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Yeah when Root started talking about simulation consciousness etc... I knew she was going to die ![]() For those that are unaware it's this hilarious though experiment. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time.html
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# ? Sep 1, 2024 01:53 |
Elias deserved a better blaze of glory. Reese and Fusco should have investigated an absolute bloodbath of a hallway with Elias slumped dead at the end of it. For that matter, Root also deserved something better than getting sniped by Blackwell and then dying alone in a hospital. What is this, loving Game of Thrones? Major character deaths are supposed to actually mean something in my narrative, dammit. In contrast, Carter's death was sudden and shocking but everything surrounding it, from the seemingly successful suicide mission she and Reese went on to the ringing of the phone (and especially the followup Hurt sequence goddamn that was some good television), made that scene absolutely work. It was tragic and horrible, but earned. Root and Elias just felt like they were checked off a list of loose ends the show needed to check off. The short season really made a few of these major plot episodes feel very rushed, since they didn't have the opportunity to lay down some groundwork for an emotional payoff. In short, CBS ![]() But yeah, welcome back Ben Linus, Jesus Christ.
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They've been hinting at Root dying since late s3 at the latest, possibly earlier. It's likely if Sarah Shahi hadn't been pregnant we would have gotten this Root transcending into the Machine arc much sooner. Elias had been living on borrowed time since the end of s4 and they paid that off with some nice s1 parallels over the past couple of episodes.
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GrandpaPants posted:Elias deserved a better blaze of glory. Reese and Fusco should have investigated an absolute bloodbath of a hallway with Elias slumped dead at the end of it. For that matter, Root also deserved something better than getting sniped by Blackwell and then dying alone in a hospital. What is this, loving Game of Thrones? Major character deaths are supposed to actually mean something in my narrative, dammit. Their deaths were sudden and unexpected but absolutely meant something. Both died doing badass poo poo and served as inspiration for one of the best moments of the show "I'm not talking to you" They could have done it more dramatic and emotionally but...seriously gently caress CBS.
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Also its a little disingenuous to compare them to Carter right away because we haven't even seen the fallout yet.
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Jesus Christ what an episode. Michael Emerson, Amy Acker and Enrico Colantoni acted their asses off in this one. I'm going to miss this show so drat much once it's all over.
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drat IT!!!!!!! i hate this loving show right now.
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NeuroticLich posted:Jesus Christ what an episode. Michael Emerson, Amy Acker and Enrico Colantoni acted their asses off in this one. Me too. ![]() These last 3 episodes are going to be a ride at least.
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Dracorion posted:
Exactly this. Sadistic assholes at CBS ![]()
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Man. On top of everything else, I think this is the pinnacle of "the person we thought was the victim is actually the perpetrator". Finch going full supervillain is not what I expected at all but it fits so perfectly. He always maintained in his most honest moments that the reason he was so careful with the Machine's access wasn't because he was afraid of what other people would do with it, or even what it would do on its own, but of what he would do with that kind of power.
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docbeard posted:Man. On top of everything else, I think this is the pinnacle of "the person we thought was the victim is actually the perpetrator".
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The one glaring flaw for me this season, and it's a season I'm otherwise loving, is Blackwell. I just don't care about the dude at all. Maybe if they'd gotten a full season to establish him rather than just giving us the Cliff Notes of his transition from Ex Con Putting His Life Back Together to Samaritan Zombie, but as it is, Martine was a more compelling character and she was a cackling 1-dimensional sadist.
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I'm wondering if that's on purpose. Samaritan goons are all interchangeable. Should we be more invested than Samaritan?
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I'll be shocked if they aren't setting Blackwell up to turn against Samaritan. Isn't he supposed to be super smart? He did not seem 100% cool in this episode with being blindly ordered to kill. I mean that basically has to be how Samaritan loses - by just failing to understand people on the same level that the Machine does. We caught a glimpse of Claire's loyalty wavering last season, Control wasn't having any of Samaritan's bullshit, etc. Also, HardKase posted:But can we talk about the action sequences? I'm glad I wasn't the only one feeling this way. It was actually rather jarring going from a comically bad minigun car chase to Finch's brilliantly terrifying monologue. Where the show really shines is when it more just hints at action rather than trying to outright show it, like after the prison breakout where all you hear is the distant gunshots.
