Notes for season 2 episode 20, “In Extremis“
The title of the episode “In Extremis”, reminds me of the words David Cameron used in 2015 to describe the rare and extreme circumstances in which private communications would be looked at. Eight years later, and governments have now moved to call for proactive monitoring.
05:07 Is this going to be another episode where someone tries to suppress medical trial data for financial gain? The Paranoid Style in American Television?
14:11 Having established Finch’s love of vintage tech, of course he’s going to have something like a Cold War-era Victoreen Geiger counter on hand rather than something resembling a cell-phone form factor (although the script calls for something that can read alpha particles, which those vintage portable Geiger counters cannot).
But on closer inspection… that prop isn’t even a real Geiger counter. For a start, old Geiger counters generally don’t have big ☢ Ionising radiation warning symbols on them, since they’re not the source of radiation. (Having said that, there are radiation detectors on sale that, maddeningly, do have the hazard symbol on them.)
This one looks like it’s actually a modified Garrett Groundhog metal detector (a “coin hunter”), probably from the 80s. I’m guessing it was sitting in a prop store, rather than being built for this episode, and that the script called for an old-fashioned looking device.
The use of polonium-210 is a reference to the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, where Russian agents slipped it into a teapot during a meeting at a hotel in London.