Person of Interest season 5
- Thread starter JoeZhang
- Start date
Yay! Can't wait.
I will miss Finch & Reese.
I will miss Finch & Reese.
I guess the Machine's neat little lifeboat isn't as flawless as we thought. That's on Reese for smashing her around like that. I'm really feeling worried about her survival. I think the Machine is the character I've grown most attached to.
I'm also unexpectedly relieved to see that Bear is okay.
Really creepy how Samaritan can "activate" anyone just by sending disinformation to their phones.
A relief that Samaritan chose to handle Lionel with a carrot rather than a stick. And you can always tell when Samaritan is behind something, because its theme shows up in the music. I realized in my binge-rewatch how nonstop the music is on this show. It's pretty much wall-to-wall in a way that's unusual for live action (though normal for a lot of animation), and it's very leitmotif-driven, with character themes that consistently show up whenever a character or entity is active or being discussed. Though oddly, I haven't managed to pick up on a theme for Carter or Fusco.
Oh, no... And now it's on fire. This is downright Perils of Pauline at this point.
Aww... He called her "she"!
And the Machine is saved by... product placement? I dunno, I have a hard time believing that 30 Playstations could be as powerful as several train cars full of high-powered servers, even given Moore's Law. Maybe if they were networked to all the other Playstations in the world in a crowdsourced... somethingorother... that could work, but even what's in the briefcase is just the Machine's most basic programming. And how do they hook her back up to the surveillance feeds?
I'm also unexpectedly relieved to see that Bear is okay.
Really creepy how Samaritan can "activate" anyone just by sending disinformation to their phones.
A relief that Samaritan chose to handle Lionel with a carrot rather than a stick. And you can always tell when Samaritan is behind something, because its theme shows up in the music. I realized in my binge-rewatch how nonstop the music is on this show. It's pretty much wall-to-wall in a way that's unusual for live action (though normal for a lot of animation), and it's very leitmotif-driven, with character themes that consistently show up whenever a character or entity is active or being discussed. Though oddly, I haven't managed to pick up on a theme for Carter or Fusco.
Oh, no... And now it's on fire. This is downright Perils of Pauline at this point.
Aww... He called her "she"!
And the Machine is saved by... product placement? I dunno, I have a hard time believing that 30 Playstations could be as powerful as several train cars full of high-powered servers, even given Moore's Law. Maybe if they were networked to all the other Playstations in the world in a crowdsourced... somethingorother... that could work, but even what's in the briefcase is just the Machine's most basic programming. And how do they hook her back up to the surveillance feeds?
And a quick zap of nitrogen can permanently cool down the set-up. Then again, it was just the decompression process they had to deal with.
Because of the cell processor in the PlayStation 3, the Air Force was able to turn 1,760 of them into a supercomputer. They got the idea from a UMass-Dartmouth black hole physicist who made one to use for his research.
Product placement would've been to use the PlayStation 4, which 1) doesn't have that cell processor, and 2) since it's current gen would've been infected by Samaritan.
Yeah, it was running so hot because of the decompression. Presumably normal operations wouldn't be quite so intense.
Oh, I don't doubt it's theoretically doable, given how much power they put into gaming graphics and such. I just find it implausible that they could do it with so few of them. 30 is a lot less than 1,760. I'm thinking this has to be a stopgap until they can find a way to let the Machine grow back to her full size and function. I still see a cloud-based model as the way to go, although if she were just running on the Internet, then Samaritan could find and kill her again. Hmm... I wonder if "Thornhill" still has people putting up those boxes on the electrical lines. That's where the Machine was living until Samaritan forced her out of them, but she might've had a contingency plan, orders in place to have the power companies keep replacing the boxes, so that she'd have a place to go once she was restored.
You know, I've been thinking lately, both here and in the chess flashbacks in "If-Then-Else," that the recent flashbacks have been anthropomorphizing the Machine too much. After all, in earlier seasons, Harold was convinced the Machine was just, well, a machine and not a sentient mind, hence his skepticism toward Root's beliefs. But it occurred to me last night... maybe that's just what Harold convinced himself of so that he could live with the way he hobbled the Machine's mind. He couldn't live with the idea of having lobotomized a sentient mind, so he convinced himself it was just a malfunctioning program.
Still, in last night's flashback, the Machine seemed to have much more of a clear "voice" than it's had in other flashbacks, having conversations in complete sentences. At other times, it communicated more abstractly, just sending brief texts or instructions. But I checked the timeline of the flashbacks, and while it isn't 100 percent consistent, it does seem that most of the other flashbacks we've seen of the Machine communicating have been either several years earlier, before she'd developed so far, or several years later, after she'd been lobotomized. And this flashback was not long after the Machine set him up with Grace, so her greater solicitousness and interest in Harold's well-being is consistent.
You said 1,760 before.
No, I said the Air Force supercomputer was 1,760, and that they got their idea from the UMass-Darthmouth guy doing it first.
That low battery status -- one heck of a battery.
