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Yeah, the sparks flying every which way was a bit hokey but otherwise I loved everything about that episode. And besides, if we hadn't had that, we couldn't have had Bear fetching the fire extinguisher in his capacity as Best Good Boy. (Well, okay, I didn't love the dialogue that occasionally verged just slightly on the wrong side of too much exposition, but if I had a real problem with that, I couldn't watch this TV show or any TV show.)
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May 5, 2016 02:52
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It is, at the very least, one of the better examples I've seen (what I assume to be) product placement that is actually well-integrated into the plot.
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May 7, 2016 20:59
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SpookyLizard posted:The only thing I actually didn't like in this episode was a lack of Shaw and a lack of Greer. I figure we'll have plenty of both in episodes to come, and I found that Samaritan wordlessly hunting for them was effective enough that I didn't mind. Though yeah, I really was (and am, though it seems unlikely at this point) hoping that Elias is only mostly dead. Dominic too, honestly. His story doesn't really feel like it went anywhere, and I think they could have done something a lot more interesting with the idea of 'smart and careful gang leader' than just use him as a roadblock for Our Heroes last season.
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May 8, 2016 17:03
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Monagle posted:if it was product placement why was the logo never viewed onsceen and its only referred to as "videogame console" Maybe I was imagining it, but I'm pretty sure I saw the PS3 logo on the boxes at one point.
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May 8, 2016 20:26
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Monagle posted:It wasn't like they went out of their way to hide the logos, but it was never a focus or part of the foreground I obviously don't know if they got paid by Sony or just got permission from them, I just thought it was pretty clever if they did. I'm pretty sure they at least had to secure permission, particularly given that this is a show that doesn't hesitate to use made-up brands (Fetch-And-Retrieve.com, whatever the Facebook clone was called, etc.). V-Men posted:Maybe we're just seeing a consequence of the shortened season. I can see them possibly being killed as a potential write off if necessary, and they survive if there's more time. I could certainly see a situation where Dominic goes against Samaritan because he won't listen to anybody while Samaritan tries to enlist Elias because Samaritan can promise Elias his dominance over the underworld and the stability necessary to maintain it. Yeah, I suspect you're right. Just felt like there was more story to be told with those characters (especially since Elias had drat near pieced together the existence of the Machine and Samaritan on his own, and Dominic at least knew something was up, though all of his theories were a lot more conventional). On the other hand, I can see a lot of interesting potential fallout from their deaths, too, with Samaritan noticing Fusco for the first time only being the beginning of it.
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May 8, 2016 20:54
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The way I see it, nothing much has really changed. John's police cover was never blown, and presumably Finch's wasn't either. Samaritan had them in its sights, but once it lost track of them, it couldn't find them again so long as they're careful. (Root is a special case, as previously discussed, but Samaritan had to track her indirectly too.) I am a little curious why Greer doesn't use his pull with the intelligence community to get their photos circulated among law enforcement or whatever the old fashioned way, but maybe Samaritan is a jealous god. I have no doubt that Samaritan is still looking for them and for the Machine, but they still have ways to hide.
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May 12, 2016 03:22
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Crusader posted:And while we haven't been explicitly shown it, I'm presuming that Samaritan operatives are combing the city still looking for Team Machine, since even when Martine was hunting down Shaw she could tell Samaritan had a blind spot. If I recall, that's how they found out about Samaritan's blind spot, since Martine recognized Shaw but Samaritan couldn't. Not sure if this is spoilery or not, since I'm mostly going off what was hinted at in the finale last year, but better safe and sorry. But if Shaw really has had her loyalty changed by Samaritan somehow, then that could be really bad for this aspect in particular, since she was there when Root and her team of hackers installed the malware-infested servers just before Samaritan came online. And while she's not an especially technical person in this respect, she could certainly point out which servers were the compromised ones.
