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?
09:50 So the bad guy in this episode is a call back to an unseen character from an episode that had aired more than two years previously. (Or, on my rewatch timeline, at the end of July.)
10:25 “I’ve managed to extract location data from the digital photo of Clara.” Finch is making this sound a little harder than just pulling the geotag out of the Exif attributes. We see the metadata on screen, and I was surprised to see “serial number” as a field. I don’t remember seeing this displayed for an image, but I’ve checked the spec (version 2.3 at the time this episode was made) and there are attributes for body serial number and lens serial number. I’m not a photographer, but do high-end replaceable lenses communicate their serial number (via something like RFID) the same way the replaceable heads on my electric toothbrush do?
14:45 “Everyone out, it’s a trap!” It was obviously a trap. The Voice would have known about Exif metadata. Most people (not working for Vice) had been aware of it for years. It’s almost odd that a messaging service that has a facility for “self-deleting” messages wouldn’t also include metadata sanitisation.
22:44 Is this the third time that the police station has been the site of an “Assault on Precinct 13” scenario?
29:10 “Open up, Amir.” shouts the gang-member. Mate, Amir is a murder suspect in a police holding cell. If he could open the door from the inside that would be quite the “design fail”.
29:30 “It’s just Chen” assures Fusco. I don’t know man, you already established the gang has a cop working with them, and Chen appears to be the only other cop in the building. My spider-sense would be tingling. It’s not like Fusco has a naive trust in other officers – he’s a former corrupt cop who worked to take down a network of corrupt cops.
33:00 Shaw’s back, but has been subjected to computer-based mental-manipulation for so long that she can no longer trust her own instincts. 2016.
42:24 After 99 episodes, Fusco finally gains his halo – the golden reticule of AI awareness. And there are now five silhouettes under the Queensboro Bridge, where Reece and Finch spoke in the first episode. And this is a bookend – the last episode of the “person” focused series, because all that remains is AI.