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Person of Interest – The Fifth and Final Season |OT| "Thank you for creating me."

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Lonestar

I joined for Erin Brockovich discussion
Well, its possible that he got put into the Mexican Prison, via the "good detective Stills." But no confirmation on what really happened.
 

RS4-

Member
This Show

IJbngaq.jpg

Was gonna use one with him pitching, but eh. Might as well go with this.
 
Finally watched the premier, so damn good having this show back. It's easily the best show that no one watches.

Just wanna agree with everyone on the amazing job done with the machine, at this point it's an actual character that I really care for. Every interaction between her and Harold was heart breaking and thoroughly engaging.

It's so sad that this is ending, but at least they get to wrap it up. Can't wait for a complete blu ray set (if they do release one of course).
 

Lonestar

I joined for Erin Brockovich discussion
Comparison with the latest episode of Game of Thrones:

Person of Interest had the better resurrection scene of this week.
 
D

Deleted member 80556

Unconfirmed Member
Pretty cool detail I saw while rewatching the episode. While Samaritan is trying to identify Root, its going through her aliases, including Caroline Turing, which was the alias she used to trick John and Finch into rescuing her in Firewall.

Also, John seems to be changing his personality after Terra Incognita, or is it just me?
 
D

Deleted member 80556

Unconfirmed Member
In true POI form, they don't show how they got out of the firefight cliffhanger ending.

They don't even show when they split up!

Best left up to the imagination. They were pretty much up against an army. Plus, the intro of the episode (after Root's intro) is so damn good as it is.
 

Veelk

Banned
As much as I love the series, I can't get over how unconvincing the Samaritan bug is.

Why couldn't Samaritan manually track the Team from the first time? Why can't it create an algorithm that notifies it of any unidentifiable suspects when it shows up, since the Team and very few others would not be in it's massive data bases?Why can't it mark the faces it sees, despite being unidentifiable as themselves, with a special tag that designates them as the team?

I'm not going to be too hard on it, because it is an engine for good storylines. The team lives in a Samaritan's world while thriving within the cracks. That's a pretty good set up. And also, I guess the producers didn't want the premise to change TOO much, so they had to have the team seek out people of interest and help them out. Without that, any semblance of PoI as it was before would be gone. And, frankly, I can't think of an especially more convincing way to escape Samaritan's notice. Still, Samaritan's bug seems just so highly fixable.
 

MartyStu

Member
As much as I love the series, I can't get over how unconvincing the Samaritan bug is.

Why couldn't Samaritan manually track the Team from the first time? Why can't it create an algorithm that notifies it of any unidentifiable suspects when it shows up, since the Team and very few others would not be in it's massive data bases?Why can't it mark the faces it sees, despite being unidentifiable as themselves, with a special tag that designates them as the team?

I'm not going to be too hard on it, because it is an engine for good storylines. The team lives in a Samaritan's world while thriving within the cracks. That's a pretty good set up. And also, I guess the producers didn't want the premise to change TOO much, so they had to have the team seek out people of interest and help them out. Without that, any semblance of PoI as it was before would be gone. And, frankly, I can't think of an especially more convincing way to escape Samaritan's notice. Still, Samaritan's bug seems just so highly fixable.

It is not a bug though. It is a targeted set of implanted sub-directives that seem to affect Samaritan at a very low level.

Essentially, Samaritan knows of a blind spot, but the exact nature of said blind spot explicitly defies analysis.

That said, I do not completely disagree with you...
 

Veelk

Banned
It is not a bug though. It is a targeted set of implanted sub-directives that seem to affect Samaritan at a very low level.

Essentially, Samaritan knows of a blind spot, but the exact nature of said blind spot explicitly defies analysis.

That said, I do not completely disagree with you...

Oh, you know what I mean. It's a bug from Samaritan's perspective.

I think this episode shown it has been working on fixing the piece of code though. Maybe manually tracking the target is something it just was able to do for the first time, and now has been cycling through Root's identities. It still can't identify her, but it has some way of marking her.

It's just very obviously a narrative device of "the villain is not able to do this because if it could, the heroes would be fucked"

Still, to the shows credit, the fact that it is now fixing this means that there is a palpable tension rising. The team is no longer able to hide, so how they will resolve this is a question on everyone's minds.
 

MartyStu

Member
Speaking of things resolving themselves, are we in agreement that whatever Root and her hacker posse implanted into Samaritan almost certainly had an additional purpose?

I am assuming that it has a secondary directive to either allow the machine to take over Samaritan or modify it to come around to the machine's way of thinking.

