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“Person of Interest” recap (5.12): Inevitable

After watching “.exe” (the filename extension for an executable file, taking on a double meaning here), I find myself pondering the difference between what is inevitable and what is necessary. Finch informed Greer that he was certain his Machine understood “that some sacrifices are as unavoidable as they are necessary.” The line set my pedantic brain to scrambling: are those not just two ways of saying the same thing?

They aren’t, of course, and perhaps it was Samaritan’s final, frozen word of the episode that reminded me of that: “INEVITABLE.” Samaritan’s rise may have been inevitable, as the Machine’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” style simulations suggested (and logic would have told us-Arthur Claypool’s machine was the second to be born; without Harold’s, it would have been first).

Speaking of simulations. (Via samsroot)

And in Greer’s view, Samaritan is also necessary: the evolution of humans to ASIs is not only natural progression but vital progress. Harold’s insistence has always been, however, that what is inevitable is not actually necessary. Samaritan is not needed to save humanity from itself; even the Machine can be lived without. Proliferation, to use Greer’s ominous word, may be highly likely, but that doesn’t mean it should be embraced or surrendered to. All that is truly necessary, for Harold, is human existence and autonomy.

This point of view has flaws. We have seen before how Harold’s ideas about autonomy tend to become, shall we say, cramped when running up against outcomes he doesn’t like; as recently as “QSO,” he refused to accept that Max Greenfield had freely chosen to risk his life in service of truth and integrity. And as Greer quite correctly pointed out, Harold has never trusted the Machine with the same autonomy he enjoys. (It’s worth noting that between his skills and his anonymity, Harold enjoys more autonomy than almost anyone alive; he’s limited in profound ways by having to stay “dead,” but he’s also free from all the tracking and numbering the show so astutely warns us about.)

This brings us to the second flaw: what makes humans so special, other than the fact that Harold himself is one? Why is human autonomy more precious than machine autonomy? This is a classic problem of any fiction that deals with A.I.s, and the better works in that category take the question seriously. I think this is where Harold’s guilt comes in. If the ASIs had never existed and humanity still ended badly, that would be an impersonal, emergent process for which he could not blame himself. That is, if he could unhappen the awfulness of now, the fact that he would be responsible for what occurred later in a Machine-less world would bother him less than the fact that he introduced artificial intelligence to that world in the first place. This is why he refers to what he’s trying to do as “wiping the slate clean.” He sees what he’s doing not as removing existing variables, but as causing them never to have existed.

While I don’t agree with his perspective, I can understand it and have some sympathy for it. This is why the Machine offers him those simulations. On the one hand, as she says, she’s trying to give him data with which to make his decision. (It makes me ache, wonderfully, that in the second episode of this season Finch had to give his Machine the gift of context, and in the second-to-last she offers him the same.) On the other, she is perhaps trying to show him that a world from which the Machine and Samaritan exit is not actually the same as one in which they-or even just the Machine-never existed. That world is not one in which Carter is alive, or Jessica; it’s not one where the various numbers the team has saved survive; it’s not one where Root, Fusco, John, or Shaw is redeemed. Those things would likely have come to pass without the Machine, but they can’t happen after the Machine, which world (however impossible one of them may be) is better is highly subjective, which is why it’s so interesting that the final simulation, the one that clinches Harold’s decision, is one of Root working for Samaritan.

Everyone in the alternate reality has extremely neat hair. (Via love-wins-exd)

On the one hand, Root is alive in that scenario. On the other hand, she’s exactly the amoral, misanthropic murderer Harold was first kidnapped by, untouched by love and untaught by the Machine. She still found a god to follow, but with none of the same intimacy and far less interesting results. As the Machine points out in Root’s own voice, in that scenario she never found Shaw; as Harold notes, she also never had to lose her. (And Shaw never had to lose Cole.)

It’s hard to know exactly what that idea means to Harold. He never tells us what he took away from it. But I imagine it made it clear to him that Samaritan could not be allowed to run free. While he can’t be completely certain that not activating the ice-9 virus will definitely mean a Samaritan victory, given the billions of simulations the Machine ran, he can be about as sure as anybody can be that this is the case. And knowing that an untrammeled Samaritan is a god the old Root could have served without changing tells him a lot about what Samaritan is like and what its priorities are. Therefore, Samaritan has to be eliminated.

Along the way, we were treated to a great deal of enjoyable, if almost always sad, story choices. We got to see Shaw and John working together seamlessly, John with so much brotherly, comradely concern for her it practically overflowed from his very body.

