Recap
In an office in Hong Kong, Demetri's mystery woman is watching
A Christmas Carol. Taped to her window are a series of clippings, notes, and photos, similar to Mark's Mosaic board. A photo of Demetri is presented with the note A561984 fastened beneath it. ..
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Episode Notes
Title: As revealed in the ep, the title is the serial number of Mark's gun.
Again, in this ep, the events in the show are slightly ahead of real time, as the events are implied to be much closer to Christmas than the air date in the USA or Australia, probably the week of or before Christmas.
Episode Quotes
Marshall Vogel: This is a sovereign territory of Communist China, that ours believe was responsible for the Blackout.
Demetri: I take it you're here to offer your help, is what you're saying.
Marshall Vogel: Go home, is what I'm saying.
Simon: You know they're going to crucify us?
Lloyd: What's a little mob to-do between friends?
Simon: I do not believe we caused the Blackout.
Stan: Well, you probably shouldn't have stood up in front of a crowd of reporters and said you did.
Stan: How about this? You come back tomorrow, I'll have something to show you, we make some progress. I'll see what I can do about an official role.
Simon: Because I do like you, Assistant Director Wedeck, I will accept your disingenuous offer.
Mark: The, uh, woman we're looking for, she has information we need. It's a matter of life and death.
Samad: I'm so sorry. I can't help you with that.
Mark: You have it backwards. If you can't help, you will be sorry.
Stan: We've given these to our top-level analysts. They haven't been able to tell us anything useful about them...
Simon: Well, it's a good thing I'm smarter than they are.
Simon: Hmmm. A techie, chess-playing, social misfit physicist. Well, that should narrow it down.
Nhadra Udaya: You shouldn't have come here.
Demetri: You called me, remember.
Nhadra Udaya: That was a mistake, clearly. You being here now, you've set things in motion that will end very badly for you.
Mark: Can we just skip all over the other histrionic action movie cliches, because I'm way too jetlagged to deal with any of that right now.
Janis: Do you remember that whole "not giving up thing" we were talking about earlier?
Bryce: Um-hum.
Janis: If I were to start trying now, what exactly should I be doing?
Bryce: First of all, this is for a pre-natal vitamin...
Janis: That's all great. I need something a little more basic. I'm actually going to be doing this alone. And the whole penis thing is kind of a problem for me, 'cause I don't like them.
Bryce: You're gay.
Janis: I'm super gay.
Bryce: Super gay.
Janis: Yeah.
Cultural References
Simon: I'm not going to let you drag me down into your spiral of shame just because you're playing
Mr. Mom.
Simon is referencing the title character in the 1983 movie
Mr. Mom, played by
Michael Keaton. Jack loses his job while his wife, who had been a stay-at-home mom, Caroline, finds professional work. At the beginning, he has no idea how to handle the household chores efficiently, and the term "Mr. Mom" has come to mean anyone who is dealing with the demands of being a male stay-at-home parent.
Demetri: You know, the
Batman TV show. She always played
Catwoman.
The late
Eartha Kitt was the third actress to play
Catwoman during the course of the 60s
Batman series.
Julie Newmar originated the role for the first two years of the series, and
Lee Meriwether took on the role for the feature movie in 1966. Kitt portrayed Catwoman for the series' third season. Despite Demetris' claim, Newmar, along with Michelle Pfeiffer from the second Tim Burton Batman movie, are the ones totally associated with the role. Kitt
did have a deep, gravelly voice similar to his caller, however.
Analysis
Lloyd: Have you heard of the '
Many Worlds Interpretation'?
Olivia: No.
Lloyd: It was coined by a physicist called
Hugh Everett in the fifties.
"Many Worlds" is a real concept in physics, and was indeed first advanced by
Hugh Everett in his 1957 Princeton PhD Thesis.
The wikipedia article is better suited to explain it, however, though somewhat technical.
Lloyd is wrong in terminology, however -- the concept was advanced by Everett, but the
term "Many Worlds" was
coined by Bruce DeWitt later in the 60s and 70s as DeWitt promoted the theory and brought it into the mainstream.
It is, as suggested by the episode, a mainstream interpretation of the implications of quantum mechanics. It's a bit technical, but the base idea is that all the different possibilities of the universe that occur -- every chance event's alternatives -- actually DOES occur and we only perceive one of the options. From that come a lot of sub-variants, but the base idea is that, for the Schrödinger's Cat paradox, both events DO occur -- the cat BOTH lives AND dies -- but we simply don't know
which universe we're viewing until we actually open the box and look. The viewer's act of viewing establishes the perceived result of the "dice roll". But, instead of it making those variations "not" happen (referred to as "waveform collapse"), all it does is connect your "current perception" to one of the outcomes. The other outcomes
still occur, just not on
your "timeline".
