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 business cards in 2016 with no email address or website domain.
13:00 Finch realises that Samaritan’s surveillance of him is not just in the present, but stretches back into the past as far as digital storage exists. He went back to the place he had a first date, ten years to the day. Two things about this: 1) the final season takes place in 2015 but Finch doesn’t speak to Grace until January 2006 – so not ten years 2) the waitress in the place was still there, recognised him, and recalled his coffee order after ten years?! That’s as spooky as anything Samaritan is up to.
16:07 Root and Shaw are in the safehouse, and they hear the screeching of cars stopping outside, and Root goes to check. For some reason I’d always assumed that they were quite high up – the view from the window the first time we see the safehouse in a previous season gave that impression.
24:30 During a street shootout, Root flirts with Shaw by dropping some simulation theory over a Moby soundtrack. Which reminded me of my own college experience.
25:57 Blackwell, Samaritan’s leather-clan Barrista Ken, gets sinister Siri walking directions through his headphones. (Pedestrian navigation was an Apple Maps feature from 2013.)
27:30 Root talks about being watched over by a loving machine, calling to mind “a cybernetic forest, filled with pines and electronics“.
29:00 Root is allowed to have a moment of awesome, taking out the Samaritan cars. So she’s clearly not going to survive the episode.
34:50 The FBI agent is played by Geoff Pierson, who was a Senator (and President) in 24 – and going by his credits appears to be casting’s idea of what a general or senator would look like. But he only exists as a foil for Finch’s “I have played by the rules for so long…” monologue.
41:00 Finch receives a call from Root, at the same time Root is found in the morgue. Bookending Root’s frustration with Harold (in season 2) for denying the Machine a voice, the Machine has inherited Root’s.
42:57 Instead of playing the second half of NIN’s “The Day The Whole World Went Away” they revert back to the normal theme. Cowards. That is usually the track I request to be played by anyone showing off their new stereo equipment.