At first, I was taken aback at how much “guiding hands” manhandling Shaw was accepting from him, but I’ve decided it’s part of the trust and partnership they’ve built up over time. Just let me have this. (Via shoot-rootandshaw)

We also had Harold Going Dark in a way I found much more enjoyable to watch this week than last week. Last week it was all about navel-gazing, but this week the navel-gazing was accompanied by what fans of Leverage will recognize as “competence porn,” or the pleasure of watching a character do what they do extremely well. And perhaps more than anything, we had the moment of the Machine releasing her father from the promise he made never to harm her again. I was glad and touched that he remembered that promise in time for it to matter and that she offered him absolution. She agrees that this is what must happen for her purpose, their mutual purpose, to be served; and so she does her best to relieve him of the guilt that plagues him far more than the pains of his old injury, which he keeps close to him as a kind of self-flagellation.

Also, if we’re being honest, this is a hard moment not to enjoy.

To return to the question of what is necessary and what is inevitable, in its way the whole season-or even the last two seasons-have been about that tension. Samaritan’s rise has been almost inevitable for some time, though there were a couple of turning points that could have forestalled it. It was never necessary for the greater good, though a potential society of ASIs in the future might see the question differently. (The implicit question, left satisfyingly without a clear answer, is whether The Machine was necessary either.) The Senator’s death might have been necessary-this was not entirely obvious at the time-but it certainly was not inevitable. (Whether this was the right choice is not the point. The point is that it was a choice.)

Once Samaritan came to power, the ultimate destruction of Team Machine also became nearly inevitable, but none of them gave up in the interim. They fought every hour of every day to put off that end as long as possible, even if in the long run it might be useless. Greer (in an excellent final visit with John Nolan) helpfully demonstrated the counterpoint: being so certain of the inevitable that you calmly lie down and die. Team Machine has never contemplated such a thing in the face of Samaritan.

This is not necessarily even a matter of survival instincts: many of them have been willing to lay down their lives for others, John perhaps most of all. The Machine demonstrated her willingness to do the same here, as Harold struggled with what he wanted (to avoid her non-inevitable death) and what he felt was necessary (a strike that would harm her as well). It’s a matter of doing what you can for as long as you can against the seemingly impossible odds of destruction. It’s insisting that what seems inevitable need not be accepted as necessary; that what is right may be impossible, but is worth trying to secure anyway.

It’s Harold’s insistence to Greer that when it comes to the whistleblowers and truth-tellers who Samaritan killed, their deaths may have been necessary in Samaritan’s view, but they were not inevitable; that these qualities are neither the same, nor to be monopolized by anyone, even those who tell us they are gods, knowing good and evil.

Final notes:

  • The Machine is “she” again this week partly because she’s still singing Root’s song, but also because again Harold used the pronoun himself. That he used it particularly after she released him from his vow spoke, to me, of how deeply he was feeling his love for her, and his sorrow at what he (and she) felt he had to do.
  • Speaking of gender: How about Samaritan’s Big Scary Man voice it used to talk to Zachary, huh? Honestly: hilarious. Of course.
  • I have one serious question about the Machine’s simulations. Without Team Machine’s involvement (including Harold’s getting there first), is it really certain that Samaritan would have been “raised” by Greer and not by Arthur Claypool? Everyone else is different; why not Samaritan? (I suspect the answer is, adding in that variable would make the episode far exceed its bounds in terms of running time as well as complexity, but if anybody wants to write some very cerebral fanfiction about this, I for one am dying to read it.)
  • I’m not sure we needed two separate death fakeouts this episode. We’re all waiting for a bunch of character deaths, which is part of why it works, but two in one episode-especially after a real, very painful, death-kind of cheapens the whole deal, if you ask me. I’m glad we saw what was going on with Fusco, though, and of course, the parallels with his early story were nice.
  • Honestly, for John’s sake, I really hope he gets to die defending Harold. It’s all he wants. I really felt for him at “Damn you, Finch,” though I suspect this was another instance of Harold’s fending off the inevitable because it’s not yet necessary.
  • “Dashwood,” the password that the Machine guessed under Harold’s nose, is a reference to Sense and Sensibility-the book we saw Shaw looking at earlier in the episode, and the one in which Harold hid Grace’s engagement ring.
  • This collection of PoI’s best undercover roles and costumes is a nice bit of distraction.
  • Greg Plageman on the episode; Amy Acker on Root. Plageman and Nolan on the episode again.
  • Yup, that car sure did drive itself. Let’s not think about what Samaritan can do with that kind of functionality.

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