Notes for season 2 episode 8, “Til Death“
03:40 Add ebook publisher eastvillagepublishing.com to the Warners domain pool.
04:52 The RFID duplicator Finch hands Reese has the same form factor as you’d get if you searched AliExpress for “handheld RFID writer”, but zhuzhed up with more lights.
05:50 Finch has a Nazar hanging from the rear-view mirror of his borrowed car, a charm to ward off the “evil eye”, an apt choice for a show about pervasive surveillance. A similar pattern is later seen on the Drake’s furnishings.
08:20 The name of the tech services company “Cyber Wingman” has made me think of the date scene in “Bury the Lede”.
“Mr and Mrs Drake have requested high-speed fibre optic throughout the house.” This is plausible nonsense. In 2012, as today, the house would still be wired up for Ethernet and wifi, but fibre would be terminated at a wiring closet and connected to a local router.
08:25 Finch does however (as part of his cover) run defragmentation software on the Drake’s PC. Something that should have been unnecessary by 2012. Improvements in disks and filesystems would have made defragmentation essentially unnecessary before 2010. By 2012, the home computers of the wealthy would have been SSDs which should not be defragmented at all.
10:41 You’ve got to appreciate a bomb maker that choose top wired up a top-end smart phone, rather than a bog-standard Nokia.
21:44 Carter and Reese drink from “Anthora” coffee cups (the disposable cups with Greek design elements) which I think might be one of the show’s deliberate anachronisms. They were common in New York for decades prior to the Starbucks-ification of coffee distribution. The cups ceased mass distribution in 2006 (although more were produced after 2015), but prop stores have a reserve for whenever a show needs to evoke a past New York.
23:30 Fusco tells an anecdote of a house robber who logged into their Facebook account, which is something that has happened multiple times.
34:20 In the context of the show, Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Red Tower” feels like a another cctv portal being viewed by the Machine.