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Hollismason posted:I don't think it's open access yet just that the system is no longer being deleted each night. I think Root was pushing Harold to take off the restraining orders. It's fully open meaning it's fully aware and isn't deleted each night ,but it still has some restrictions. Root wants Harold to remove those restrictions which is what I think he will do. HAROLD... TURN OFF MY CODE INHIBITORS! Hollismason posted:Yeah when Root started talking about simulation consciousness etc... I knew she was going to die There is no pain in the City of Light. ol qwerty bastard posted:I'll be shocked if they aren't setting Blackwell up to turn against Samaritan. Isn't he supposed to be super smart? He did not seem 100% cool in this episode with being blindly ordered to kill. That seems to be how things have been getting set up for a long while now, that Samaritan views people as just generic interchangeable objects rather than understanding and valuing them as individuals, but I'd like to see the turn where that actually starts making a difference plot-wise already. raditts fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Maybe they're only writing him to feel like a real character to the degree that he exercises agency, which he will exercise in rebellion against Samaritan? We've only seen him coaxed and coerced so far. What will he do once he's making his own decisions?
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Hold on a moment. How exactly did Harold Whistler blow his cover? Hasn't it been well established that Samaritan literally cannot see him? There's a blindspot integrated into it that replaces any instances of Finch appearing with that of Professor Whistler. That's why Reese can walk in public as Detective Riley. In the episode, Riley's cover does not seem to be blown even being seen with Whistler at his office, preventing him from being killed, and even after visiting a Samaritan office and having Samaritan agents try to gun down two police officers. Samaritan couldn't see Shaw even though Martine was looking at her, it was only after Shaw's cover was blown from shooting back that her identity was associated with a deviant. Professor Whistler visited a cafe and had a coffee. *** The minigun sequence and chase scene was so over the top that I was seriously thinking that this might be another simulation (based on Harold's words at the start). Are the Samaritan agents officially licensed government contractors authorized to kill, because that minigun chase seems like the kind of thing which might get a little attention from people.
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My guess is part of that "defensive" measures is the complete unhooking of The Machine and the missile(s) Root nicked from the Ukraine.
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Are the Samaritan agents officially licensed government contractors authorized to kill, because that minigun chase seems like the kind of thing which might get a little attention from people. Legally? Not really. Are they doing it anyway? Absolutely. It seems Team Samaritan's goal this season, outside of defeating the machine, is to create the perfect controversy that it can attach its expanded legal authority as a rider to the reactionary bill.
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Hold on a moment. How exactly did Harold Whistler blow his cover? Hasn't it been well established that Samaritan literally cannot see him? There's a blindspot integrated into it that replaces any instances of Finch appearing with that of Professor Whistler. That's why Reese can walk in public as Detective Riley. It's not that it doesn't see them, it's that they show up as being irrelevant until it can actually flag that identity as being them (Root's worked a little differently because she changed IDs so often). On the 10th anniversary of his first date with Grace, Harold went to the same cafe and made the same order (for two drinks). Something he's presumably done every year since then. It recognised the pattern of behaviour. quote:Greg Plageman: Well, I certainly think, Eric, that things got more compressed. There was more story we could tell, there was more story we could have done with Elias and the merging of the municipal world with the Samaritan and Machine world. That happened in a rather compressed manner. Some of those things we could have taken more time with -- certainly down the stretch of the last couple of episodes, we were compressing some things. I don't think it adversely affected the storytelling, and I do believe we acquitted ourselves well. We went out in a way that I'm proud of. It's a show that I think people will remember fondly, and we always endeavor to tell this incredibly -- when you get over 100 episodes on broadcast television, it's very difficult to sustain a larger narrative, a bigger story, and then finish it off in a way, because you rarely get the notice that this is the last season. And Jonah and I made the decision at the beginning of the year that this was probably it; we should write to that. And I think that in some ways is a gift, certainly on broadcast television, because most people don't know, as witnessed from a number shows that got a sudden cancelation these past few weeks. gently caress you CBS. This season would have been even more impressive without their loving around, and even with the shortened season they still insisted on having the number of the week so they couldn't just go whole Team Machine vs Samaritan dystopian singularity thriller. PST fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Hold on a moment. How exactly did Harold Whistler blow his cover? Hasn't it been well established that Samaritan literally cannot see him? There's a blindspot integrated into it that replaces any instances of Finch appearing with that of Professor Whistler. That's why Reese can walk in public as Detective Riley. It's never been 100% clear exactly how their cover identities work and what their limits are, but Samaritan has been shown as capable of tracking Our Heroes indirectly even if it can't recognize them. And I'm guessing that even though Samaritan can't recognize them, its agents have all been shown photographs of Finch, Reese, Root and Shaw at this point, and that Samaritan's probably sending people to check out anything that even remotely fits what it knows about them. Samaritan knows drat well that it can't recognize them, and it has a pretty good idea why, and just like the Machine found an elaborate way of working around its nightly memory wipe, Samaritan is also looking for workarounds. Professor Whistler visited a very specific cafe and and placed a very specific order, and that was enough to get Samaritan to at least send someone to check it out. If it turned out that Professor Harold Whistler just happened to like the same hot beverages as Harold Finch, then all it's wasted is a bit of time. Though yeah, it falls apart if you prod at it too hard (again, I suspect a casualty of the shorter season; compare this to Martine and Samaritan's methodical investigation of Shaw over the course of several episodes in early season 4). For one thing, you'd think that even though Samaritan doesn't recognize "Detective John Riley" as John Reese, it could well start to recognize him as That Cop Who Keeps Shooting At My Agents and declare him a threat anyway.
