Notes for season 4 episode 13, “MIA“
01:06 Finch mentions that when communicating beyond the bounds of the “Five Boroughs” mesh-net they have to speak with discretion – which suggests they’re talking in the clear, rather than using an app with an encryption layer?
03:30 Anthora coffee cup in shot.
04:11 Dani Silva returns, in what we might assume is as a trial run as a series regular if Shaw doesn’t return.
6:00 The Maple police department has a Dell 2009W monitor.
13:18 Finch is accessing the “Gang Portal” website, featuring a heatmap of gang activity in New York. We presume this is an NYPD system, rather than a niche service for gangs. He then accesses “LinkedWeb”, and LinkedIn analog. Finch states “the restaurant employs one waiter with gang connections”, and there’s a brief second when I assumed the guy had listed gang membership on this LinkedIn page?
19:20 Fusco namechecks real-world website Craigslist, when speculating how someone becomes a contract killer.
26:00 The Carrow CEO reveals that she too is just a gig economy drone, under threat of death, picking up and moving things as directed by email, with no real knowledge of what the company does. “Even if she was just following orders, she’s responsible” fumes Reece. It’s an interesting point about an individual’s culpability for mandatory participation – as employees, citizens, consumers – in systems for which they have no effective control. This point is massively undercut by being expressed by a former professional killer, aided by another former professional killer, in search of a third former professional killer.
26:57 “The blond woman told me, a few must be displaced so that the majority may thrive – everyone rewarded to their abilities” Mashing utilitarianism with a slogan of socialism, it sounds like Samaritan has gone full Jeremy Bentham in its governance plan. Feels like there are themes here that get picked up later in Westworld – especially in season 3. We presume the “blond woman” was Rousseau, and I now wonder if her name was intended as a reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
27:23 Finch determines that Samaritan is using the town in order to perform psychological experiments on humans in order to better understand human nature. I suspect this episode was inspired by the 2014 revelations about Facebook secretly performing psychological experiments on its users.
30:39 We see the labels for packages from Carrow. They have a bunch of numbers on them, but nothing is specified as “SSCC” (Serial Shipping Container Code) the minimum requirement for a standard US shipping label.
31:00 The transponders Carrow are making are essentially a sci-fi version of Apple’s AirTags. Almost mundane now, but sinister in the context of total AI surveillance.
34:40 Carrow’s secret research project is revealed as an implantable neuro-interface – ostensibly to control seizures, but probably just as an extension of Samaritan’s studies of humans. Brain Computer Interfaces have been around for decades, both as subject of research and as a standard of cyberpunk fiction. Triggered by the DARPA BRAIN initiative in 2013, there has been an significant amount of research on these devices in the past decade.
39:40 Samaritan-front Carrow abandons the town of Maple. Perhaps foreshadowed by its name, which means “itinerant gambler”.