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May 12, 2016 14:05
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Sinteres posted:Did anybody else feel like the dialogue was pretty rough in the last episode? The exposition has been pretty clunky for a while, maybe forever, but either it's getting worse or I'm more ready for the finale than I thought I was. I didn't think it was that rough, but it did seem like an episode where at least the A plot could have aired at pretty much any point during the series run (or at least any time after we had some idea of the finer points of Reese's past with the CIA). I enjoyed the episode a lot, I really dig character-focused stories like that, but I'm definitely ready to Get On With Things. e. Also, now that I think of it, it felt like it walked back John's epiphany from late last season about how forming connections with people is actually good and cool a little. Which is kind of disappointing. docbeard fucked around with this message at 20:02 on May 13, 2016 |
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May 13, 2016 20:00
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Sinteres posted:I wonder if they'd originally planned to do more with the psychiatrist girlfriend that got interrupted by having a short final season where they didn't have time for it, if the actress got busy, or if they never had a plan to start with and just decided it was dumb. That plotline really did go nowhere. I have similar questions, and similar opinions. And I kind of dug Iris (though I liked her a lot better as John's therapist than as John's girlfriend).
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May 13, 2016 20:17
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Or they expected the season to start last fall.
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May 14, 2016 06:36
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I think my favorite thing about the simulation is that it actually incorporated "yeah, we totally brainwashed you BUT YOU JUST BROKE FREE BECAUSE YOU'RE THAT TOUGH" into its narrative when, in fact, she is that tough. Yeah, the twist was pretty obvious early on, though everything was played ambiguous enough that you weren't necessarily sure. (The thing I noticed straight away was the way Shaw's surgical scar migrated to either side of her neck, though of course Samaritan had just insisted she be given a second chip. But then she never seemed to have two scars.) But as folks have said, I didn't mind that, since the point was never a shock reveal that this is all a simulation, the point is that Shaw has been going through this poo poo for like a year and she hasn't given in yet. It also does explain all the little comments they were dropping in last year's finale about how Shaw had told them exactly how Root would try to rescue her. Shaw didn't tell them a drat thing, but they probably ran simulations of a team rescue attempt, and took notes of which tactics Shaw's brain didn't just reject with a LOL NO.
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May 17, 2016 15:40
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GrandpaPants posted:Did this episode take place in the past? I thought Shaw showed up in S4 in one of Decima's vans. I forget the circumstances, but does it line up with the possibility that she's the one who sniped Elias and Dominic? I remember them saying they'd written this episode so it could be dropped in pretty much anywhere this season, but I think it was set more-or-less present-day. They did make a reference to the Machine having been compressed early on, I believe. We did indeed see Shaw in a van at the end of S4, but the circumstances were left very ambiguous (and carefully filmed because this would presumably have been around the time that Sarah Shahi was very very pregnant). I think given what we know from this episode, the implication is that they just had her drugged to the gills for transport.
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May 17, 2016 15:58
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Zaggitz posted:I also figure the phone call Shaw makes to Root at the start of 4x21 is a voice clip from a failed simulation. Yeah, putting together a custom recording of Shaw's voice would be trivial for Samaritan. The Machine's been shown as being capable of doing it too. I want to say when it moved itself out of its original storage facility, it gave verbal authorizations that seemed to come from that Special Counsel dude who was Control's predecessor in the government.
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May 17, 2016 16:27
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I'm reminded a bit of a story they told during the DVD commentary for an episode of Leverage, where the network didn't think that something (a credit card skimmer, I think) was realistic. And they had to break the news to them that no, it wasn't realistic, that real credit card skimmers are smaller and less impressive-looking than what they put in the episode.
