Category: Notes

Notes for season 5 episode 6, “A More Perfect Union” 05:04 “Uncle Ralph’s” Irish passport gives his nationality as “Éireralpho” instead of Éireannach. The show then dips into national stereotypes to imply the real Ralph will be too drunk to attend a wedding. (It’s not that the Irish aren’t heavy drinkers, it’s that it’s statistically…

Notes for season 5 episode 5, “ShotSeeker“ 01:46 ShotSeeker, the city-wide network of microphones listening for gunshots (Acoustic Gunshot Detection) was previously mentioned in S4E10 by the name of a real-world provider “ShotSpotter”. 05:36 Finch refers to the room containing the laptop running a copy of Samaritan as being in a “Faraday Cage”. As I…

Notes for season 5 episode 4, “6741“ 01:14 While observing Shaw having a neural control chip implanted at the base of her skull, Lambert mentions that he’d gotten his German Shepherd chipped. It’s not clear if Lambert is ordinarily resident in the UK, but ID microchips for dogs became compulsory in the UK for pet…

Notes for season 5 episode 3, “Truth be told“ 09:12 So odd most of the high profile people’s phones in the show are vulnerable to “blue jacking” yet very occasionally someone will have protection installed. While I’d have hoped the bugs being exploited would have been addressed after being abused for at least five years,…

Notes for season 5 episode 2, “SNAFU“ 00:30 “I defragged the drives.” Defragmenting drives isn’t really something anyone has needed to do since 2012. A combination of smarter filesystems (and solid state storage) has mostly made storage management a background process. 01:00 The PS3-based Machine is having issues with facial recognition, which gives the actors…

Notes for season 5, episode 1, “BSOD“ Ok, final season. Samaritan has full access to the country’s digital infrastructure, has hundreds of human operatives, has wiped out most of the people who threaten to disrupts it, and can recognise (but not identify) Finch, Reese, and Root (as “enemy combatants”). The Machine only exists in a…

Notes for season 4 episode 22, “YHWH“ 01:00 “Utilities are yet to determine what is behind these power surges. Speculation ranges from aging infrastructure to Chinese hackers” Ah, the story of the last twenty years: We can’t tell the difference between the consequences of our own political decisions, or someone actively trying to harm us.…

Notes for season 4 episode 21, “Asylum” 00:01 “We are being watched”, the show reminds us. In theory, the effectiveness of the Panopticon is not in the observing, but the constant reminder of the potential of being observed. 01:59 We presume that ISA have the capacity, independent of Samaritan, to hack into moving vehicles and…

Notes for season 4 episode 20, “Terra Incognita“ 0:45 Flashback-Carter brings the Anthora cups. 11:10 In 2008 Carter picks up a jade puzzle ball at the crime scene, estimates its pawn value at “twenty grand”, and wonders why a violent home-invader didn’t take it. Puzzle balls are a series of balls, nested inside each other,…

Notes for season 4 episode 19, “Search and Destroy“ 04:04 Finch claims that “86% of networked devices” are using Castellum anti-virus. I’d be surprised if 86% of desktop/laptop devices have full file-scanning anti-virus running, let alone “networked devices” as a whole. The release of Microsoft Security Essentials (and later Windows Defender) as free products means…