WhiteRabbitEXE
Member
Fuck guys... I haven't been this depressed about something being over since Lost 6 years ago. 
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Person of Interest The Fifth and Final Season |OT| "Thank you for creating me."
- Thread starter Sober
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MegaManTrigger
Banned
Definitely buying the 5-season box set when it comes one day. Or I might as well just buy the individual seasons in my local stores.
Fuck guys... I haven't been this depressed about something being over since Lost 6 years ago.
It's been a great week of TV, with this finale, and GOT's best 2 episodes yet.
But now there's nothing for a good long time. I personally have College Football in something like 60 days...Videogames will have to hold me over till then.
DarkJak101
Member
I am seriously going to miss this show...
The finale was incredible. I didn't get to watch the finale live, so when I saw the 10/10 IGN score a day later, I was super hyped to watch this episode and had high expectations. Needless to say, it surpassed all my expectations. Everything about this show was incredible, and I am sad to see it go.
Definitely need to pick up the Blu-ray box set and give this show a rewatch.
The finale was incredible. I didn't get to watch the finale live, so when I saw the 10/10 IGN score a day later, I was super hyped to watch this episode and had high expectations. Needless to say, it surpassed all my expectations. Everything about this show was incredible, and I am sad to see it go.
Definitely need to pick up the Blu-ray box set and give this show a rewatch.
My problem with Samaritin is that it was too OP compared to the Machine that Finch never wanted to "release" from it chains. It was a really painfull arc, people were dying because of Finch ethic and Samaritin having unlimited power and ressources.
So I'm part of people who prefered POI before Samaritin but I still watched because I like the show.
Razgriz-Specter
Member
The problem I had with Samaritan was that it never actually felt as smart as the machine and how they continued pushing it.
It never topped the machine seeing Finch by his reflection on the cake dish over someone's shoulder through a webcam to me.
Samaritan was better in the background as an ongoing plot,
Elias, Root, Control & Hersh, HR, Vigilance, Kara and Mark Snow heck even MI6 guy I found far more interesting.
D
Deleted member 80556
Unconfirmed Member
I think we could've had a more developed Samaritan if we would've had a longer season. Granted they had the previous season, but it seemed like they were kicking into gear the great filter storyline in this season.
Lord_Byron28
Member
Yeah I felt in S4 they dumbed down the capabilities of the two machines. There were a number of instances where Samaritan didn't catch something that The Machine in the past seasons would've quickly picked up on.
Why do all the good shows have to die. I turned more people onto this show than any other show out there. Putting on two people at a time, one friend having the blu ray the other the DVD, I can count off the top of my head at least 8 people I converted to team machine.
I'm bummed, hopefully it stays on Netflix for a long time.
Feels like just yesterday Reese was going to bury Fusco out in Oyster Bay
I'm bummed, hopefully it stays on Netflix for a long time.
Feels like just yesterday Reese was going to bury Fusco out in Oyster Bay
MegaManTrigger
Banned
The problem is that Finch is staring down Samaritan, who is pretty much what his Machine would be like if it was unhinged. He wasn't ready to give his AI more power, and it's understandable why given what he had to face when he programmed the Machine. I don't blame Finch for people dying, that's fully on Samaritan for extending its reach and killing people that didn't meet its agenda.
Which instances? Just curious.
funkystudent
Member
Finished.
This fucking show!
A shame its over because you can tell they rushed though the last few episodes and just crammed stuff in. The machine having other teams and root biting it felt like they needed to have had more room to breath and been great ideas for mid season two parters or something. Same with Fusco finally being let in on the secret. It happened but they never did anything with it.
They did ok with the half season but it could have been much more with another 8-10 episodes....
At least the show went out while it was good. Even though I felt the show lost something once it started with the Samaritan stuff. Would have loved a full S5 but I would have liked S5 to still be the end.
This fucking show!
A shame its over because you can tell they rushed though the last few episodes and just crammed stuff in. The machine having other teams and root biting it felt like they needed to have had more room to breath and been great ideas for mid season two parters or something. Same with Fusco finally being let in on the secret. It happened but they never did anything with it.
They did ok with the half season but it could have been much more with another 8-10 episodes....
At least the show went out while it was good. Even though I felt the show lost something once it started with the Samaritan stuff. Would have loved a full S5 but I would have liked S5 to still be the end.
WhiteRabbitEXE
Member
It was the Machine's copy. Samaritan is 100% gone.
Englebert3rd
Unconfirmed Member
I wonder what will happen to all the ex-Samaritan "employees" now. It could be a great S6 where a cult will emerge and the Machine is trying to remember/relearn itself.
You know, I'd be interested to hear what it actually means to 'kill' Samaritan. It'd be pretty plausible that it isn't as easy as it is to kill a human.
