Notes for season 3 episode 19, “Most Likely To…“
01:56 Shaw gives the NYC taxi medallion number to Finch, who looks it up and retrieves the driver details. This isn’t quite right. The medallions are associated with the vehicles, not the drivers. There’s not a one-to-one relationship between drivers and cars, and there are many more taxi drivers than actual taxis. You can look up who owns the medallion, but it’s almost certainly going to be an investment company not a driver. There’s open data available for both medallions and drivers, but no way to link them together.
08:23 The PoI, Matthew Reed, is Nestor Carbonell – Richard Alpert in Lost, and the Mayor in the Nolan Batman movies. Everyone at the reunion is supposed to be 37/38, but Reed looks a bit older.
20:12 “I thought you were going to hack into OPM’s secure network.” “I did.” This episode is set March 28-30 2014. On 20 March 2014 the Office of Personnel Management was informed that its network had been breached. Which is probably the spookiest the show gets as far as the alignment between fiction and reality.
20:25 I assume the prop Finch is using for the handheld X-ray scanner is custom made based on portable dental X-Ray, but it has a similar usage profile to the MINI Z scanner used for customs and baggage scanning. There’s a bunch of handheld X-Ray scanners on Alibaba, but you can’t see them when using UK IP addresses due to regulatory issues.
25:00 Finally, the inevitable Grosse Point Blank duelling-assassins.
37:26 “I sympathise with your cause, just not with your methods.” I think it’s worth noting that while Vigilance is an armed group using violence, its actions to this point have been relatively precise, and not publicly known – i.e. not “terrorist” in the 20th Century understanding of the word – but this will change by the end of the season.
40:00 Around 10 months after the Snowden leaks, the world of Person of Interest gets a similar disclosure.
41:30 “Shut it down.” – given they don’t even know where The Machine is at this point, it’s not clear what is being asked for beyond just ignoring any new numbers. It’s implied that all the relevant numbers are now diverted to Root, like she’s reached that point in a video game when all the mission trees unlock.