Notes for season 2 episode 21, “Zero Day“
01:33 Reece has a Uniden Bearcat scanner (probably a UBC125XLT) for listening to police radio.
04:00 According to the OSC Decima report, the RFID chip implanted in Alicia Corwin, prior to 2012, had a 256kb capacity. While this seems like a tiny amount of space compared to a microSD card, injectable RFID chips at the time would have actually had one thousandth of that, 256b. Even in 2023, the average is around 2kb, with 8kb being described as “huge“.
05:52 Of course Ernest Thornhill is another Hitchcock reference (“North by Northwest”) – I guess Jonathan Nolan is the big Hitchcock fan in his family.
06:30 An office of rows of people typing unintelligible sequences into computers is like a 70s/80s kid’s conception of what computers are like. Dot matrix printers outputting codes onto fan-fold paper, and people transcribing that back into the computers. Sisyphean bureaucracy.
I remember reading a (perhaps apocryphal) story that when one of the US federal bureaucracies (IRS? VA?) introduced electronic submissions, the data would just be printed out and placed in the same data entry queue as all the other paper submissions.
07:24 We see from a close-up of the paper that the output is in a base64 dictionary. This is commonly used to enable the transmission of binary data over a mechanism that’s only reliable for plain text, such as email. (I tried testing bits of this into a b64 decoder, but it doesn’t appear to be a plain ascii message.)
09:30 We see that the safe house (that I refer to as “The Tower”) was previously Ingram’s bachelor pad, at least one of them as this is a different location from the loft with the pool seen in season one.
15:34 If you’re thinking “Wait, the car was empty? But what about the driver?”, then Carter is here to deliver a bit of dialogue to clumsily cover over this.
16:58 Finch finds “hidden information” in the Thornhill photo, which shows it to be a composite. Poor opsec by The Machine in sending out a multilayer photoshop file, rather than flattening it into a jpeg or whatever.
17:26 We get a shot of Finch looking at the photo of Thornhill, but somehow the back of the photo is a mirrored version of the the front of the photo? As if it was printed on acetate, although we already saw earlier that it’s a regular photo.
19:44 Root sends a message to Finch by “Opening IRC chat” in his “C++ chat window”. While it’s clear what’s happening, that doesn’t make sense in terms of actual tech. An old-school move would have been for root to send a local TTY message via something like write/talk/wall.
(In 1987 it was apparently possible to remotely write to terminals across the net?)
26:16 While analogous to the “rescue mode” that most computers have, “god mode” also feels like the the equivalent of the “freezer cartridges” from the 80s/90s that would allow computer users to inspect and change the memory of a running system – eg the Action Replay devices that would mostly be used for making games easier.
28:54 “When I care about someone I put a tracking device on them.” Dating Red Flag.
30:00 The code on the paper is “memories”. So we assume the machine has a default state, probably from late 2006. The dumped code probably represents the differences that would be applied to the Machine’s neural net (assuming that’s how this fictional AI works) representing changes to its decision-making rules since 2006.
Obviously the show is drawn to the aesthetics of obsolete tech, but what are the world’s rules here? Could the machine laser print the data as matrix codes, and read them back in via camera. You’d assume that it can’t just dump its brain to a bunch of hard disks, because it might then be compelled to also delete them at midnight. So could the machine dump to tape or disk at 23:50 and just pay people to unplug the disks, and then plug them back in after midnight?
38:17 On the screen the process “Contingency” has been running since 2009-07-11, but in season 1 episode 22, we see that the process was created at 1.16am on the 12th. This would be a continuity error, unless the local display timezone had been changed to (at least) two timezones west of New York. Which, given the Machine’s Portland location, actually fits. (Although it seems that the Machine’s midnight is always New York’s midnight.)
39:00 Ah, the debug location is the New York Public Library, or (as the world actually knows it) the library from Ghostbusters.