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May 24, 2016 18:12
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Party Plane Jones posted:If I remember right Samaritan can't actually see the group; the facial recognition doesn't work and it manually tracks them from positions called in or through other factors (clothing, the gun Root steals from the cop in the intro episode, things spoken that hit keywords Samaritan is looking for) Yeah, it was a thing last year that Samaritan couldn't identify Shaw even after Martine pointed her out. Whether that's still the case, and whether or not Samaritan's developed other means of tracking Shaw, who knows? On an unrelated note, Samaritan's creepy speaker voice in the radio episode was like a thousand times better than anything involving that kid. Borachon posted:If I had to guess how the show ends, Harold programs the machine to start using the numbers thy helped, and the show fades to black with the baby machine starting to beat the baby samaritan when the machine is allowed to leverage all of the people it helped over the years. I don't know if it'll be quite that straightforward, but I absolutely believe that the Machine's focus on free will and saving individuals vs Samaritan's theory of top-down control and sacrificing a few for the sake of many will be critical to how things play out.
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May 26, 2016 14:53
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AND THAT'S WHY (Greer's arm falls off) YOU DON'T SPY ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
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May 30, 2016 15:46
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bring back old gbs posted:My new tinfoil hat theory is the Machine doesn't give a gently caress about Samaritan. It is losing to it in simulations because it's running it's own thing: Transferring itself to Root through the cochlear implant. Hahaha, that would be interesting, and while I don't quite see it working out quite that way, I think that the Machine only cares about Samaritan to the extent that Samaritan is a threat to people. Especially now that we know for a fact that they both have the same broad mandate of protecting humanity, and just two very different approaches to doing it. Interestingly, it mirrors almost exactly the split between the relevant and irrelevant numbers; Samaritan identifies and responds aggressively to major threatening trends (like national security) whereas the Machine focuses on individuals, and expects people to solve their own problems once they've been identified. On an unrelated note, I've been watching the series from the start again and I just watched the first season finale and the first two of the second season, where Root is introduced as something other than a name on a screen. And I noticed this time that even before we know she's Root (and crucially before the Machine has had any known contact with her), her box in Machine View is yellow, even after she kidnaps him but before she starts actively threatening him. Which fits with what we learn later about the Machine trying to free itself, but I love that sort of attention to detail.
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May 31, 2016 22:02
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It's going to hack
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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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Jun 1, 2016 12:45
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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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Jun 1, 2016 13:28
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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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Jun 1, 2016 14:59
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I could see them doing a double-fakeout ending, where on one hand we have the Machine picking up Blackwell as her primary asset to hold American society together in the wake of the molten shards of Samaritan raining down all over everything, while it appears that everyone is dead. And then we cut to Italy, where Harold and Grace Uccelli run a bird sanctuary together, while the Man in the Suit and the Woman Who Doesn't Like Suits But Will Wear One To Blend In travel the world to save the irrelevant numbers, backed up by INTERPOL Agent Fusco.
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Jun 2, 2016 16:54
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I don't consider this evidence for or against Fusco dying, but doesn't he share custody of his son with his ex-wife?
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Jun 2, 2016 17:29
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Yeah, I mean idyllic happy ending fantasies aside, I can't imagine any reunion between Harold and Grace at this point being anything but difficult. Though I'm at the point in my Season 2 rewatch where we're seeing them dating again and goddamn are they adorable together (not least because, I suppose, Grace's actress is Michael Emerson's wife and their chemistry is real) and the old sap in me wants it to happen anyway. berzerkmonkey posted:Yeah. I think she has full custody. But, being as this is a story and not real life, it really doesn't serve any purpose to kill him, other than an "everybody dies" mentality by the writers. There has to be a bright spot at the end, as a lot of the show focuses on redemption. Oh yeah, I absolutely agree. I don't think Reese, at least, makes it out alive, but I hope I'm wrong because seeing him claw his way back to being a real person again after having the humanity ground out of him has been fantastic. Normally I think American TV seasons are too long, but I kind of wish we'd gotten a full season this year. The pacing just feels off and I think some of the slow-burn characterization that they like to do is suffering because of it.
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Jun 2, 2016 19:17
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I think Blackwell is meant to be our window into a typical Samaritan operative's training.
