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I liked this show a lot but this finale felt really weak to me. It felt like stuff just happened kinda randomly. I didn't get much of a sense of what the Ice-9 virus was doing, or why specifically the ASIs were vulnerable to it. We're told there's a cyber-apocalypse but all we really see is flickering screens and a news report saying bad stuff is happening... and then everything basically returns to normal. Previously we saw Samaritan having facilities and assets all over the world (as well as building itself into the hardware of as many devices as possible), but now it only has one offline backup (conveniently located in the same city as our heroes). We've been told how how these A.S.I.s have godlike intelligence, so why are they vulnerable to a virus built by mere mortals and if they're planning moves 100 steps ahead then why does it feel like Samaritan is randomly stumbling about the moment something goes wrong (Finch tells Sammy "I am going to kill you", then steals a virus capable of killing Samaritan but Samaritan doesn't seem to have many contingencies and countermeasures in place for if Harold actually uses it). And to me it made sense if Ice-9 didn't target the A.S.I.s (which should be almost impervious to direct assault) but instead crippled their access to the government feeds thus leaving them blind and dumb. Or if it crippled society's tech infrastructure. That seemed like a clever way to set up Team Machine's win, they can't beat Samaritan directly so they exploit flaws in human systems instead and it ties in nicely with Finch's idea of not playing by the rules anymore (and also explains why Finch needed to be in an NSA data center to install it). Maybe this sounds like I'm complaining that what I thought was going to happen didn't happen but I thought they could come up with something smarter than Virus Ex Machina and a rooftop shootout. (I mean I thought The Machine building itself into the power grid in S4 was really clever, so super virus disappointed me a lot). And this season just seemed full of aborted plotlines or stuff that didn't go anywhere. Did Root's trip to the Russian missile silo do anything? Did Samaritan's DNA database do anything? We're told The Machine keeps losing to Samaritan in simulations but then in the confrontation that matters The Machine defeats Samaritan without a word of explanation. They did set up a possible explanation here in Root's defensive changes to the machine's code but I don't think Harold ever activated them. So what was the point in that plotline? Blackwell seemed to go from "down on his luck ex con reluctantly working shady jobs" to "loyal sniper assassin" with little sense of the progression of time. Then immediately goes right back to "aww shucks it was just a job". I liked the parallels of Samaritan recruiting Blackwell with the same speech that Harold gave to John, but whilst John had a steady progression Blackwell's character was all over the place. And I thought it was contrived how Shaw worked out that Blackwell killed Root, he happened to bring along the same type of rifle even though he didn't use it and Shaw leapt to the conclusion that he did it. Fusco gets taken out of the precinct at gunpoint after John chokes the police captain out, then the officers in the prison transport van get sniped to death whilst trying to execute him but at the end of episode he's back in work? ??? And the machine doesn't think sniper backup would be useful at any other point in the episode? A lot of that would've benefited from more time to flesh things out, but ultimately I'm watching the episode that was and not the episode that might have been. And just to be clear I didn't hate the episode, I just expected better from it. I did like The Machine finding a very human answer to the meaning of life but I thought they laboured the point a bit too much. I also really liked The Machine's explanation for learning to predict people (I thought it was very fitting given The Machine's purpose). So I thought the episode was good at hitting emotional beats, but plotwise nothing made much sense.
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Jun 23, 2016 01:05
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KilGrey posted:I don't understand why you would do this. What's the point? Yeah, it goes faster but...? Are you really that crunched for time? Are you gonna die and need to get through shows as fast as you can? Ketchup is an advanced AI running simulations trying to save his assets from imminent death. In desperation it has started searching through human media for any ideas that may assist in this procedure, but needs to accelerate the process to have any hope of implementing a solution.
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Dec 30, 2016 12:00
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