Person of Interest S04E10: "The Cold War"
While Season 4's recently dominating story of two criminal masterminds—Elias and Dominic—at war has the potential to bring a city to its knees, it's actually operating on a micro level compared to the oft-teased macro showdown between super A.I.s Samaritan and The Machine. Synthetic thinking machines with aspirations to become deities kicked off Person of Interest's winter trilogy (that's what I'm calling it) last night in grand fashion, highlighted by a sit-down between two characters, yes, characters, that we've been dying to see come face-to-face ever since they were introduced. And it felt a bit like Judgment Day.
Person of Interest has always handled its concept of artificial intelligence with real smarts, not only giving these sentient boxes rudimentary processes of thought, but also personalities. After all, personalities are merely the composite of our ideologies, upbringing, and experiences, and this show has clearly showed us that these A.I.s have had all of those.
One thing Samaritan has repeatedly exhibited is a sense of curiosity, which is a scary trait for an all-seeing entity. And with The Machine, Samaritan succumbed to its most base form of curiosity in order to better understand it (and because it has had a devil of a time finding The Machine so it can destroy her). So phase one of Samaritan's new plan was to get The Machine's attention in order to draw her out so they could have a pow-wow, and it did this by intercepting The Machine's irrelevant numbers and enacting its own method of taking care of them.
The first case was a great example of Samaritan's black-and-white mechanical personality; a woman who had the intention of killing her abusive husband had her dirty work done for her when Samaritan wifi-jacked the hubby's insulin reader, causing him to take a lethal dose of insulin and keel over. Problem solved! You can almost see Samaritan virtually patting itself on its cyber-back. Elsewhere around the city, anonymous email tips sent by Samaritan led to the lock-up of several underground criminals, sending New York City into a *gulp* state of peace and quiet. Cops were left with nothing to do but lick bits of crullers off their fingertips while doing paperwork.
Naturally, Team Machine was confused about this. Finch and his synth-phobia kicked into high gear, and he stood on a soap box 100 feet tall so he could admonish Samaritan for playing judge, jury, and executioner, and was careful to remind everyone that The Machine did the same back in Season 3 when it asked Finch to kill a senator who had the power to put Samaritan online. Shaw, who is practically half-robot herself, actually defended Samaritan's work, pointing to the harmony on the streets as proof that it isn't all bad. "The Cold War" was a series of these two-sided arguments acted out by its characters, officially putting to rest the subtlety the show used to play with when comparing its A.I.s to powerful gods. It was debate club, but because the topic was so fascinating, it muscled out the repetitive argument that Person of Interest has been engaging in for so long. However, I'd be lying if I said I didn't prefer the quieter and inferred debate over characters taking turns espousing the sides of the greater argument. But hey, they were literally watching two techno-gods go at it, so being on the nose made sense.
After Root denied Samaritan a meeting with The Machine, Samaritan enacted phase two by sending New York City into total fucking chaos. It released all the information on the poor saps who were in witness protection, turning the streets into a shooting gallery, and uncorked all sorts of sensitive information online, transforming temporary utopia into anarchy. It was the Sony hack on a larger scale, once again proving that the writers of Person of Interest are from the future and fool us into thinking they're so smart by inserting all there timely storylines (or, more likely, they're just really smart).
This was Samaritan flexing its muscles, and I'll be damned if this wasn't part of its plan all along. Some gods want to be respected, others want to be feared, and Samaritan screamed "BOO!" at the city by exhibiting its power. Of course, the people don't even know Samaritan exists, so the message was sent directly to Team Machine, forcing The Machine to agree to a sit down with Samaritan.
That led us to the episode's most interesting scene when The Machine's avatar Root met up with the Samaritan's avatar, who was a 10-year-old hacker prodigy. From a story standpoint, there are a lot of reasons why having a boy represent Samaritan works. For starters, Samaritan is a lot younger than The Machine, so yeah, a kid. But really, it all comes down to experience and development. Samaritan is still learning the way of the world, but has been uninhibited in its upbringing. Greer lives to serve Samaritan. That's going to raise a monster, and nothing is more monstrous than a pre-teen know-it-all. Samaritan is all id, like that boy from The Twilight Zone who took over the town with his mental powers. So having a boy works in that sense.
