Notes for season 3 episode 23, “Deus Ex Machina“
How did they get through two seasons without using Deus Ex Machina for a title?
01:39 “We’ve opened up these proceedings to observers around the world.” So presumably people around the world are watching, but few people in New York since… there’s a power cut, and people aren’t going to waste their remaining cell battery watching Court TV. Just another flaw in the Vigilance plan?
03:00 “No one seems to recognise the courthouse.” Which is fair, as it’s actually an old bank, 49 Chambers. The building was redeveloped after this was filmed, and the bank lobby is now an art space.
03:33 Root suggests that the Machine doesn’t know where Harold is, despite apparently being on live TV being seen by millions. Hmm.
05:17 While Vigilance had been described as a terrorist group through the season, they (and most of their actions) weren’t publicly known. They legitimise their actions as being a manifestation of the American Revolution, but Collier probably drops the rhetorical ball by executing someone, mid-testimony, during a Kangaroo Court. He’s arguably still “on brand” – prior to 1950, the American military could execute prisoners without trial.
06:09 Collier is tied up in an empty storage unit. Except for, of course, an ubiquitous Dell 2009W monitor.
09:49 “What machine?” a reminder that, even by the end of the third season, nobody has told Fusco about the Machine.
11:20 “Decima tags its people” with RFID chips. Despite being fascinated by the biohacking field, I’m glad that, even a decade later, injecting your staff with tracking chips still feels like a supervillain move.
13:44 The early Vigilance steals a 2012 Street View camera. At this point it would have been a Google-built camera, but (trivia point) when Street View launched the images were shot on film cameras created by IMC, a company co-founded by director James Cameron (early work included Titanic).
14:29 Collier’s mention of “Domain Awareness” means that the scene occurs after August 2012, when NYPD and Microsoft announced it.
16:36 We see the RFID reader in the Decima facility, looking like a toy Xenomorph head. The prop is actually a Honeywell Voyager Barcode Scanner (1200G-2USB-1) not an RFID reader. RFID and NFC readers don’t usually have tapered read points since they’re basically just a flat coil of wire.
22:50 So it turns out Vigilance had an FBI mole in it for years attempting to instigate bigger violent actions… which makes the twist at the end ironic.
23:42 The machine detects a “transmission anomaly” in a satellite modem, presumably using the broadcast the trial. The modem is a Rylatech model – the company from the previous season whose equipment was removed when it was found to be collaborating with Chinese government espionage. Hmm.
24:58 The high-ceilinged data centre housing Samaritan has “warehouse from the end of Raiders” vibes.
27:00 Collier accuses Finch of building a “Weapon of Mass Surveillance”. In Finch’s defence, the surveillance itself was already in place – he just developed a new way of analysing it.
31:50 Greer changes a line from Hamlet to describe the Machine, “In apprehension, how like a God”, and predicts a Pantheon of God-like AI in twenty years time. Setting a calendar reminder for 15 April, 2034.
33:00 Greer reveals that Decima created Vigilance as group to frame for the terrorist atrocity used to justify the activation of Samaritan. Which seems like a lot of risk, and planning, when they could just frame an extant terrorist group? I guess they just needed something that would directly threaten the operators of any existing surveillance system?
37:54 We see a CCTV view through the lens of Samaritan, but then we see the fixed-camera image rotating, using 3D volumetric reconstruction in real-time. This is an indication that Samaritan’s capacity far exceeds the Machine.
37:59 Trained during the Bush presidency, the activated Samaritan begins targeting DEVIANTS. We see the information box for a random citizen: “Diagnosis: Attention Deficit Disorder / Consumption of pornographic material / Illegal internet downloads / Anti-government statements / Multiple sexual-partners / Self-deleting texts“
At this point Samaritan feels like a manifestation of Liberal Hollywood’s nightmare that the country would put some some paternalistic force, heavily influenced by religious concepts of morality, into a position of unquestionable authority. We call this the Supreme Court.
39:31 Root has hidden the identities of seven people from Samaritan… but, spoiler, the three hackers who helped her aren’t actually seen again in subsequent seasons.
39:58 Props to Finch for being able to just securely wipe his computers and leave the hardware in place, prior to the arrival of an assault team, rather than (the usual) “wiring everything to explode”.
40:12 “Filed. Indexed. Numbered… you’re not a free man, you’re just a number.” Root does “The Prisoner” in reverse.
43:00 “We hope that you choke.” The season ends with “Exit Music (For a Film)”, Radiohead’s song with lyrics that imagine an alternate ending to Romeo and Juliet in which they escape their families.
And that’s season three. Only a season and a half to go, or just over 24 hours.