Man, those flashbacks are always awesome and enjoyable. I need to go find a video or wiki with them all lined up and stuff.
Man, those flashbacks are always awesome and enjoyable. I need to go find a video or wiki with them all lined up and stuff.
Yeah, but you didn't say how many consoles that guy used. I can't read your mind, just your words.
Yes I did -- 176... which you quoted your "You said 1,760 before" post. So you did read my words.
^The point is that you didn't say it in post #65, so I couldn't possibly have known it in post #66.
My only hesitation about that scene was the liquid nitrogen. Wouldn't that destroy the cables? If the cables crumble, then "she" can't access all of that power. Meh. Probably just a nitpick. I suppose it just needed to get cool enough for the last few seconds, just long enough for her to decompress and escape--which she did, I presume, since Reese got switched from "Combatant" to "Unknown" in the police station.
I really liked the flashbacks. It breaks my heart a little every time I since Finch with his former fiance. They were such a sweet couple. And I can NOT get enough of Finch and The Machine. Hell, I'd watch just that for an entire series.
I really liked the flashbacks. It breaks my heart a little every time I since Finch with his former fiance. They were such a sweet couple. And I can NOT get enough of Finch and The Machine. Hell, I'd watch just that for an entire series.
I was wondering why they didn't use PS4s.Because of the cell processor in the PlayStation 3, the Air Force was able to turn 1,760 of them into a supercomputer. They got the idea from a UMass-Dartmouth black hole physicist who made one to use for his research.
Product placement would've been to use the PlayStation 4, which 1) doesn't have that cell processor, and 2) since it's current gen would've been infected by Samaritan.
The flashback with Finch and The Machine was great.
It looks like we're starting to lead into Fuscio learning about The Machine and Samaritan.
I was a little disappointed we didn't get at least some kind of a hint about Shaw.
If they were immersed in the liquid, perhaps. But I assume the sprayed LN would have vaporized by the time it reached the cables and stuff, so it wouldn't be in contact long enough to freeze anything.
From what I can tell from a quick online search, copper wires immersed in LN would remain relatively flexible and would actually increase in conductivity. The rubber insulation on the wires might become brittle, though.
No, the Machine doesn't make that happen. That's the result of the hardwired program that Root and her team installed on the 7 Samaritan servers at the end of season 3. It's caused from within Samaritan itself without its knowledge. It works by overriding Samaritan's recognition protocols for Reese, Finch, Root, Shaw, and Root's three programmer friends, which is why there are seven servers, one for each of them. As we saw here, Samaritan was able to continue tracking the "enemy combatants" because its observation of them was ongoing, and it was using "manual tracking," i.e. sending live agents after them and tracking its agents as they tracked the targets. Even then, it still couldn't get facial recognition to work. Once it lost track of them on the cameras, it had to start from scratch, and so the recognition overrides built into its servers were able to kick in once again.
At this point, the Machine has no ability to control anything in the outside world. She exists only within those gaming consoles and Finch's computers in the subway station. She's not online yet -- probably not even fully conscious. What they saved in the briefcase wasn't her whole mind, just the core programming. So they may be somewhat starting from scratch. I'm not even sure this can be considered the same entity. The Machine is dead, and this new Machine might pretty much just be her clone. Or her daughter. At most, she's like Spock between The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home -- her katra's been put into a new body, but she's amnesiac and needs to be re-educated. So it'll be a while before she's really able to function again, and they'll still have to reconnect her somehow to all the surveillance and communication feeds she had access to before.
It's become the most poignant relationship on the show. I'm still a little teary-eyed that he finally called the Machine "she."
I think, if anything, it's actually easier in some ways to care about such an abstract character, since we can project whatever we want into the void. The Machine is a character defined by her actions rather than anything like appearance or mannerisms or the like -- and her actions have tended to be benevolent, with few exceptions (like trying to get them to kill the congressman -- assuming that really is what she intended). And she's defined by her effect on other people, like the way she taught Root to care about human life and even nudged Sameen to be a better person. So there's a lot to like.
Although a lot of the credit goes to Michael Emerson's amazingly poignant performance -- he basically acts for both of them in their scenes together. We care about the Machine because she embodies the best of Harold.
Incidentally, I noticed there was a bit of censorship in the episode. In the online trailer, there was a line where Fusco said that something had become a "nuclear fustercluck," a very funny euphemism in itself. But apparently even the euphemism was too much for the CBS censors, because it seems to have been redubbed as "a nuclear farkakte." Which not only doesn't make grammatical sense, because that's an adjective, but is still pretty scatological to anyone who knows Yiddish or German. (It basically means "full of crap.")
I just re watched the episode and counted the PS3s. There were two racks with four rows each and every row contained at least nine consoles (The left side of the back rack was a bit obscured). So that makes at least 72 consoles (minus the few that shorted out).
The nice thing about a cluster is that you can just keep adding new nodes to grow its computing power. The only limit is space, power and cooling.
The nice thing about a cluster is that you can just keep adding new nodes to grow its computing power. The only limit is space, power and cooling.
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