However, from a television perspective, it was a bit awkward. Creepy kids have been done to death on the screen to the point where we need a moratorium on it. There's something off-putting about seeing a child spout lines that are way beyond his or her reading level, and watching Gabriel engage in adult topics like theology dunked in a pool of technology wasn't the easiest thing to take in. He said, "This world is a cesspool of crime, corruption, and poverty," when he should have been talking about Pokemon. That, and the fact that these two were delivering lines like they were their own thoughts when in reality they were being fed what to say through earpieces. I guess I have a slight problem with this concept of "avatars" and how they're represented. It's interesting that this topic of free will repeatedly comes up, but these two are essentially puppets. But since I can't think of a better alternative for Samaritan's avatar or the concept itself, I'll shut up.
What the scene did do was further these two A.I.s as personalities and rivals. Samaritan's delusions of grandeur have placed it above mankind, and it's treating humans the same way I treat my Sims (I go full-on disaster movie as soon as I can). The Machine, on the other hand, wants to let mankind run itself, with only the occasional intervention to push it back on course. It's the "Is man inherently good or bad?" argument, with Samaritan pointing towards endless war and strife as reasons that man needs "a firm hand" to discipline it while The Machine stresses free will as the essence of humanity. Neither can exist without mankind, and they're both aware of that, but Samaritan is willing to tolerate mankind if it will just praise it like a god and respect its authoritah. Samaritan is also eager for The Machine to respect its holiness, promising The Machine that it will destroy her. The question is whether or not Team Machine will go down with her.
The two reached a stalemate, even though Samaritan clearly had the upper hand, so Samaritan decided to chuck a few gigantic lightning bolts by crashing the stock market in the closing moments of the episode because when all else fails, hit 'em in the wallet. Drunk on power and frustrated by The Machine, Samaritan is taking its tantrum global to beat people down until they have no choice but to submit. What a brat!
"The Cold War" also sprinkled in some flashbacks to Greer in 1973 when he was a dedicated MI6 agent rousting about London looking all dapper and Bond-like. But its main objective wasn't to show how he liked his martinis, it was to show how Greer ended up where he was today. Greer was clearly committed to the cause back then, but had his faith shaken when he found out that his boss was a double agent. It's a good way to place Greer into his shoes today. All Greer wants to do is serve a cause, preferably one that can't be tempted by the worst of human nature. And what's more impervious to temptation than an all-knowing machine? In addition to adding some '70s flavor, these flashbacks did a bang-up job of explaining how Greer ended up where he is today and why he's so unflinchingly devoted to Samaritan.
"The Cold War" started this trilogy off on a much grander scale than I thought it would. We're talking plummeting Apple stock and a chain reaction of exploding dominoes around the globe that Congress can't fix by writing a check to the big banks. But is it moving too fast? What will be left for it to rule over if it batters its potential followers into nothingness? There's no clear-cut path for the trilogy to take from here, which would normally raise alarms with me, but the uncertainty of its direction is actually working in its favor. If Samaritan wanted to get our attention, it did. It's just too bad we have to wait until January to see what comes next.
NOTES OF INTEREST
– Finally, furries can get in on this Root-Shaw sexual tension!
– It's amazing that Person of Interest can churn out an episode that's not really about Reese and Finch and still make it interesting. Such is the power of the complex universe the show has created.
– Shaw decided she couldn't stay underground any longer, putting everyone at risk. Naturally, Finch had a problem with this. But I have to wonder whether things are in such a bad state that Shaw is making the right decision as a last-ditch effort to help. It certainly raises the stakes for Team Machine, and as we've seen with previous Person of Interesttrilogies, that can lead to terrific television.
– Is it possible that the Samaritan story will be wrapped up by the end of this trilogy? Could that really happen so soon? I really like what Person of Interest has done in building up Samaritan, but if the show completes that arc in a satisfying way by the end of this trio of episodes, I'll be super impressed.
– Haha, Finch was SERIOUS about getting Shaw's sandwich order right, and I don't blame him.
– That scene in the church with the human centipede at gunpoint (Root with a gun to Lambert's head, Martine with a gun to Root's head, and Reese aiming his sniper rifle at Martine's head) was vintage Person of Interest. So, so good.