Notes for season 5, episode 13, “return 0“
08:26 Even with HR removed, it’s apparently not hard to find a bunch of cops at the precinct that would execute fellow officers for “a nice fat bonus”.
11:27 The music playing as Finch waits on the room is “Bunsen Burner” which previously appeared on the soundtrack of Ex Machina (2014).
14:02 “The suspense is killing me… in addition to the gunshot wound.”
15:27 We see the bulletproof briefcase containing a laptop and a small number of (RAM?) chips. This is apparently the Machine’s “core code”. Given Samaritan’s core code was under 800Gb, you’d assume that the Machine’s core could easily fit on a portable SSD the size of a pack of cards.
16:40 They need to break into the basement of the Federal Reserve building, which going by “Die Hard with a Vengance” isn’t actually that hard.
17:10 Reese mentions that the heart rate monitor paired with the bomb looks a lot like a Fitbit. (I think it’s a black “Fitbit Flex”.)
18:00 There’s a very brief suggestion that Samaritan has determined the location of the secret subway base from the recent travel patterns of Reese and Finch. It’s a little rushed, but it’s the final episode in a protracted season, so they did leap from A to C.
19:34 What the hell was the point of the whole Semtex plan? It didn’t even knock the Samaritan agents off their feet. They wasted seconds which they could have used to escape. AI, eh?
20:55 I get the aesthetics – but putting a mini server farm inside an underground bank vault is wildly impractical, not least from the issues with air conditioning. A sealed vault without adequate venting would get very hot, very quickly.
21:41 You’ve got to appreciate the sportsmanship of the armed guard that drops his gun and switches to melee when Reese’s bullets run out.
31:15 “None of these dishes are capable of transmitting to a Molniya orbit. This is the wrong building.” It’s the final episode, so no need to spend time explaining this sort of thing. Molniya orbits are highly elliptical, ie they aren’t geostationary. Which means that the ground transmitting end would need to be motorised to physically track the satellite.
32:37 Reese has to defend the laptop from incoming enemies until the upload reaches 100%, which feels like about 30% of Watch_Dogs missions.
36:18 The Machine leaves a final message in an analogue form on a Nagra III, bookending the use of vintage tech in the pilot (a Nagra E). It also, for me, evokes the look of The Conversation (1974).
37:40 The entire episode sets up the epic confrontation between computer gods… and you don’t actually get to see it? Certainly, it’s not clear at all what actually happened on the satellite itself. Finch ran billions of simulations where core versions The Machine and Samaritan competed in a constrained environment, and Samaritan wins every time. But my interpretation of what happened is that The Machine, knowing it couldn’t defeat Samaritan, instead sacrifices itself to merge its code into Samaritan, hoping that enough of its core would survive to influence its alignment.
It becomes clear now that the recorded message we hear at the beginning of the season, without context, is from The Machine to whatever entity survives to be downloaded from the satellite. A sort of initial seed for a fresh new AI.
38:49 We see Blackwell removing, from a wall safe, what looks to be tubes of bullion coins – the standard currency of the John Wick universe.
41:22 Core code is downloaded from the satellite into a desktop at the subway. The computer display aesthetics of the entity downloaded from the satellite have the white-on-black looks of The Machine. Since there’s no longer a carriage full of PlayStations, we presume it’s unable to operate at full capacity.
41:50 We see Finch approach Grace in Italy, but its reality feels ambiguous. Like Alfred catching sight of Bruce at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, it’s not clear if it’s just illustrating a wish. A final AI projection?
42:30 Shaw answers a ringing payphone, the same one from the Pilot, and glances at a surveillance camera. She smiles, perhaps a new machine had accessed The Machine’s message and adopted Root’s voice. The story isn’t completely over, but the series ends. June 2016.
A few months later Google would, at its new London office, demonstrate the neural network it had used to replace its existing Translate product. A few months later “Attention Is All You Need”, the Google research paper, would be published and introduce the transformer deep learning architecture, and a business model would soon follow.
Within a few short years, stories of ASI threats had gone from prescient to hackneyed. (Prescient? We had HAL in 1968 and AI villains seemingly every year since?)
There’s been no Shaw-focused spin-off, sadly (“neurodiverse bisexual female Knight Rider” seemed like an obvious Netflix pitch). Jonathan Nolan continued with some of the themes of the show, but projected further out, in Westworld (and The Peripheral).
AI-aside, the first (and only) season of Rabbit Hole exists in a similar stylistic space to Person of Interest, talking about modern technological issues while heavily alluding to 70s cinema.
It’s been an interesting rewatch. Certainly it’s cleansed my mental palette for thinking about some of the issues touched on (and AI is so hot right now) but also this regular marking of time has also helped me see how some things, including myself, have changed over the course of a year.
I’m even looking at buying a suit.