To kill an ASI physically would be to destroy it's drivers, processors, etc. However, to do this to a wired up ASI, you'd basically have to destory all the computer equipment it inhabits, something not possible.
Alternatively, you delete it's existence as a sentient file. But it's actually really difficult to delete things on a computer. Something can almost always be recovered, right?
The machine didn't physically destroy anything of Samaritan, so what did it actually do to cease the existence of Samaritan? While Samaritan as we know him is definitively gone, it seems like there would be remains of his existence that would definitely affect how the machine programs.
I wish I knew more about coding to understand how an ASI would work.
To kill an ASI physically would be to destroy it's drivers, processors, etc. However, to do this to a wired up ASI, you'd basically have to destory all the computer equipment it inhabits, something not possible.
Alternatively, you delete it's existence as a sentient file. But it's actually really difficult to delete things on a computer. Something can almost always be recovered, right?
The machine didn't physically destroy anything of Samaritan, so what did it actually do to cease the existence of Samaritan? While Samaritan as we know him is definitively gone, it seems like there would be remains of his existence that would definitely affect how the machine programs.
I wish I knew more about coding to understand how an ASI would work.
wow, Fringe, episodes with their daughter, that brings back memories
that last sequence with JC guarding the package was brutal
Englebert3rd
Unconfirmed Member
My assumption would be that the Machine code becomes like a virus and removes code/files off the other ASI and then changes itself back to its normal coding.
IGN's top 10 episodes of Person of Interest (with 1 Honorable Mention)
My Thoughts:
Not sure if I'd have 6741 on my list. I still have serious problems over real life simulation/VR working on anyone strapped to a table and not walking. Shoot was fine, but it started to become the main storyline of a show about ASI's. I also feel that keeping Shaw alive after If-Then-Else damages it enough to drop it a spot or 2. It was a perfect ending scene, but nullified by offscreen events. Always thought that If-Then-Else was going to be John's death, but changed by Sarah's departure, going by how little storyline they gave John afterwards.
But as is, Return 0 has yet to cause me not to tear up on multiple scenes. It's the music, the end, and it's the little things.
I think I'd rank my 10 like this:
1. Return 0 - Season 5
2. The Devil's Share - Season 3
3. If-Then-Else - Season 4
4. God Mode - Season 2
5. Deus Ex Machina - Season 3
6. Dead Reckoning - Season 2
7. Terra Incognita - Season 4
8. Zero Day - Season 2
9. Firewall - Season 1
10. Death Benefit - Season 3
HM's: Proteus - S2, Foe - S1, Mission Creep - S1, RAM - S3, / - S3, YHWH - S4, 90% of the rest of the show S1-5
List could change and move every day, except for probably the top 3.
HM - Witness - Season 1
10- RAM - Season 3
9 - Firewall - Season 1
8 - Relevance - Season 2
7 - The Crossing - Season 3
6 - The Day the World Went Away - Season 5
5 - Deus Ex Machina - Season 3
4 - 6741 - Season 5
3 - The Devil's Share - Season 3
2 - Return 0 - Season 5
1 - If-Then-Else - Season 4
10- RAM - Season 3
9 - Firewall - Season 1
8 - Relevance - Season 2
7 - The Crossing - Season 3
6 - The Day the World Went Away - Season 5
5 - Deus Ex Machina - Season 3
4 - 6741 - Season 5
3 - The Devil's Share - Season 3
2 - Return 0 - Season 5
1 - If-Then-Else - Season 4
My Thoughts:
Not sure if I'd have 6741 on my list. I still have serious problems over real life simulation/VR working on anyone strapped to a table and not walking. Shoot was fine, but it started to become the main storyline of a show about ASI's. I also feel that keeping Shaw alive after If-Then-Else damages it enough to drop it a spot or 2. It was a perfect ending scene, but nullified by offscreen events. Always thought that If-Then-Else was going to be John's death, but changed by Sarah's departure, going by how little storyline they gave John afterwards.
But as is, Return 0 has yet to cause me not to tear up on multiple scenes. It's the music, the end, and it's the little things.
I think I'd rank my 10 like this:
1. Return 0 - Season 5
2. The Devil's Share - Season 3
3. If-Then-Else - Season 4
4. God Mode - Season 2
5. Deus Ex Machina - Season 3
6. Dead Reckoning - Season 2
7. Terra Incognita - Season 4
8. Zero Day - Season 2
9. Firewall - Season 1
10. Death Benefit - Season 3
HM's: Proteus - S2, Foe - S1, Mission Creep - S1, RAM - S3, / - S3, YHWH - S4, 90% of the rest of the show S1-5
List could change and move every day, except for probably the top 3.
If it is any consolation, that would not help very much.
Something like Samaritan probably cannot truly be quarantined and destroyed once it has reached the heights seen in the series. It is inconceivable that something several orders of magnitude more intelligent than us would think so linearly about its survival as to not have built mechanisms to ensure its continued existence and possible propagation. No matter how dire the scenario.
