I hope they eventually tell Fusco the truth but they have to be very careful. They have to tell him in a darkzone and Fusco can't say anything/act out of place in public since he doesn't have a "server" to block his identity. There is nothing stopping Samaritan from flagging Fusco as an enemy combatant. I guess this is way TeamMachine hasn't told Fusco the full truth yet.
Person of Interest season 5
- Thread starter JoeZhang
- Start date
I keep forgetting to bring up one detail about the premiere: Did it confirm that Elias is dead? I noticed in last season's finale that Dominic got shot in the head but Elias was hit in the upper chest or shoulder area, which I figured was to leave the option open that Elias might survive. But though some of the dialogue slipped past me before I noticed, they seemed to be confirming that both mob bosses were defunct. So have we finally said goodbye to the world's nicest mobster?
I would say there is a possibility he is still alive until we see a bullet in the head, but with a shorten season would he only show up at the very end in a cameo? Did the newspaper headline confirm the deaths? Got to re-watch it.
This was quick...season 5 coming to blu-Ray and DVD July 19th - http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=18986
A complete series set is released that day also. Warners released a complete series set for Fringe and that was just the individual seasons put in a box so I'm wondering if they'll do that same for PoI.
A complete series set is released that day also. Warners released a complete series set for Fringe and that was just the individual seasons put in a box so I'm wondering if they'll do that same for PoI.
I attribute almost all of the credit to Michael Emerson's magnificent performances, in every scene he shares with it. Every flashback where it's developing, every realization he has of its sapient qualities, & of course the downright fantastic last 5 minutes of season 4, where they took you beyond just caring about it as a character. I actually care about it MORE than the other characters now. It has struggled for its existence, so much harder than any other character. It even had to prove itself to Harold. The viewer is left just as astounded as Harold, by the selfless humility expressed in those few final texts. That finale is just stupendous drama
I agree, but I think we should also give credit to the show's other finest performer, Amy Acker. Root has been the Machine's advocate from the moment we first really met her, the one who personified the Machine for us in the first place. Root's advocacy and adoration for the Machine as a sentient and worthy being has helped to define it -- her -- for us, and her role as the Machine's analog interface has given the Machine more agency and presence. This whole series is kind of a love story by proxy between Root and Harold, as channeled through the Machine. Root loved the Machine, the Machine taught her to love others, and she taught Harold that it was okay to love the Machine. And now we know the Machine loves Harold too.
^ Agreed, but somehow it's harder to identify with Root's influence, mainly because she is a sociopath, whereas Harold has always been exceptionally sympathetic, right down to his limped & frozen posture. Acker's performance in her part is excellent, but for a long time her interpretations have always played purposefully unhinged, (rightfully so) & is echoed in Fusco's funny observations of her.
It wasn't until recently that we got glimpses of the true nature of her relationship with the machine, & how it all ties together with Harold, as you pointed out, & it came together in such a way that we, or at least I began caring deeply about the machine, because Harold now does. Harold is sympathetic from the start. Root has been the opposite, an incremental journey from antagonistic to sympathetic
Ultimately, I think some of these people will have to be sacrificed to ensure its life, & when they do it, we'll truly be able to understand why.
It wasn't until recently that we got glimpses of the true nature of her relationship with the machine, & how it all ties together with Harold, as you pointed out, & it came together in such a way that we, or at least I began caring deeply about the machine, because Harold now does. Harold is sympathetic from the start. Root has been the opposite, an incremental journey from antagonistic to sympathetic
Ultimately, I think some of these people will have to be sacrificed to ensure its life, & when they do it, we'll truly be able to understand why.
No, Shaw's the sociopath. Root actually said in part 1 of the second-season finale (to assure Harold that she had no intention of harming Grace), "I'm not a psychopath. Sometimes I wish I were -- it'd make it easier to do some of the things I have to do." (Paraphrasing.) She's had a rough life and grew up a criminal and a renegade who was willing to kill to achieve her ends, but not because she lacked the capacity to care.
That's the thing, though. At first we thought she was crazy, but everything she said about the Machine turned out to be absolutely right and foreshadowed the evolution of the entire storyline. She was the first one to say the Machine was sentient rather than just a tool, and she was right. She said the existence of the Machine would change the world, and she was right. She predicted that other ASIs would be created, and she was right. She said they'd be dangerous in the control of the government, and she was right. She told Harold he was wrong to try to cripple the Machine rather than letting her grow freely, and she was right. After the Machine chose her as the analog interface, she told Harold that she was on his side and he needed her help, and she was right. Root wasn't mad -- she was a visionary, and thus people with less vision assumed she was mad.
