Notes for season 3 episode 14, “Provenance“
06:50 We see the Nowell Codex, famous for containing the unique copy of Beowulf. Except this is presented as though it was an actual book, and not mounted pages. If you scroll through the British Library’s digital copy, you’ll see that the presented pages don’t match any in the actual manuscript. So either they’re from another source, or the production commissioned someone to produce some plausible Old English pages for two seconds of screen time?
10:43 Finch examines the discarded tablet. “All portable devices have GPS chips these days.” Well that’s not quite the case 2023, and it certainly wasn’t in 2014.
However there were a lot of iPads with will cell-data capabilities and GPS, and the map Finch produces is likely a reference to the discovery in 2011 of a location history database, consolidated.db, stored on Apple devices.
10:55 The bar is named “The Purloined Letter” after an Edgar Allan Poe story,
11:14 Ah, just remotely hack everyone in the bar. Proportionate.
14:48 It’s 2014 and people are writing down their criminal plans on paper maps and just hiding them in their apartments.
15:10 The company handling the Gutenberg Bible transportation is S3 (Symmetric Security Solutions) although the name “S3” hasn’t been synonymous with security in the last decade. (I assume it’s a reference to G4S.)
21:00 Ah, the Mission: Impossible style break-down of how they’re going to pull off the heist. (Bad Robot was also producing Mission: Impossible films at the same time as Person of Interest.)
21:42 The prop for the biometric access point (HandPunch 1000) is based on an actual product, the Schlage HandKey II.
23:08 Finch unpacks a Formlabs Form 1 3D-printer, a Kickstarter that shipped in September 2013. Although its operation in the show, rapidly printing a hand to fake a biometric scan, isn’t plausible.
27:00 Some gratuitous rooftop Irma Vep parkour here.
28:14 The logo for the “New York Department of Water and Power” looks like the Twitch logo?
38:20 Anthora, drink.