This episode begins with a direct carry-through from the previous ones exact ending – we see the trouble that the bureau are in – The only thing that they can link Kaczynski to the Unabomber is language, linguistic analysis [forensic linguistics] but at this period of time, there is no precedent for getting a warrant or continuing to arrest someone with only linguistics to go off of. Shit hits the fan in an impressively terrible way – leading to the next wake-up call of living in the 90s was. If the media [newspapers, magazines, news, radio] got hold of information about an ongoing case, they were under no legal hold to no publish the information – regardless of the fact that it could directly be responsible for breaking a huge and incredibly pivotal operation. Like this. The team – thinking they had months to figure out a way to undisputable link Kaczynsi as their prime suspect and get a valid warrant to get inside his cabin and arrest him. Their time-frame shrinks to 24 hours, or the media stations will all go forward and begin reporting.
GIF Source: Mia for The Game of Nerds
Fitz and his team drill through their possibilities and try to source a link… this ends up being a far bigger task than they’d have liked. But our boy-wonder eventually makes his way to it; Paragraph 185 – “cant eat your cake and have it too” – Fitz finds this in both the manifesto and one of Ted’s many letters to his brother. Responding to his colleague who comments that Ted wrote it wrong, twice. – “He wrote it right, twice. That’s actually the correct phrase, we stopped saying it that way 400 years ago but Kacsynki uses it correctly, all the rest of us say it wrong.” Smoking gun? CHECK. First part is done but it now has to be signed off by a judge – who actually gives one of the most interesting and tantalisingly relevant anecdote about his time in the war – and ties it in with what Fitz has been creating in analysing linguistics.
“You know, there’s really nothing here except language, I couldn’t find a single precedent for this kind of argument in all of western legal history. But then I remembered something – I was serving in the pacific, Okinawa. The Japanese would steal our passwords and then sneak across our lines at night. So our sentries started using passwords like ‘squirrel’ or ‘whirlwind’, reversed. I was 18 years old on sentry duty this pitch-black night. The password was ‘liberty’. Suddenly these dark shapes came moving toward me – no way to tell, G.I’s or Japanese. Until I heard the password come back; ‘Riberty’ and we open fire. The way that soldier talked, the way he used language, told us who he was. That’s not so different from what you did here, you’ve got your search warrant!”
GIF Source: Mia for The Game of Nerds