Probably the harder Samaritan tries to excise the implanted directives, the faster it is suborned.
 

Veelk

Banned
*Shrug*

Definitely a possibility. If there was foreshadowing to this, I missed it, but it'd be a useful way out. Or better yet, just say that her code allows her a backdoor into Samaritan's brain. Saying that it had more functionality than Root disclosed might be a bit too much of a backtrack, but if they say that it can be repurposed in a way that Root hadn't envisioned until now (as she couldn't have predicted the machine becoming portable), I'd say that's fair game, because it doesn't give the Team an easy answer. The repurpose will still take work to, you know, work.

I don't know if that happens though. From the opening, it looks like the Team got, at best, a pyrrhic victory. "I don't know what victory means anymore" suggests the team didn't get what they wanted, just stopped Samaritan from getting what it wanted.
 
As much as I love the series, I can't get over how unconvincing the Samaritan bug is.

Why couldn't Samaritan manually track the Team from the first time? Why can't it create an algorithm that notifies it of any unidentifiable suspects when it shows up, since the Team and very few others would not be in it's massive data bases?Why can't it mark the faces it sees, despite being unidentifiable as themselves, with a special tag that designates them as the team?

I'm not going to be too hard on it, because it is an engine for good storylines. The team lives in a Samaritan's world while thriving within the cracks. That's a pretty good set up. And also, I guess the producers didn't want the premise to change TOO much, so they had to have the team seek out people of interest and help them out. Without that, any semblance of PoI as it was before would be gone. And, frankly, I can't think of an especially more convincing way to escape Samaritan's notice. Still, Samaritan's bug seems just so highly fixable.

From Samaritan's POV, it's hard to manually track something when you're completely unaware that you've been coded and modified to be blind to certain things. It's really only fixable when you're made aware of the error. That being said, IIRC, it wasn't until the conversation between Root and the avatar that Samaritan was made completely aware that it wasn't unable to process Samantha Groves' identity, even despite knowing it was her. It appears that it is slowly learning to apply markers to unidentified objects (such as when Root exposed her name, Samaritan immediately places a marker named "Root" on her image).
 

MartyStu

Member
*Shrug*

Definitely a possibility. If there was foreshadowing to this, I missed it, but it'd be a useful way out. Or better yet, just say that her code allows her a backdoor into Samaritan's brain. Saying that it had more functionality than Root disclosed might be a bit too much of a backtrack, but if they say that it can be repurposed in a way that Root hadn't envisioned until now (as she couldn't have predicted the machine becoming portable), I'd say that's fair game, because it doesn't give the Team an easy answer. The repurpose will still take work to, you know, work.

I don't know if that happens though. From the opening, it looks like the Team got, at best, a pyrrhic victory. "I don't know what victory means anymore" suggests the team didn't get what they wanted, just stopped Samaritan from getting what it wanted.


I fully expect the machine itself to 'die' by the time the series ends.

The question is if Samaritan makes it. And in what form.
 

AzureSky

Member
the computer stuff is hilarious, pure comedy. I dont know how they do it, i mean the ideas behind it are mostly plausible and interesting, but it looks like execution is done by people who think computers are magic. Combination of both is like a work of a mad genius.

Love it.
 

Patryn

Member
I fully expect the machine itself to 'die' by the time the series ends.

The question is if Samaritan makes it. And in what form.

I could definitely see a Neuromancer ending.

But my personal guess is that both AIs die, but the Machine creates its own child AI.
 
I don't know how this is going to end, but right now I'd bet on there still being at least one ASI in the world. I could see something completely different replacing what is in the show now, but at the same time, given the way the show works with the flashbacks and such (the Machine is the narrator of the show, recalling these events at some point in the future, if we go with that) I'd say the Machine has to survive in at least some capacity, or its "memories" do.

I like the idea above me that the Machine has a child. Perhaps Person of Interest, in the end, is a bedtime story for the baby Machine. :p

Why couldn't Samaritan manually track the Team from the first time? Why can't it create an algorithm that notifies it of any unidentifiable suspects when it shows up, since the Team and very few others would not be in it's massive data bases?Why can't it mark the faces it sees, despite being unidentifiable as themselves, with a special tag that designates them as the team?

The Team is in its databases, though. It knows the identity of every Machine asset. You see that in Samaritan's POV, including in the premiere when Reese walks back into the police station. It immediately identifies him as a deviant, but then receives "new information" leading to a "classification error" that resolves in the Riley identity.

