of Clearview AI in 2019, who just went ahead and sold facial recognition data based on billions of online images to law enforcement and governments.
36:32 There’s no real clue that the ledger is hidden in the carousel, it’s just a hunch that pays off. It’s narratively unsatisfying.