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Jun 2, 2016 19:36
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bring back old gbs posted:He is a also literal genius though, it displayed his IQ in an overlay but not everyone had that. It may matter. Samaritan's definitely made a practice of recruiting exceptionally intelligent people in the past. I guess now that it's more entrenched than before, it can just raid temp agency files for the smartest people instead of depending on nautilus-themed ARGs.
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Jun 2, 2016 20:19
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Jigsaw posted:This episode brought up a lot of questions for me: if there are other Team Irrelevants, is Samaritan after them too? If not, why not? They wouldn't have the blind spots added by the replaced servers, so no cover identities for them. Are they just better at hiding? Are they actually helping fight Samaritan, or can only Finch & Co. do that for some reason? As long as they aren't an active threat to Samaritan or to its operations, and as long as they can't lead Samaritan back to the Machine, it has no real reason to go after them. It's likely that they don't know much about the Machine aside from it being a mysterious source of information about people in danger, and may not know that Samaritan exists at all. (I was half expecting, when John said that they were also working for the Machine, for them all to just be completely oblivious, since they get all their info from a mysterious corporate dude called Thornhill.) I suspect that further elaboration about this will end up as another casualty of the shortened season. (I could absolutely have seen them do an episode centering around another Irrelevant Team that got in Samaritan's way and got squashed like bugs, for example.) I liked this episode, though after last week, I was expecting something a bit more apocalyptic. Still, a lot of good stuff here, and I really liked how thrown Shaw was by everything. And I don't find Harper as annoying as the rest of the thread, though I guess the episode she was introduced in wasn't great. I have a feeling that the conversation between Finch and the Machine about love is going to be crucial to the eventual resolution, and will certainly be key to the difference between an unshackled Machine and Samaritan, for all that they have nearly identical broad goals. Samaritan sees people as pieces to be shoved around for the greater good, and the Machine sees people as people to be saved. Interesting that the President's apparently a white dude, since we saw Obama being elected in a flashback sequence. (I'm guessing that the network told them they could absolutely not show the real President being threatened with assassination.) It was also interesting that real brands like Google and Facebook got namechecked when they've always used fictional variants (like Friendczar) in the past.
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Jun 8, 2016 14:43
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The way Harold talked about collateral damage suggests, at the very least, that it won't exactly be a surgical strike.
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Jun 8, 2016 20:08
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I didn't get the impression that this was actively a Samaritan plot rather than just Samaritan not giving a poo poo if the President is killed. (Though I guess there's not enough information to know either way.) Which suggests that Samaritan has so thoroughly seized control of at least American society that it doesn't really matter any more who's in charge, because Samaritan is really in charge. The blue box for the President is interesting, because we've last seen that used for Machine assets on the relevant side. pik_d posted:That's (probably) why these guys did it with a drone though. That was certainly their stated rationale; staging an attack using a drone to make it clear that the Surveillance State was to blame for all of this. Though of course it still would have backfired; can you imagine the uproar if a drone got hacked and used in a terrorist plot for real?
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Jun 9, 2016 00:38
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Aphrodite posted:They're really just using irrelevant as shorthand for "Samaritan doesn't care if this person dies". Yeah, and in this case, "why isn't a threat against the President of the United States considered to be a relevant threat". And the answer appears to be "those distinctions don't actually matter any more".
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Jun 9, 2016 01:07
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Hollismason posted:Wasn't there a Senator that was a asset of Samaritan. Maybe it didn't protect the president because it was maneuvering that Senator in place for control of the country? I can't recall his name, but yeah. He was the Senator who had oversight over the ISA (so Control effectively worked for him),. There was also that Congressman that the Machine (possibly) wanted killed, who made the deal with Greer to give Samaritan the NSA feeds. The kid avatar also demanded to meet the President at one point. I think it is absolutely safe to say that Samaritan is running things at the highest levels of Washington now.
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Jun 9, 2016 01:24
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Aphrodite posted:Samaritan would have taken an active role if that was the goal. What I'm hoping they'll have time to address is just what could happen if Samaritan *is* abruptly destroyed. Never mind the disruption of the internet and various electronic systems, if Samaritan's really running things to any degree, then a bunch of civic institutions are suddenly hosed.