I don't think there is anything more to those servers, either. The seven servers are designed to hide the team behind those new identities - they're hard coded, according to Root in the S3 finale - which is just the show's way of saying they're safe as long as they conform to those identities (because if they don't, then yes, Samaritan can flag them and track them as per its own programming).

I don't have a problem with the blind spot in and of itself because it has been applied consistently throughout the show. What did bother me was how easily those servers were installed, and how Samaritan still hasn't figured this out. I accepted it as a conceit for S4 because of the storytelling potential, it works for me, and I'd probably complain more but the Samaritan storyline is finally ending now and the show is ending so it's basically moot. We did still lose a team member in S4 and the show is more aggressively playing with the idea that these identities are not going to hold up, so I'm mostly feeling like the writers have handled it well enough (we'll see how S5 plays out, I guess).
 
OMG PS3 linux supercomputer cluster.
That's the most out there, accurate gaming information I've seen in any show/movie.
In addition it would also not have any Samaritan firmware.

Though one has to wonder why they would have hundreds of PS3fats in their warehouse :p
 

Doorman

Member
I suppose the one issue I still have left re: Samaritan and the "saved seven" is the fact that Samaritan has more resources at its disposal now than the Machine's ever had, and is blatantly aware that Root et al. has done something to throw it off of properly identifying them, but still hasn't conceived of any way to circumvent that and set itself back up in such a way that it can target them like it'd want to.

I mean, thinking about some of the tactics the Machine has proven capable of, it recognized the fact that its memories were being reset every day and devised an entire shell corporation around people typing up physical paper-copies of its data that it could read back and reincorporate, it's managed to completely physically relocate itself without either Finch or the US government realizing it, when backed into a corner it managed to remove itself from a singular physical location entirely and somehow moved its entire operation to work via old power lines with specialty boxes installed, and in the most dire of circumstances, super-condensed its core programming down enough to fit into a series of RAM chips stashed in a briefcase. The Machine has been finding ways to reinvent itself and overcome its own shortcomings in the past, why has Samaritan not found similar ways to adapt? Samaritan is the program with access to all the Government's information feeds, at this point it should have the capital to construct a duplicate of itself, import its core algorithms, and then double check the new system's identity database with its current one to root out any outliers. It's shown it can recognize and distribute photographs of "devaints," so why does it not simply retain an image of each Team Machine member and be constantly running facial recognition? That way it wouldn't be trying to seek out "Harold Finch," but rather anybody who matches Harold Finch's image. It knows that it cannot find the team through its own conventional searching functions, so come up with an unconventional way to do it.

And I suppose now that the OG Machine is essentially gone and we have the underground-formed PS3x300, I wonder...how is it supposed to regain access to the government's information network, without either the Government or Samaritan taking notice? Without the feeds, there's nothing to analyze, and no numbers to direct the team to. I worry that they're going to wind up just glossing over this part of it but if Samaritan is aware of all network activity, it'll notice a new Machine trying to access that much data.
 

Patryn

Member
I always took it that the block works two ways: It blocks the seven from identification as long as they play their role, and it blocks Samaritan being aware of the block. So it's functionally prevented from trying to undo the block by the block itself. So while it may register that it can't identify the seven, it's blocked from looking deeper into understanding WHY it's blocked. Similarly, because the block is a blind spot, it can't alert its agents to remove the block because Samaritan can't perceive the block and you can't tell people to get rid of something you don't realize exists.

There's also the fact that the block exists in one server in one server farm, of which they said Samaritan has dozens. It would be nigh impossible for Samaritan to likely isolate the single source of the block.
 
I suppose the one issue I still have left re: Samaritan and the "saved seven" is the fact that Samaritan has more resources at its disposal now than the Machine's ever had, and is blatantly aware that Root et al. has done something to throw it off of properly identifying them, but still hasn't conceived of any way to circumvent that and set itself back up in such a way that it can target them like it'd want to.

I mean, thinking about some of the tactics the Machine has proven capable of, it recognized the fact that its memories were being reset every day and devised an entire shell corporation around people typing up physical paper-copies of its data that it could read back and reincorporate, it's managed to completely physically relocate itself without either Finch or the US government realizing it, when backed into a corner it managed to remove itself from a singular physical location entirely and somehow moved its entire operation to work via old power lines with specialty boxes installed, and in the most dire of circumstances, super-condensed its core programming down enough to fit into a series of RAM chips stashed in a briefcase. The Machine has been finding ways to reinvent itself and overcome its own shortcomings in the past, why has Samaritan not found similar ways to adapt? Samaritan is the program with access to all the Government's information feeds, at this point it should have the capital to construct a duplicate of itself, import its core algorithms, and then double check the new system's identity database with its current one to root out any outliers. It's shown it can recognize and distribute photographs of "devaints," so why does it not simply retain an image of each Team Machine member and be constantly running facial recognition? That way it wouldn't be trying to seek out "Harold Finch," but rather anybody who matches Harold Finch's image. It knows that it cannot find the team through its own conventional searching functions, so come up with an unconventional way to do it.

