Notes for season 5 episode 11, “Synecdoche“
01:05 Root’s grave is marked as “050313”. A note on reddit suggests this it the date in mm/dd/yy that Root was nominated as the Machine’s analog interface. (Although this is the air date, and I think the episode was supposed to be set in April?)
09:30 The TV news talks about Alchementary (the business Logan Pierce left friendczar to start during season 2) not giving up data to the NSA, but while we’ve frequently seen friendczar on screen, we’ve seen nothing of Alchementary.
13:56 Shaw mentions she’s connected a Secret Service radio to “the mesh net”, but since this is Washington DC and not New York, I assume their devices form a small mesh – rather than the rooftop meshnet in New York.
21:57 Whoever made the phone for the waiter, shares the same FUI designer as Finch.
22:00 It looks like Shaw is stripping a hotel phone line to deliver an electric shock? Normal US phone lines are about 48V DC, i.e. the upper limit of “low voltage”, but I don’t know about hotel wiring.
27:00 The date of the gala was the fourth of November, so the conspirators chose the Fifth of November as the date to kill the head of state?
27:13 Palantir gets a namecheck as part of the “Surveillance Industrial Complex” for, I think, the first time – despite somehow feeling present in every episode.
30:00 Joey from season one reappears. The actor that plays Joey is married to Amy Acker – the voice of The Machine.
33:40 How the hell are machine guns on ground level hitting the low parts of the roof? Even if snipers on the other roof switched weapons they’d need to be at higher elevation.
35:00 Ah, they were going to put an end to the “monetisation of the American people” with one drone strike? So to be clear, the plan was to assassinate a president in a way that implicates the president’s own surveillance policies? So, it’s the equivalent of: if someone shot an anti gun-control president, everyone would become pro gun-control? I question this groups Theory of Change.
37:58 Finch addresses The Machine via an AXIS 210 Network Camera.
38:00 While we assume ICE-9 is a Vonnegut reference, let’s also consider the possibility that the show takes place in the same universe as 2003 Pacino movie “The Recruit” (which also used the name for a computer virus).
39:59 We get to see Dark Finch – using people’s personal information to manipulate them in the same way that Samaritan operatives do.
41:20 Having The Machine working with a second team in a different city (Joey, Logan, Harper) certainly goes some way to answering the question of why almost everyone whose life needs saving lives in or near New York.