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Notes for season 5 episode 10, “The Day the World Went Away“ 06:18 Sunita Mani briefly appears Sonum, I mostly know her as the hacker Trenton in Mr Robot. 07:12 Useful for the assassins to carry business cards with the company name “Temporary Resolutions” as quite the misdirection. Name aside, there’s something inherently suspicious about…

Notes for season 5 episode 9, “Sotto Voce“ 00:51 The absolutely weird colour grading tells us this is a US show portraying Mexico. 06:05 Reese places an Anthora on the table. 07:50 Another reference to “self-deleting text” messages, which appear to be a standard facility in this reality, rather than a feature of specific apps?…

Notes for season 5 episode 8, “Reassortment“ 13:30 A lockdown caused by a traveller from Hong Kong infected with a new influenza-like virus? In 2015 (the episode is set in Oct 2015, but aired in May 2016). 19:53 “Be sure to wash your hands often.” Are they doing a pandemic speed-run? How long before they’re…

Notes for season 5 episode 7, “QSO“ 04:38 Root used to be in cyber, but now she has retrained as a ballerina? I’ve never been backstage at a ballet, but do they usually have surveillance cameras in the changing rooms? Also, Root’s alias (Petrina Durov) is probably another gender-swapped tech reference – this time to…

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…