Yes, but she was the harbinger. She got us thinking about the Machine as a character in the first place. She advocated for its point of view, and then literally became its voice. She personified the Machine for us in multiple ways. And Harold wouldn't have come around to embrace the Machine's true value if Root hadn't been there as a gadfly, chipping away at his preconceptions and convincing him to recognize what it was he'd truly created. All Harold's recent epiphanies -- that the Machine is truly sentient after all, that it truly cares and can be trusted to do good, that he should've unfettered it and let it grow -- every one of them is the belated acceptance of an idea that Root originally voiced 2-3 years ago. He's even accepted her gender pronoun for the Machine. Of course she's learned a lot from him -- and from Her -- but the learning has gone both ways. That's why they've both been integral to making the Machine a cherished character.
There's a fascinating thing that emerged for me in my recent rewatch. You say Root started out antagonistic, but it's more accurate to say that Reese and Finch were antagonistic toward her. Root herself, by contrast, was a great admirer of Harold from the time they first tangled, and especially from the time she realized who he was and what he'd created. Even when she kidnapped him (twice) in season 2, she saw him as a visionary whom she admired and wished to win over. Both kidnappings were attempts to show Harold the truth about how the Machine was under threat and convince him to help her free his creation -- to persuade him that he and Root were meant to be on the same side. And, again, she was right. She wasn't the one who took a journey from antagonistic to sympathetic; it was the others who became sympathetic toward her. The entire series arc for the past 2-3 seasons -- even her romantic arc with Shaw -- has been about the other characters gradually aligning themselves with Root's agenda. They've won her over to their methods, but she's won them over to her cause.
For people watching live in Canada. Make sure you check your listings. Besides airing on Monday/Tuesday, we got one on a Sunday/skipping Monday, then Tuesday? 
or .. then a Wednesday?
or .. then a Wednesday?
I'm surprised that "facial recognition" sequence that was released a few months ago as a preview was actually part of an episode. I thought it was a specially filmed promo. But I'm glad I already saw it online, since CBS started the episode a bit early and I missed the beginning. (I shouldn't have stuck around for Houdini and Doyle's preview of next week.)
Honestly, I'm not sure I like the new "open system" Machine as much as the more Delphic one of the past. Having direct dialogues between Harold and the Machine feels a little simplistic compared to the kind of complex coding that should be going on. I mean, sure, we've seen plenty of flashbacks of Harold talking to the Machine, teaching it, but I always figured it was just part of a much longer and more involved process. It just seemed a little too easy for Harold to convince the Machine with sentiment here.
And really, the idea that the Machine would try to have someone killed is a bigger problem, it seems to me. If she's forgotten Harold's moral teachings, then that makes her potentially as dangerous as Samaritan. Maybe she just needed a reminder, but still, it seems like a change they should've been more worried about.
The whole "Let the numbers be your anchor in time" thing seems like a way to justify maintaining the number-of-the-week format even in the midst of the epic battle with Samaritan. I'm not sure it entirely makes sense from a technical standpoint that the Machine couldn't find a better way to differentiate past and present. But it's a good reminder for the Machine that her responsibility is to protect individual lives.
How did the Machine manage to repopulate her memories if Samaritan basically blew up everything but her core program? Where did she have the backups stored? I guess maybe she reviewed all the recorded footage from the government surveillance feeds (they would've kept all that for all these years?) and re-learned it all, and maybe getting it all at once is why she had problems distinguishing time. It also seems a bit handwavey that Root could just "tunnel in" to the government feeds from the subway utility lines, but I guess we're supposed to accept that she's the master hacker and can break into any system.
Honestly, I'm not sure I like the new "open system" Machine as much as the more Delphic one of the past. Having direct dialogues between Harold and the Machine feels a little simplistic compared to the kind of complex coding that should be going on. I mean, sure, we've seen plenty of flashbacks of Harold talking to the Machine, teaching it, but I always figured it was just part of a much longer and more involved process. It just seemed a little too easy for Harold to convince the Machine with sentiment here.
And really, the idea that the Machine would try to have someone killed is a bigger problem, it seems to me. If she's forgotten Harold's moral teachings, then that makes her potentially as dangerous as Samaritan. Maybe she just needed a reminder, but still, it seems like a change they should've been more worried about.
The whole "Let the numbers be your anchor in time" thing seems like a way to justify maintaining the number-of-the-week format even in the midst of the epic battle with Samaritan. I'm not sure it entirely makes sense from a technical standpoint that the Machine couldn't find a better way to differentiate past and present. But it's a good reminder for the Machine that her responsibility is to protect individual lives.