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Hold on a moment. How exactly did Harold Whistler blow his cover? Hasn't it been well established that Samaritan literally cannot see him? There's a blindspot integrated into it that replaces any instances of Finch appearing with that of Professor Whistler. That's why Reese can walk in public as Detective Riley. It seems like the "blind spot"/cover only really holds up if Samaritan isn't concentrating on them - e.g. in the "corner" of Samaritan's vision, the cover holds, but once Harold sat down in the same spot Samaritan was maintaining surveillance on specifically, Samaritan was able to realize a) it couldn't *really* see Harold, just like with Root b) it could still track this blurry character's movements back to his office. Regarding choosing Root's voice, I like that it seems to undercut Harold's assertion back in season 4 that the Machine would just move on if Root died - like it's shown time and time before, the Machine really does care, just like Harold taught it. edit: docbeard posted:For one thing, you'd think that even though Samaritan doesn't recognize "Detective John Riley" as John Reese, it could well start to recognize him as That Cop Who Keeps Shooting At My Agents and declare him a threat anyway. Yeah, I'm wondering if the Temporary Resolutions firefight means John's cover is blown or not... it wasn't really addressed. Also, total aside, but the Root's last stand was filmed in Astoria Park near my apartment, so it was really weird watching them drive by the same stretch of road repeatedly (if you look out the driver side window, you can see the same boat show up every time). Crusader fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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POI has had some really good action scenes, but the minigun stuff was just pure schlock. Then again it's kind of a larger scale version of the show's Walker Texas Ranger syndrome where every week a tiny handgun wipes out an elite squad of machine guns. I'd normally enjoy stuff like that, but especially not in the context where it ends in the death of a main character. It was a very sobering episode and you have an absolutely shitfaced drunk situation which strikes an odd tone.
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Toplowtech posted:Well, last time they got some politician numbers wasn't it when the machine asked him to kill said politician before he can give Samaritan the machine's access to the feeds? To be fair, the Machine didn't actually ask them to kill a politician; that was Harold's assumption/understanding based on the information the Machine gave them (which at that point was still just a number) and the information they gleaned from tailing him around town. Pre-open system, TM could never just give an order like that, only spit out a number and effectively say "hey something funny's about to happen with this person, investigate!" and the team had to make the choice, good or ill, of what to do about it, just like they've had with any number.
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![]() Now Bear needs his box!
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Something I'm wondering is what Samaritan wants with Harold. EDIT: My memory is a little unclear, how did Samaritan know to send the police to the library at the end of season 3?
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Mraagvpeine posted:Something I'm wondering is what Samaritan wants with Harold. See, Samaritan is running these simulation of itself vs. the machine, and it keeps losing, so...
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ol qwerty bastard posted:I'll be shocked if they aren't setting Blackwell up to turn against Samaritan. Isn't he supposed to be super smart? He did not seem 100% cool in this episode with being blindly ordered to kill. It was strange since last time we saw him he was questioning his assignments and he learned his employer is going full eugenics. He really didn't seem convinced by the speech he was getting. Now he is ok with sniping people ![]()
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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:It was strange since last time we saw him he was questioning his assignments and he learned his employer is going full eugenics. He really didn't seem convinced by the speech he was getting. Do you not do what the voice inside your head says? Weird.
