I wasn’t too impressed with this show when it first started. The story of a minor league Skynet and the man who created it/her/him/whatever. But over the past few episdoes it has changed into something a bit more interesting. The Machine has a rival known as Samaritan. The idea being that this new Artificial Intelligence is a good guy. But Samaratian is a good guy in the same sense that Nazi Germany and Eugenics are good guys.
We can all agree that there are some people the world would be better off without, among them would be Nazi Germany and people who believe in Eugenics. So Samaritan has been killing off people it doesn’t think should be suffered to live. Among them have been suicidal folks and criminals of one sort or another. Samaritan also doesn’t like our hero’s Machine, so he/her/it/whatever wants to kill The Machine as well.
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a good deal of the city’s population was gone for a while. There were news stories about there not being any murders during this time. Now that most of the people have returned, the murder rates have returned as well. Was New Orleans a better city when all the murders were somewhere else? What would Samaritan do to New Orleans? Or Cleveland? Or Detroit? or New York City? Or well, any city in America?
One of my minor gripes about the last episode of Person of Interest is that it’s an American centric show. The Machine is cornered in New York by Samaritan. Why? Wouldn’t The Machine have moved to China? Or India? Or maybe somewhere in Orbit where it could gather itself far from danger if the need arose? It’s an integral part of the plot that The Machine doesn’t hide on the other side of the world, but it is a serious weakness in the plot. It makes the Machine look a bit dim. The Machine is not an American, why the hell would it be limited to the US border?
So I like that Person of Interest as it is asking a lot of big questions now. Is Samaritan the villain or the hero? Is the world it envisions better or worse than what we have now? Should people be treated like weeds in a garden or allowed to grow where they want? Maybe we will get a few answers next season. Or maybe just more questions.