A mild example would be the machine persisting its memories in season 2 (Zero Day). That was the best it could do while fettered. Unfettered, I am sure every single piece of networked electronic would eventually serve as it in some capacity.
The Machine pretty much has to be on Samaritan cleanup and duty for the remainder of its existence now. Kinda why it is so important to strangle competing AI in their cribs: after a point, they essentially become a permanent sap on resources--unless their creators pulled a Finch and tried to hobble them.
All that aside, the point may be moot because I am fairly confident that without the custom chips, Samaritan is pretty impotent. So until whatever proprietary feature they had became widely available, any backups or progeny--unless completely redesigned-- Samaritan has would most likely be dormant or vulnerable to the machine.
P.S. As an extreme aside, 'Zero Day' is interesting because of how stealthy its implausibilities are. The Memories that the machine has manually reentered are all base64 strings. The biggest problem with this is that just one wrong character renders the entire thing useless. So in order for the machine to make any use of that data, it either needs to correctly predict and account for every human fuck-up--a near impossibility--or have multiple mills process the same data and try to gain a consensus from the multiple versions. Either way, I imagine that whatever state it is recovering is always incomplete and garbled. Also, unlikely that this state can all be put in over the course of a single day unless it has mills all over the world.
Honestly, i think the best episode is S01E07 - Witness.
That's when you get that shit has just got real.
Not that the finales (God Mode > If-Then-Else > Return 0 > Firewall > Deus Ex Machina) don't have their punch, but the Elias presentation was too good.
I feel S3\4 are a bit too doom&gloom. You can only be an underdog at one step from total annihilation for so long.
Also as a coder, the eye rolling at anything involving hacking, "nuclear option virus" and samaritan in general was... uhm...
Not really, no.
Double parity bit should get it done properly. Although, it probably would've made sense to compress and decompress to words - errors are far less likely when you can perform a dictionary check.
That's when you get that shit has just got real.
Not that the finales (God Mode > If-Then-Else > Return 0 > Firewall > Deus Ex Machina) don't have their punch, but the Elias presentation was too good.
I feel S3\4 are a bit too doom&gloom. You can only be an underdog at one step from total annihilation for so long.
Also as a coder, the eye rolling at anything involving hacking, "nuclear option virus" and samaritan in general was... uhm...
Not really, no.
Double parity bit should get it done properly. Although, it probably would've made sense to compress and decompress to words - errors are far less likely when you can perform a dictionary check.
The point is not whether or not the errors can be detected, they obviously can. The problem is that unless the string is re-entered, that data is pretty much lost. To ensure QA, the machine would have to be pretty involved in the process to make sure that bad strings were re-entered correctly via some sort of feedback.
It is the last point that is important here. That entire operation was much too makeshift to have established the sort of back and forth required to ensure that the data was always good.
And yes, using actual words would have been much more conducive to manual re-entry, but I am assuming that it would have been a bridge too far.
Thinking of it, not sure why it couldn't have offloaded the data it wanted to keep to some other data storage, and just have hired employees upload it back after the midnight wipe.
The "typing it back in" was really more for dramatic effect. To pass Ernest Thornhill off as a person in the episode for longer.
The "typing it back in" was really more for dramatic effect. To pass Ernest Thornhill off as a person in the episode for longer.
Perhaps. But I think it was more of a very narrow technicality that it exploited.
I actually like it more when I consider how implausible it all is. It does a great job of showing the sheer desperation involved in the move.
I am sure that every day the machine loses a bit of its core memories due to human error.
Parity bits allow for data recovery. They're not MD5 checksums - implementing them for large amounts of data is pretty hard (and memory consuming, +12.5% for 1 error / word tolerance, +25% for 2) but to lose data past double bit parity is pretty unlikely.
For "Why don't you just use external HDDs, dummy" - Finch likely hardcoded that limitation in. The point was that it was a workaround on Finch's laws, contrary to the spirit but not the letter.
In a scenario where all the the data is properly purged(and aggressively zeroed) from all disks, memory and backups, all the machine has are the base64 strings that it needs to decode before it can use the resultant data. Ex:
Given this string: "This is the machines memory."
Base64 encode: "VGhpcyBpcyB0aGUgbWFjaGluZXMncyBtZW1vcnku"
Now a few minor mistakes: "VHhpXyBpcyB0aGVgBWFjagluZXMncBtZW1vCnku"
Your new (incomplete) decoded string: "Txi_ is the`acj nes'p[[K"
This is assuming that the machine at this point has no reference at all and is simple able to decode the data and tests its veracity. It has little recourse when it comes to fixing the bad data unless the situation is as I outline in the original post.