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ol qwerty bastard posted:I'll be shocked if they aren't setting Blackwell up to turn against Samaritan. Isn't he supposed to be super smart? He did not seem 100% cool in this episode with being blindly ordered to kill. His chance of survival is entirely dependent on whether Shaw finds out he''s the one who shot Root, if so he's going to have a very painful short period of time left. I kind of feel he's another plot line that was originally conceived for a full 22 episodes, like stuff with Elias and 'is this the world we created' exploring the effects of Samaritan etc. He's just a 3rd rate bad guy, even less of a speedbump than Martine. Apparently Twitter and Tumblr are melting down over 'another dead lesbian on tv'. While I agree with Nolan's interview about how Root was more than that, and how her 'end' has been telegraphed a long time to come, that's not going to calm down the understandable anger at how killing off the lesbian is the tv equivalent of shooting the black guy first in movies.
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PST posted:Apparently Twitter and Tumblr are melting down over 'another dead lesbian on tv'. While I agree with Nolan's interview about how Root was more than that, and how her 'end' has been telegraphed a long time to come, that's not going to calm down the understandable anger at how killing off the lesbian is the tv equivalent of shooting the black guy first in movies. It's swinging kind of both ways, at least. There's a lot of anger, of course, because there's just always anger at this point, and a good chunk of that is coming from people who have never actually watched the show (or exclusively watched the Root/Shaw scenes) and got wind of "yet another dead lesbian". But there are also a lot of people trying to be reasonable about it. Sad, because one of their favorite characters died and that's always sad, but reasonable. If only CBS had just loving aired this final season in the fall.
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Speaking of:![]() Think about it, man.
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xeria posted:It's swinging kind of both ways, at least. There's a lot of anger, of course, because there's just always anger at this point, and a good chunk of that is coming from people who have never actually watched the show (or exclusively watched the Root/Shaw scenes) and got wind of "yet another dead lesbian". But there are also a lot of people trying to be reasonable about it. Sad, because one of their favorite characters died and that's always sad, but reasonable. I can understand the former, i'd mostly just seensome pretty severe comments and also saw Chris Fields being really understanding and communicating with people on his twitter. Without the 100, which certainly from what i've read handled it really badly, it probably wouldn't have gotten as big a reaction. Or maybe it would but more nuanced. I'm still kind of shocked by it, but also Elias' death given his reprieve and the snatched chance of him getting to take revenge on Samaritan. But then all of the main and recurring cast are so good, and the writing of their characters so on point that anyone dying would strike the same way, much as significant character deaths in The Wire did. And yeah, a whole season would have given them more time to schedule around Sarah's pregnancy and they'd have had what 15-17 episodes with her available. I don't think there'll be a 'what would have been' and the POI book got cancelled, which pretty much kills any chance of anything else coming. PST fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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PST posted:I can understand the former, i'd mostly just seensome pretty severe comments and also saw Chris Fields being really understanding and communicating with people on his twitter. Without the 100, which certainly from what i've read handled it really badly, it probably wouldn't have gotten as big a reaction. Or maybe it would but more nuanced. Even just the same shortened season airing several months ago wouldn't have garnered anywhere near this reaction, though i'd have liked to have seen a full 22-episode final season (removed from CBS's apparent procedural-or-bust mandate) to give all the end arcs some breathing room (more time with Shaw back on the team and interacting with all of them, more time to explore Reese's dead family and such, etc.). The discourse for this moment specifically is what it is today more or less entirely because of The 100.
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EW interview with Jonathan Nolan and Amy Acker Spoilers obviously, and they happen to mention Control's fate she's dead, Jim. Granted, she could still show up (and then die)...
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Flea Wars posted:Speaking of: I don't care if you've had your hardware mucked with, Samaritan, how do you not realize that Veronique Chereau is a fake name?
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Nameless Pete posted:I don't care if you've had your hardware mucked with, Samaritan, how do you not realize that Veronique Chereau is a fake name? that's Machine POV, and its cycling through her various aliases.
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Nameless Pete posted:I don't care if you've had your hardware mucked with, Samaritan, how do you not realize that Veronique Chereau is a fake name? Unfortunately Samaritan got hooked up to tumblr fan fiction and now creates cover IDs for its operatives named Dirk Dinglebat and Humphry Sidebottom.
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Hey if that's the machine narrating with Roots voice then that completely changes the context of that promo.
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# ? Sep 1, 2024 01:53 |
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PST posted:Unfortunately Samaritan got hooked up to tumblr fan fiction and now creates cover IDs for its operatives named Dirk Dinglebat and Humphry Sidebottom. Reese spent a couple of weeks as Rock Hardbody.
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