Notes for Fringe season 1, episode 19, “The Road Not Taken“
02:59 The ZFT manifesto even has an english title printed now, “destruction through technological progress”
08:30 The saw Walter uses for the autopsy is a Stryker Cast Cutter 8380-210
10:34 Harris orders that that CEO of a major US defence contractor shouldn’t be investigated for criminal activity. So, very much the familiar archetype. Broyles and Dunham agree to ignore the wishes of the government and continue to investigate a powerful figure. It’s standard television stuff, but something that a few years later would be referred to as “the Deep State”.
11:24 “Looks like somebody could have flossed more.” I don’t like to think about people body-shaming the subjects of autopsies.
12:30 Astrid uses a flatbed scanner to take a partial dental image and somehow gets a match from the teeth database. Ignoring the image capture, the FBI does have a dental database in 2009, the National Dental Image/Information Repository (NDIR), but only for missing persons, not the population in general. In the timeline of the story, the victim would have been missing less than 24 hours.
17:46 The answerphone in Issac’s office is an AT&T 1739 Digital answering system
22:15 Not only is the conspiracy theorist identifying as Spock teasing Leonard Nimoy, the actor is Clint Howard who has appeared in Star Trek multiple times.
33:10 Peter’s turntable is a Numark TTXUSB
34:23 Peter’s secret project turns out to be a version of Project IRENE. But for some reason he’s using an electron microscope. Grooved on records can be seen by the naked eye, you don’t need an electron microscope, you just need a good camera.
35:12 Sound waves make tiny changes to the things they hit, so it’s notionally true that the walls of a room contain a record of every conversation, it’s just not practically useful. The idea you could replay the sound waves is nonsense.
37:30 “I guess we’re going in the old fashioned way” So, without a warrant?