Notes for season 2 episode 7, “Critical“
1:30 Leon is running a gold farming scam in 2012. I think gold farming’s cultural peak came with the suggestion that prisoners in China were being forced to grind in mmorpgs. I didn’t really hear much about gold faming until Axie Infinity tried to make gold farming the point of the game, with the gold being “Smooth Love Potion”, a crypto-currency that rocketed up and then collapsed over the course of 2021.
07:30 Finch notes that Madeleine and Amy have been married since June 2011, but presumably not in New York which only recognised same-sex marriage from July 2011.
09:00 Julian Sands appears as Alistair Wesley. (At the time of writing in 2023, Sands is sadly missing and likely dead.) Wesley tells Madeleine, a surgeon, he’s going to kill her wife unless she kills a high-profile patient. Interestingly this episode aired in November 2012, and just a few weeks earlier Warner Bros / CBS had also committed to a pilot for a similar premise, Hostages, based on a then-unproduced Israeli script.
11:45 Fusco shows Carter the CCTV footage on a Dell Latitude XT2 XFR rugged tablet. It’s no Toughbook.
13:49 I know it doesn’t matter in the context of a dose intended to be fatal, but it seems like you often see doctors on television use the same needle to draw from a multi-dose vial as to inject. (Normally, in case of contamination from the silicone seal, separate needles are used.)
14:22 Of course Madeleine’s office has the same Dell 2009W monitor (with third-party VESA stand) as half of all offices seen in the show.
14:27 Despite the name (“Network Data Analyzer”) Finch is clearly using an interface based on Wireshark.
14:45 “Can you use [this single image] to triangulate the sniper’s position?” More loose trigonometry from Finch.
15:00 Finch hacks the hospital’s blood inventory via their website. The inventory is expressed as units per ABO/Rh type, but all of the types have roughly equivalent inventories. This is poor management by the hospital – the amounts should really reflect the blood type distribution of the location. This means holding mostly O+ and A+, and relatively small amounts of AB.
16:50 “I’ll be seeing you.” Did I mention my theory that Person of Interest takes place in the same universe as the 2009 Prisoner mini-series?
17:50 Carter tampers with evidence for the benefit of… slow audience members?
21:54 A patient monitor screen is mocked up as showing vitals in a simulated 14-segment display, in a change from OCR-A.
25:32 It’s not clear why Leon passes on the hacked insider information about Veldt rejecting a wind farm proposal. Feels like it lowers the stakes. It pays off later, I guess?
30:50 Even in an emergency situation, Reese can’t hold back from offering up his opinions on New York bakeries.
31:50 “Agent Snow, freeze”
35:47 Wait, did all of the hidden operatives in the park have very obvious radio ear pieces this whole time?
36:50 “You’re the surgeon, doctor – I’m just the nurse… or in this case the backup plan.” I’m assuming, at this point, that the the audio in the operating room isn’t being recorded.
37:50 Ah yes, a tablet with a smashed screen – you won’t get any data out of that thing.
40:05 The front page of the newspaper also includes a 1989 NYT story about fonts, but where “Bill Gates” has been replaced by “Kevin L Rapier”, and “Microsoft” has been replaced by “Eight O Eight” (indicating the source of the prop).
41:00 It feels like they’re setting up Wesley to be a reoccurring character, but ultimately he’s never seen again.