Person of Interest: A House Divided
May 6, 2014 10:28 PM - Season 3, Episode 22 - Subscribe

Alliances and rivalries get reaccessed as the major factions make their move. This is the second to last episode of the season.

Team Root assembles! The Machine frets over its creator's fate while Finch and Greer debate the ethical implications of the Singularity. And while Decima makes its pitch for the Samaritan system to the government, Vigilance prepares to pass judgement.
posted by homunculus (18 comments total)
 


I hate to say it, but the last scene and the preview of next week looked pretty cheesy. The Vigilance plot line doesn't quite work for me, so I was hoping the finale would be more Samaritan v. Machine. The episodes about the evolution of The Machine are the ones I enjoy the most. We'll see.
posted by homunculus at 10:42 PM on May 6, 2014 [2 favorites]


At least this season seems like they're actually trying to move the plot forward. Last season seemed like cancellation fodder.
posted by blue_beetle at 5:26 AM on May 7, 2014


I was a little puzzled at some of the Greer lines as he seemed to be contradicting himself a fair bit:

Paraphrasing:

G: Surely you didn't think you would be the only one to create such a system?

G: But as the father of AI, you are the only one who could stop Samaritan. So once it goes online, you become irrelevant.


What? He's not the only creator, just the first, but somehow that gives him some power to stop Samaritan? And if so, why not kill him before Samaritan goes online when it is apparently more vulnerable, as opposed to after it is online, when Finch no longer matters? Anyways...sometimes the convoluted logic on the show bugs me.

I was hoping for a bit more of a debate between the two - Finch's rationale that a human always has to have final control on the decision, versus Greer's ideal of pure logic. Maybe that will be next week; but it seems glaringly obvious to me that a system based on pure logic will eventually be anti-human. Doesn't Finch have some touching speeches about how his system didn't really work until he taught it all humans were relevant? Samaritan just seems to see all people as potential threats.

Which feeds into the larger debate the show fuels about surveillance, the problems with it, and the uses of it. I find it fascinating that the show is capable of giving some air time to each side and presenting some understanding of the dilemmas around these questions.
posted by nubs at 6:57 AM on May 7, 2014


I liked that we got some Collier flashbacks, and I hope we get some more that show something about how Vigilance 'works' and came to exist. Because they're apparently very well-funded, well-trained, and incredibly well-informed, but they just seem to come out of nowhere, they've always felt a little like faceless "bad guys", just mooks for the good guys to whale on. It'd be good to give them a little more development, show where all that money and training and information comes from. OTOH I feel like the Collier flashbacks are setting up for a big reveal of who the real mastermind behind Vigilance actually is. (Possibly that'll be the season cliffhanger?) I'm not expecting it actually will be, but I wish it would be Elias...he was a great villain and I miss having him around.
posted by mstokes650 at 7:42 AM on May 7, 2014 [1 favorite]


Doesn't Finch have some touching speeches about how his system didn't really work until he taught it all humans were relevant?

Yeah, that was in the episode called Root Path. Here's the quote:
Root: [Regarding the machine] How badly did you have to break it to make it care about people so much?

Harold Finch: That didn't break it. It's what made it work. It was only after I taught the Machine that people mattered that it could begin to be able to help them. I'd like to do the same thing for you, if you'd let me.
posted by homunculus at 11:20 AM on May 7, 2014 [1 favorite]


Annalee Newitz's latest recap: On Person of Interest, the U.S. Government Gets What It Deserves
posted by homunculus at 6:52 PM on May 7, 2014


OTOH I feel like the Collier flashbacks are setting up for a big reveal of who the real mastermind behind Vigilance actually is.

My first suspicion was that it's The Machine, and that Vigilance is the result of a bug tracking program it's running to stop surveillance abuses. Newitz has the same suspicion in the recap I just posted.
posted by homunculus at 7:01 PM on May 7, 2014 [1 favorite]


pretty cheesy. The Vigilance plot line doesn't quite work for me

yeah, they aren't my favorite either. but for me at least, the collier flashbacks gave their extremism a little more context. i dug his last flashback scene with the new bureaucrat, he can be a little cartoony with the suave villain thing, but that scene was a good amount of anger and indignation and i'll-be-back. taps into that anti governmental abuse side of me and balanced out my usual feeling they're just crazy people who start shooting up high school reunions and everywhere.

yay all the root/shaw banter. i like how the show can mix up the tenseness of 3 black ops assassins squaring off in a hallway with the comedy of shaw getting interrupted by her favorite thorn in the side bringing the 'ole good news/bad news. the ensuing bickering with "george," her continuing issues with being in the driver's seat. i think i'm just inordinately fond of tough guys being sarcastic and competitive with each other. after awhile you can have a shootout showdown go only so many ways! usually it's shaw/reese, god only knows what would happen if these 3 had to pick chairs in a public place.

most adorable lines

reese: "greer has finch. he's the only thing we have to worry about."

shaw: "my friend is never wrong-- which is as annoying as that sounds."
posted by twist my arm at 11:38 AM on May 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


also the show page has carter on there. :(

*sniff* oh it's nothing. allergy season.
posted by twist my arm at 11:41 AM on May 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


Okay, I have a question for other PoI fans: what's up with the music?

I keep hearing songs used in the show that surprise me. I'm left wondering if maybe my musical tastes have become much more mainstream than I thought they were, or if the music supervisor just has unusually good taste (for a broad-appeal network TV show). I'd like to believe the latter, but fear the former.

Yeah, so, I compulsively compiled a list of songs from two different sources, searched for each song on YouTube, and created and annotated the playlist I link above just for this comment.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:16 PM on May 10, 2014 [3 favorites]


Yeah, they do use some good stuff, so it's at least partly the later. I particularly liked the way they used "Hurt" during the opening scene of the final HR episode (spoilers for S3, E10).

Yeah, so, I compulsively compiled a list of songs from two different sources, searched for each song on YouTube, and created and annotated the playlist I link above just for this comment.

Your commitment is a model to us all.
posted by homunculus at 4:18 PM on May 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


In the case of Hurt, they used the entire song, all three-and-a-half minutes of it. It seems like I noticed them doing that another time, too.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:25 PM on May 10, 2014


The use of "Future Starts Slow" by The Kills in the episode introducing Shaw was particularly memorable, imo.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:55 PM on May 15, 2014


The Kills are one of my favorite bands so that was definitely one of the times when I was like, wait, what? And I listen to Cat Power and UNKLE and Fever Ray, all of which have appeared more than once, I think.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:15 PM on May 15, 2014


Fever Ray was used memorably in season one of The Following, as well.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:36 PM on May 15, 2014


I'm working my way through this show's episodes, after having discovered it only recently, and I can't tell you how happy I am to have finally gotten to the point where there are FanFare discussions of the episodes.;-)
posted by orange swan at 9:02 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


so it turns out I had missed huge swaths of season 3, and only now have seen them and caught up - and working through 4 again now its on Netflix.

I'm really enjoying Odom's scene chewing as Collier, and the jockeying for position among the govvies.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:40 PM on December 30, 2015


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