Category: Notes

Notes for season 1 episode 6 “The Fix” 16:53 “Interference suggests it was made on an old PCS cell network making the recording at least two years old.” It would actually have been more than three years old – this is referencing the shutdown of the 1G analog AMPS cell-phone network in the US between February and…

Notes for season 1 episode 5 “Judgement” 02:00 Finch is reading “It Can’t Happen Here” in 2011, several years before everyone started calling it prescient. 05:25 another iPhone interface on a not-very-iPhone bad guy phone – are they not allowed to use iPhones? 01:37 Finch “When you work for the government, access is not a problem.” 14:04…

Notes for season 1 episode 4 “Cure Te Ipsum” 01:30 The episode’s first “obsoleted thing” makes an appearance, the pager. (Broadcast pagers, rather than the local pagers you see in food courts, etc.) It’s plausible that hospital staff were using pagers in 2011 but they’re slowly on the way out.  Up to 2019 it was estimated that…

Notes for season 1 episode 3 “Mission Creep” 01:20 The show makes an early reference to something familiar, yet obsoleted by new communications technology, as Reese jokes about checking newspaper classifieds for a job. 04:20 Reese has replaced the unfashionable Jawbone-style headset from the first two episodes with more discreet earbud. 12:30 Carter again looks at a…

Notes for season 1 episode 2 “Ghosts” 02:30 A hitman takes instruction via a public payphone. Person of Interest loves New York payphones, reflecting both older technology and shared public infrastructure (like abandoned libraries, subways). In reality New York had started pulling out payphones in 2015 before the series had finished. The final one was removed in…

Notes for season 1 episode 1 “Pilot” 00:20 After a clean-shaven flashback, we meet Reece looking rough, sporting a hobo look that would probably cost about £600 to reproduce at All Saints. 00:30 It’s apt that we start with public transport. After I’d seen a couple of episodes, I started describing it to people as…

It is the Second World War. A British mathematician, Alan Turing, has designed a machine capable of decoding encrypted German radio transmissions. This creates a moral quandary. The intelligence from the decoded messages could be used to prevent future German attacks from succeeding, but to do so would risk exposing the machine, and jeopardise its…