Person of Interest finale - spoilers

[ffutures]

The season finale of Person of Interest was possibly the grimmest cliff-hanger I've ever seen:

The final episode of Person of Interest left the USA in an interesting state; a "panopticon" society where every action is noted and acted upon, where people appear to be being arrested because of e.g. being "deviant" rather than because they've actually committed a crime. And where the Skynet-equivalent computer has just been told that it's giving the orders...

I think that this will end badly because the new computer doesn't have The Machine's experience and will make bad choices. I'm also guessing that The Machine still has a few tricks up its sleeve and back door access into the new computer. It'll be interesting to see where it goes.


Is it just me that thinks this series is currently the best SF on TV? Certainly a lot more believable and scary than e.g. HYDRA's subversion of SHIELD in Agents...

Comments?

Comments

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

One of things I'd be interested to see would be interaction between the Machine and Samaritan.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Definitely!

[liliaeth]

I don't know, maybe it's improved, but... I kinda lost interest in this show in s1 due to the acting. It just felt so ... lifeless, that I just couldn't get into it.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Once you accept that everyone in it is damaged to some extent their behaviour becomes a lot more interesting. Most of the main characters have no family, no friends, are assumed to be dead, and are to some extent on the run, at least one is insane (in my opinion) even if she's usually right, another is borderline insane though possibly recovering slowly. The slow reveal of Finch's and Reece's background has been extremely interesting.

[vitruvian23.livejournal.com]

I don't know that those deviants were being targeted for arrest, necessarily - observation and elimination by the new Northern Lights equivalent, perhaps, but arresting somebody and putting them on trial would require presenting evidence of some kind, and the surveillance is still supposed to be secret. There's also the factor that Decima gets everything first, so they can target individuals the government might not even see as a problem.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

You may be right - but wasn't one of the people arrested tagged with the "Deviant" label?

[vitruvian23.livejournal.com]

They haven't been entirely clear about what the feeds actually include, for that matter. Probably all the electronic communication the RL NSA etc. are collecting, certainly we see both Samaritan and the Machine have access to all public area and office building CCTV, but if the feeds are something Decima needs the government to turn on for Samaritan, is the government in PoI remotely hacking and turning on Web cameras on everybody's phones, laptops, etc.? Because if not, some of the coverage will be fairly limited.

Also, to the extent that the camera feeds involve facial recognition, I'm surprised that nobody who's aware of this has started distributing jewelry, etc., with IR-emitting diodes pointing up towards the face, to obscure faces from camera view.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

True, but there seems no good reason to assume they don't have most of The Machine's access, and some scenes in the previous episode strongly implied that the feeds give most of that coverage.

[jedibuttercup]

It certainly asks a lot of big questions in the guise of dramatic entertainment, rather than just being funny; I laugh a lot more at SHIELD but I don't take it nearly as seriously. And I know some people don't like POI because of how subdued the characters are - but I hate big drama anyway, I've really enjoyed the subtlety of the interactions. All the little things mean so much more, that way.

One thing I've wondered ... the narrative has kind of presented the idea that the Machine was setting them up to kill someone, and they didn't do it, and that was the tipping point, and now thousands of people who wouldn't otherwise have died have been killed. But if the Machine really is capable of higher intelligence, for example learning morality to go along with its observations and predictions, teaching it that preemptive killing is OK might have been an even worse thing to do. For all that Decima is practically worshiping Samaritan, the new A.I. is still bound in a lot of ways the Machine has already grown past; I think it *will* come down to the A.I.s interacting with each other next year, and it'll be fascinating to watch that play out. (If Samaritan can't be stopped, can it be convinced to turn against Decima?) The show felt a lot more intimate when it was just Reese and Finch running around alone (as well as a lot more accessible to the casual fanwriter) but it had to change and grow sometime, and the added texture and mythology in the last couple of seasons has kept me riveted.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think that Root is being a bad influence - I suspect that The Machine wouldn't have thought of that without her.