Notes for season 2 episode 11, “2πR“
01:20 We see the men suspected of being Reese receiving DNA swabs, and your first thought is probably: “They took his fingerprints in the pilot, surely identification would have happened by now?” (This will only be addressed in a later scene.)
02:30 Reese finds a regular-sized flip-phone in his cell. If it were up to me, Reese would instead be retrieving a tiny cellphone from his rectal cavity – an actual technique for prison phone smuggling.
03:30 The absent teacher’s name is, I think, the show’s only direct reference to Jeremy Bentham, who developed the idea of the Panopticon – a prison where inmates would know they might be observed at any time, a widely used metaphor for electronic surveillance.
06:07 Finch compares the constant texting of 2012’s teens to another planet. Fusco: “Their planet’s gonna be running ours in about ten years.”
06:20 Good to see the NYPD secure email has support for RSS feeds.
08:04 “Throw all this stuff online and let me teach in my boxers.” Just wait seven years, my friend.
09:05 Finch says that a score of 50% is statistically improbable, although that’s apparently being extrapolated from a single datapoint?
14:15 Handwriting full “c” syntax on paper (as opposed to pseudo-code sketching) seems mad. I could have bought it as a plot point in the 80s – the poor computer genius without access at home – but by 2013 we were already in the era of cheap educational computing devices. The Raspberry Pi was released in 2012.
14:25 Seems weird to have a 17 year old in 2012 defending Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick’s 1995 arrest occurred a few months after Caleb would have been born.
15:33 Caleb avoids the “tabs or spaces” question by using zero indentation in his code. Like a boss.
20:35 Not only does Caleb have enough money from his drug dealing to buy a laptop, he’s also apparently conducting illegal business via the shared school computers. This is poor opsec.
24:41 The 2010 transcripts are printed in OCR-A.
26:30 235Tb compressed on to a 2012-era thumb drive? The show needs us to accept that Kolmogorov complexity works differently in its world, which actually becomes relevant in later episodes.
27:50 Ok, Caleb also using shared computers for his online banking?
42:26 Donnelly uses the powers of the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 to further detain domestic suspects, which is a gross overreach, but gets absolutely no pushback.
43:00 Wait, what happened the whole subplot about the drug dealers coming to, presumably, kill Caleb? Did he pay them off? It’s apparently not important enough to say. (Caleb turns up in a later season.)