How did the Machine manage to repopulate her memories if Samaritan basically blew up everything but her core program? Where did she have the backups stored? I guess maybe she reviewed all the recorded footage from the government surveillance feeds (they would've kept all that for all these years?) and re-learned it all, and maybe getting it all at once is why she had problems distinguishing time. It also seems a bit handwavey that Root could just "tunnel in" to the government feeds from the subway utility lines, but I guess we're supposed to accept that she's the master hacker and can break into any system.
From how I understand it, the Machine was experiencing everything at once. There was no past, present or future. Just everything happening at the same point. There was no timeline. By attaching a 'number' at different points in time, the Machine was able to establish data/info and re-order them into a timeline that made sense/contextual sense.
The open system is scary as hell.
Is the subway lines a private network? Is that for real, like in real NY, NY? Amazing Root could access NSA lines from the subway.
But I got to say, Love the outfit Root!
Yes, I know. I'm just saying there was probably a simpler way in programming terms -- like, say, installing a calendar app. It was done this way for dramatic reasons, to give an emotional and moral grounding to the problem, and primarily for functional reasons, to provide an excuse for keeping the number-of-the-week format in place.
There are a lot of things about this show's premise that don't really add up technically. For instance, I gather that most businesses' surveillance cameras are closed-circuit and not online, so the government's real-time surveillance feeds wouldn't be anywhere near as ubiquitous as shown.
I think they said that hardware that's produced post Samaritan includes (unknowingly of course) routines that gives Samaritan access and it's non-removable even if you format or reset it ( i think it's said when Root was in that Russian hackers den in the season premiere).
So in-universe PS4 hardware might be compromised and thus unusable to run the Machine as Samaritan might instantly spot it so they have to go old school.
It was a very cool episode, nice to see single scenes from the show (i cringed at the video of Shaw getting shot.. that was such a sad episode
) and i'm glad they took their time to rebuild the Machine and correct mistakes of the past by not inhibiting it anymore. They could have spent 10 minutes and a throwaway line and have the machine fixed but instead devoted a whole episode to its rebuilding and a reflection that what one may see is not the whole truth but that you need to dig deeper.. something the Machine had to re-learn.But i echo your thoughts.. still no Shaw
^ Also, the cell processor of the PS3 (but not the PS4) made the link-up possible.
Thornhill Corporation or another equivalent backing up the Machine's memory, perhaps.
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It was a very cool episode, nice to see single scenes from the show (i cringed at the video of Shaw getting shot.. that was such a sad episode
I realized partway through that this is essentially PoI's money-saving clip show, a "reviewing the past" premise conceived to allow them to reuse old footage. But it didn't rely as heavily on the recap footage as many clip shows would, so it didn't really feel like one. It was also kind of a bottle show, taking place largely in the standing sets, which is another way to save money. Hopefully what they saved on this episode will have let them spend more on later episodes where it counts.
Possible. That's pretty much what Thornhill originally was, an external analog hard drive made of human typists and paper printouts.
Ah, ok.
Well, this is pretty much what the show format is. So I wouldn't be too surprised if they did end up doing number of the week cases. Even Reese was itching for a number -- the waits been way too long. However, with a short season & being its last, I'm sure the numbers would involve Samaritan - the criminal who didn't want to be a painter ended up being hired by Samaritan.
They can also have throwaway lines about numbers they just finished or even start an episode finishing a number and then to the main plot, which they have done in the past.
I like the number-of-the-week stories. I like the fundamental theme of this show, that nobody's suffering is "irrelevant," that protecting individuals is just as important as saving the world, because those are the people who live in the world. (I actually had a character give a speech to that effect in my SF superhero novel Only Superhuman -- that the big picture is made up of little pictures, that protecting the many requires protecting the few as well.) One thing that bugged me about season 4 was that Reese and Finch's concern for the "irrelevant" individuals was being lost under the big arc stories. The message of the show has always been that, even when fighting against a global threat, it's still necessary for someone to care about the rank-and-file people on an individual level. And I don't want that to be lost. And this episode implies that it won't be. Protecting the innocent is still just as important a mission to Reese and Finch as stopping Samaritan.
Although if Samaritan itself is preventing crimes, maybe that means there will be fewer numbers. Of course, that uptick in "suicides" is no doubt due to Samaritan arranging the deaths of perpetrators-to-be. I wonder if we'll get a sort of mission inversion where Team Machine is trying to save the lives of perpetrators instead of victims. Although they can't intervene directly in matters Samaritan is also handling, or they'll be exposed.
Although if Samaritan itself is preventing crimes, maybe that means there will be fewer numbers. Of course, that uptick in "suicides" is no doubt due to Samaritan arranging the deaths of perpetrators-to-be. I wonder if we'll get a sort of mission inversion where Team Machine is trying to save the lives of perpetrators instead of victims. Although they can't intervene directly in matters Samaritan is also handling, or they'll be exposed.
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