Eh, the two scenarios you're comparing (the memory whipe and the blind-spot) aren't really the same thing. The memory whip was never hidden from the Machine, or implemented at a hardware level. The machine knew it had a 24-hour memory, and some point down the line figured out a work-around. But that could have been (and likely was) years for all we know.

Samaritan really has no idea what's going on with itself. It knows it can't find them, but it has literally no idea why. And since the blind-spot exists on both a hardware and software level, and was explicitly written to be hidden from itself, as far as Samaritan can tell everything seems fine on its own end. It has no reason to expect itself to be functioning improperly, so recreating itself is never thought of as a possible fix. The gang's disappearing act may be them hiding or straight up magic, but whatever it is, it doesn't know what. The reason why it doesn't retain photos of them to constantly use, is well, it is doing that. It just doesn't work, because that's the blind-spot in action. Every time it sees the team (outside of sort-of Root), the blind-spot high-jacks the recognition and sends Samaritan back to the false identity. Samaritan is completely incapable of matching them to their real identities, because it just sees "Oh, Det. Stills... Moving on." Wherever the gang exists, Samaritan is just seeing the false identity. Think of it like the digital version of those masks from Mission Impossible.

Eventually though, Samaritan is going to notice enough fuckery with that group of people that it will realize something is going on. Which probably will happen pretty soon.
 

Lonestar

I joined for Erin Brockovich discussion
Eh, the two scenarios you're comparing (the memory whipe and the blind-spot) aren't really the same thing. The memory whip was never hidden from the Machine, or implemented at a hardware level. The machine knew it had a 24-hour memory, and some point down the line figured out a work-around. But that could have been (and likely was) years for all we know.

Samaritan really has no idea what's going on with itself. It knows it can't find them, but it has literally no idea why. And since the blind-spot exists on both a hardware and software level, and was explicitly written to be hidden from itself, as far as Samaritan can tell everything seems fine on its own end. It has no reason to expect itself to be functioning improperly, so recreating itself is never thought of as a possible fix. The gang's disappearing act may be them hiding or straight up magic, but whatever it is, it doesn't know what. The reason why it doesn't retain photos of them to constantly use, is well, it is doing that. It just doesn't work, because that's the blind-spot in action. Every time it sees the team (outside of sort-of Root), the blind-spot high-jacks the recognition and sends Samaritan back to the false identity. Samaritan is completely incapable of matching them to their real identities, because it just sees "Oh, Det. Stills... Moving on." Wherever the gang exists, Samaritan is just seeing the false identity. Think of it like the digital version of those masks from Mission Impossible.

Eventually though, Samaritan is going to notice enough fuckery with that group of people that it will realize something is going on. Which probably will happen pretty soon.

We probably already saw what it'll eventually do. Just publically post their pictures under the pretense that they are fugitives/terrorists. Did it with Root on the Subway. It'll just let the populace become it's eyes, and there's no "easy" way to hide from that.
 

MartyStu

Member
I could definitely see a Neuromancer ending.

But my personal guess is that both AIs die, but the Machine creates its own child AI.

That also works.

Although, if we go with the assumption that this series is one about redemption (Root, Reese, Shaw, Fusco, Control) then I definitely see Samaritan being redeemed by the machine and/or the machine's death.

But yeah, I really like the idea of the machine creating its own successor.
 

jdstorm

Banned
It could just be a difference in the foundational Code. Not all humans have the same abilities so why would it be fair to assume that both Samaratin and The Machine are equal intelligences when their Code bases come from completely different minds. With the machine we have seen Finch nurture it and teach it. We've seen it learn to adapt and be flexible as it was designed to find Relevant and Irrelevant numbers. Samaratins brain seems to work quite differently. So it's reasonable to assume there is a blind spot within its code.
 

Sober

Member
Remember, we're getting double episodes for the next few weeks!

"SNAFU"

The Machine malfunctions during a reboot and supplies Finch and Root with the numbers of dozens of people not involved in any crimes; Finch and Root are locked out of the Machine as it identifies them as threats.
 
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