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 a brief opportunity to ham it up in the other roles.
05:14 Wearing a balaclava, Reese looks like he’s cosplaying Spy from Team Fortress 2.
06:00 The props for “64 next-generation GPU blades” are four Dell M1000e 16-bay blade chassis.
12:49 The Machine is operating, and identifying threats, but lacks the deep context to know which ones are real or not. Which is, I suspect, how much of the technology looking for threats operate in the real world. Think “sentiment analysis” without the ability to recognise sarcasm.
13:00 The Machine starts blurring faces – reminiscent of the change made to Google Street View in 2008.
15:47 The machine has lost any concept of contiguous time, so labels all flashbacks as “Day ℝ”. We see Finch explaining the absolute boundaries of morality, the distinction between good and evil. From flashbacks in other episodes we can guess this is anywhere between mid-2002 and mid-2003. “Certain things in this life are evil, unforgivable. Murder, assault, sexual violence, torture.” The inclusion of torture is the illustrative one. It’s delivered with the confident moral-absolutism of post-9/11, pre-Iraq America. In 2004 America was told about the abuses of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and later the torture memos were leaked. The status of torture went, seemingly overnight, from an unquestionable evil (Japanese soldiers were executed after the Second World War for having used waterboarding) to a mere opinion of what is acceptable.
20:50 When Reese pulls out a photo of Gerald Mancini it looks a bit weird, like it’s been digitally composited in. Did they recast?
28:50 Despite a shoot-out on a New York street lasting for over two minutes, there’s no sense that the cops are on the way.
31:17 The classic “Access Denied” and terminal override sequences are of course rendered with OCR-A.
31:38 CCTV timestamp shows it’s been five minutes since the Chinatown shoot-out began, and still no cops.
33:00 “Everything was so clear then. We were waging the Grand Campaign. Good versus Evil. These days black and white just dissolve into grayscale.” On some level this episode is about the folly of trying to encode some universal morality in a fixed, machine processable, form. Of enforced “alignment”.
But this is the despair of a 2016’s Guantanamo America, seeing its own identity, and moral clarity, being eroding away. The situation, normalised, is all fucked up.
39:05 We see a CCTV show of Venice showing a 2am timestamp. It might well be 2am in New York, but it’s clearly daytime in Venice. I’d assumed the location/time-codes on the feeds were from the origin, and not applied by The Machine?