Notes for season 4 episode 11, “If-Then-Else“
01:30 It’s 2015, cell phones are ubiquitous, and a crowd has gathered on the street to watch an LED stock market ticker.
06:20 What’s the timeline here? How recently did the market crash? The guy on the train apparently lost all his money, conceived of a revenge plan, built a suicide-vest, and then got on a subway train the same day? Was it spontaneous and he just happened to have a bomb already?
06:26 The first piece of tech on the stock exchange server level? A Dell 2009W monitor. (drink)
09:58 2003-flashback Finch communicates with his era-appropriate flip phone. Except the prop being used is a Samsung T139 – a phone released in 2010, several years after the original iPhone.
12:26 The wealth of the NYSE is such that they can apparently hang Degas sketches on server sub-levels.
15:01 Root shoots her way into the server room, and there are four people sitting behind four Dell 2009W monitors. Three immediately pick up guns and start firing. Initially I thought these were particularly jumpy NYSE sysadmins – but the machine identified the shooters with red reticules, suggesting they were probably Samaritan agents. So who’s the guy who shouts “don’t shoot” and runs away?
16:11 Harold gets fatally shot… so time reverses back to the shoot-out at the break room. On a long enough timeline every show does its “Run Lola Run”, but this one at least has a long-established conceit of a supercomputer running projections.
22:42 The motivation of the bomb-vest guy on the subway is that the market crash has prevented him from paying the large medical bills for his sick wife. So he’s decided to take revenge against a broker. There are maybe other parties more responsible for medical bankruptcies in the US, but I guess some of them are major advertisers on the TV networks that commission these shows.
24:31 We can see on the screen that the code being run is the example test for a bash vulnerability CVE-2014-6271 known as Shellshock.
31:59 “Unrelated attempt to deflect subtext.” the simplified simulation gives an opportunity to make the Root/Shaw dynamic clear.
34:53 “I don’t think anyone is worth more than anyone else” muses reclusive billionaire Finch in 2003.
42:16 Rewatching Shaw’s final scenes knowing that everything had to be shot in a way to hide the fact that the actress was visibly pregnant with twins. The familiar black clothing and an open jacket to break the belly’s silhouette.