The state of the art in ECC coding has gone way past parity bits these days. I had to do a bunch of research for a work project, and these are among the current best we can do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-density_parity-check_code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_code
If we feeble minded humans can come up with these, I'm pretty sure a super intelligent AI can come up with an even more robust error correction code.
Any competent super intelligent AI is going to be able to estimate the error rate of people reading and typing its memories in, and then select a level of error correction that can detect and repair any corruptions introduced with an acceptable probability of unrecoverable corruption.
Regardless of how everything comes back together, the sheer desperation of it all is pretty stunning when it is completely considered.
I imagine it would terrifying to have a little bit of yourself slip away day after day.
The Day the World Went Away was on of the best things ever on television. Ever.
Dany, does the IGN list skip episodes? If it does I suggest not doing that. The small moments are what makes this show amazing and you may miss those.
It's here I realized I accidentally left it off. I think I'd put it at #6, and move things down.
IGN does have a good amount of skips. I'd at least include all "also recommended" episodes, but even then, they skip over the "pi" episode.
It skipped episodes 3-11 of season 2. I understand that, but the show is so incredibly procedural that I instantly tune that all out.
I just finished watching the last episode and cried.
Such a good show, thank you Gaf for telling me to power through the first season.
I feel like the season 4 drag it too much, Finch is too scared, Lionel is still in the dark, and I would have like that the Machine spoke earlier (tho I understand that it was a good choice to give her the voice of Root after she died) but I really liked the interaction that Finch had with the machine back in 2006 when he was just writing to speak to it so I would have loved to see it more.
But what im going to miss the most is Root... such an incredible character. Im already missing her.
Such a good show, thank you Gaf for telling me to power through the first season.
I feel like the season 4 drag it too much, Finch is too scared, Lionel is still in the dark, and I would have like that the Machine spoke earlier (tho I understand that it was a good choice to give her the voice of Root after she died) but I really liked the interaction that Finch had with the machine back in 2006 when he was just writing to speak to it so I would have loved to see it more.
But what im going to miss the most is Root... such an incredible character. Im already missing her.
Watching this. I'm getting around the middle point of S3. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckedyfuck. It's not that I didn't kind of see it coming
but one always hopes it doesn't end as badly as it's going to end.
Northern Europe is so far behind with this show, we are only getting the fourth season blu-ray next week. -_- I should try to watch this season slower but I can't help myself.
love confession + one of the biggest baddies disappearing in the chaos of a big showdown + a few death scares that turn out happily = Whedonverses have taught me nothing good comes out of such situation
Northern Europe is so far behind with this show, we are only getting the fourth season blu-ray next week. -_- I should try to watch this season slower but I can't help myself.
Finished S3. What a ride. Carter's death left a huge hole into the show and yet is kind of forgotten a few episodes later. How they handled those few episodes post-death was great (though the plane episode was a bit generic a way to getting Reese back to the job) and then it was pretty much done and things started escalating really quickly towards the Samaritan & Vigilance stuff without Carter really being in anyone's mind all that much anymore. Not sure if that is a good thing or bad. On one hand of course a show can't get too hung up on a character's death, on the other I felt POI got over Carter's death a bit too quickly. Almost feels like two separate seasons. One with HR being the main focus, the other that has all the Vigilance and Samaritan storylines.
Also, how in hell is Michael Emerson almost 62 years old? He looks under 50. Kevin Chapman looks 10+ years older than him, not the other way around...
Also, how in hell is Michael Emerson almost 62 years old? He looks under 50. Kevin Chapman looks 10+ years older than him, not the other way around...
D
Deleted member 80556
Unconfirmed Member
Carter's death is felt even through S4. Keep watching!
I will once I can get my hands on the S4 blu-ray. It'll actually only be released in Finland today, it seems. Can't afford it right away but I'll get it as soon as I can.
Hydrogen Bluebird
Member
I really miss POI even though I do feel that season 4 and 5 had some noticeable drops in quality. I also think the show deserved a better ending (
).
I've also been playing Watch Dogs lately, mainly for Watch Dogs 2, and I did my best Mr. Reese impersonation (just sharing in case anyone wants to watch).
not really sure how I feel about Root and Reese dying but oh well
I've also been playing Watch Dogs lately, mainly for Watch Dogs 2, and I did my best Mr. Reese impersonation (just sharing in case anyone wants to watch).
WrenchNinja
Member
Should have shot him in the knees
D
Deleted member 80556
Unconfirmed Member
I honestly tried to do this at the beginning in my playthrough, but it's just not fun. At least WD2 allows for more non-lethal options.
I also had very badly set expectations for the original game. Man, I really was expecting POI: The Game.
TheCowboyPoet
Member
I'm watching Person of Interest on Crave TV at the moment. I'm just near the end of season 1. Does this show pick up? It's been fine so far but nowhere near the hype.
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