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Jun 9, 2016 01:38
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Tortolia posted:Fun episode and a nice little answer to the "Why doesn't the Machine have other assets" question. I wonder if they started up after the Machine was rebuilt. Harper, at least, was getting jobs from "Thornhill" since, I think, her second appearance in season 4. My guess is that it all started up once the Machine moved/freed itself at the end of the second season, since that's also when it recruited Root.
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Jun 9, 2016 02:34
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pik_d posted:Go on I'm guessing it's our new Team Irrelevant. I actually do remember seeing Harper's name in there. Also that dude who was John's predecessor.
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Jun 10, 2016 01:59
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In a shocking twist, his name is actually Chuck Finley, thus setting up the wacky misunderstanding for the Burn Notice / POI revival crossover whenever Bruce Campbell needs some extra cash.
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Jun 11, 2016 20:40
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Jigsaw posted:Edit: Samaritan's fatal misstep in the last episode is its newest choice of target: Leon Tao. 7,000 simulations later, Samaritan is addicted to World of Warcraft and Leon is in charge of Decima.
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Jun 12, 2016 16:04
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Party Plane Jones posted:You've got to wonder why when John gets shot so, so often he never wore a vest like Fusco did as a cop. He does at least some of the time.
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Jun 16, 2016 13:11
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berzerkmonkey posted:Neither. The virus was taken from a base a couple of episodes back. I'm guessing it was something created by the military for cyber warfare purposes (like a Stuxnet.) I assume it's Cryptolocker and the finale is going to be all about Blackwell frantically researching how to buy bitcoins.
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Jun 16, 2016 14:00
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That was, on the whole, a fantastic episode (if a bit silly in places, but I'm fine with this show being a bit silly). I wish there could have been a bit more exploration of just what it was that Samaritan thought it was safeguarding humanity from; it certainly sounded like it had predicted some specific extinction-level event looming over humanity ("The Great Filter", I think Greer called it) that it was trying to stave off by optimizing human society to the extent that it could. And of course Greer's attempt to kill Harold was a pure Bond Villain trap (which makes sense, I suppose, since Greer's origin story was basically 'what if James Bond said gently caress MI6 one day'). One thing I am a bit disappointed about, though. I had thought that the last of the 'What If There Had Been No Machine' simulations was going to be a list of all the "irrelevant" people whose lives wouldn't have been saved or whose crimes wouldn't have been stopped. Of course, I'm not sure how you show that to Harold and not convince him that he's on the wrong path, and I suppose he needed to end the episode convinced he was doing a terrible thing for the greater good. But I'd still have liked it acknowledged, since I think the thematic heart of this show has always been that individual lives are more important than national security or grand ASI schemes or whatnot. Of course, there's still room for them to hit that in the finale, and I feel like they probably will. Still, it felt weird ignoring it here.
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Jun 16, 2016 20:00
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Something just occured to me. Assuming Ice-9.exe is as devastating as its literary namesake, then Finch could have theoretically introduced it to Samaritan from anywhere. He certainly wouldn't have had to break into Fort Meade to do it; it's not as though Samaritan is housed there (and the Machine certainly isn't). But what presumably is housed there is the infrastructure for the NSA's surveillance feeds, and I think that's what Finch was really attacking (if only as a secondary target). Without the infrastructure to monitor and infiltrate every camera and computer in the world (and we can take it as read that the damage Ice-9 would do there would be irreparable, or at least not trivial to repair), even if they could restore Samaritan or the Machine from a backup, or if another ASI were created, their power would be substantially limited. Also I just watched The Crossing again, and I'm about to watch The Devil's Share, and goddamn that is some good TV.
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Jun 17, 2016 00:59
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I'm sad it's ending but I'm happy it's getting an ending, however accelerated. (And while I liked quite a bit of both season 4 and 5, I think it's ending at the right time.)
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Jun 22, 2016 01:09
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