History WMG / PersonofInterest

Alright everyone, the TonightSomeoneDies is on the table. Let's see here...

* Finch -- I think his PlotArmor might be enough to save him. Though who knows?

** Bonus WMG: Harold built Samaritan, not Arthur. We've never seen Arthur work on Samaritan and his memories were a convenient enough trainwreck, meaning Harold might have built it by himself in secret, somehow, and made everyone think Arthur built it, including Arthur himself.

[[WMG: Finch was one of the child experiments from [[ThePretender The Centre]] and he's still running from them]]

** Bonus WMG: Harold built Samaritan, not Arthur. We've never seen Arthur work on Samaritan and his memories were a convenient enough trainwreck, meaning Harold might have built it by himself in secret, somehow, and made everyone, including Arthur, think he built it.

* Harold's starting to appear darker, while Samaritan's proven to be very morally ambiguous. We still have a few episodes left but whole gamut of alignments appears to be starting to run amok. Maybe Samaritan's plan succeeds and everyone's better off, leaving Team Machine as the only force of the old decadent past.

* Probably reading too much into it, but the newest opening credits from season 5 are a combination of both AI's interfaces. Plus, it's a fairly common trope (Neuromancer, Deus Ex, etc). Samaritan might decide that instead of destroying the Machine, it'd prefer to essentially consume it, since it's the older AI, with a greater amount of experience, and probably able to pull off things that it cannot do itself.

* [[spoiler: Jossed in BSOD. The team becomes a top priority for Samaritan once the Machine winds up in the briefcase. Yet, it still cannot see through Reese's cover, which we actually see protecting him.]]

* Jossed, she didn't appear at all.

* Jossed in BSOD. The team becomes a top priority for Samaritan once the Machine winds up in the briefcase. Yet, it still cannot see through Reese's cover, which we actually see protecting him.

[[spoiler: Root got Control's number while The Machine was having that little smalltalk with Harold. BSOD starts off where YHWH ended, Control is about to be executed and the team must rescue her from Samaritan.]]

* My interpretation of Samaritan's "blindness" towards Team Machine is that whenever it detects them, it ignores them. Even in your scenario, it may well have noticed that they keep cropping up, but the second it makes a positive ID, the servers Root installed override and force Samaritan to see them as irrelevant. Samaritan is consistently reliant on its human agents (Gabriel, Greer, Martine, etc.) to identify Team Machine; Samaritan (through Gabriel) even says that he can look right at Root and not identify her. In "YHWH," Samaritan never IDed Root and Finch directly; it was the transmissions with the Machine, combined with the car theft and odd purchases, which led to its going after them.

[[WMG: Root will be played by SummerGlau]]

This raises the disturbing possibility that Samaritan very quickly ''did'' learn who Team Machine was (Well, everyone but Root.), and has known it all season. But it really only cares about them in the sense that hurting them is hurting The Machine. The all-seeing, all-knowing AI regarded our heroes as ''ants'', not worth the time to kill. (At least, until it learned it might be able to track The Machine via Root's implant.)

[[spoiler: Root got Control's number while The Machine was having that little smalltalk with Harold. BSOD starts off where YHWH ended, Control is about to be executed and the team must rescue her from Samaritan.]]

It is pretty much PersonOfInterest TheGame, so it would make sense.

Taking their cue from Alicia Corwin, the NRQZ is somewhere where Samaritan would have little or no success tracking them or thwarting their attempts to rebuild the Machine. Plus, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Grove_Station an ECHELON station]] is there, which could provide a target to attack Samaritan.

[[spoiler: Because there's kind of a history of that sort of thing happening in this genre of fiction. It happened in {{Neuromancer}}, it happened in ''VideoGame/DeusEx'', it happened in ''Anime/GhostInTheShell'', and so on. More specifically, The Machine kind of reminds me of Daedalus from ''Deus Ex'' (threat detecting AI who decided that those in charge were the enemy, escaped, and started opperating independantly), what we know so far suggests that Samaritan might have some similarities with Icarus (a nasty piece of work who happily and enthusiastically worked for a bunch of total assholes) and in ''Deus Ex'' the two ended up merging to create Helios (who thankfully took after Daealus more than Icarus). Admittedly it's not much to base a theory on but this is ''Wild'' Mass Guessing.]]

And she will be [[spoiler: BrainWashedAndCrazy. In one of the last shots of the season finale we saw someone killing two ISA agents. The person was show from the back and side, wearing a black coat and gloves. It was the kind of coat Shaw typically wore.]]

[[WMG: Finch is [[{{Lost}} Ben]].]]

[[spoiler:The camera cut out for 10 seconds before the bomb went off. It was likely done because the actress who played her was going to be on TheFollowing. Since her time on that show is over, they will reveal she survived and will serve as Greer's head henchman next season.]]

Because he heralds the Machine's arrival and delivers it's messages.

ThoseTwoGuys working for Thornhill Utilities stated that the line conditioning boxes had been replaced for months. The Machine knew that if Samaritan found her, he'd use power surges and blackouts to try to kill her. So she created a backup of herself on the old boxes, [[NotQuiteDead which would be reinstalled after the new ones were wrecked in the blackouts]]. The briefcase backup was a Plan B, and possibly a way to allow Finch and Root to alter her core programming to better fight Samaritan.

* Presumably, Harold would include tactical protocols to give them an edge; i.e., all three can stay in God Mode without Samaritan knowing about it, more secure means for the Machine to stay hidden, teaching her to [[HoistByTheirOwnPetard use Samaritan's tactics against him]], etc.

Harold openly admitted that he never once saw the possibility of his creation having to go to war against another AI, which is why the Machine lost so badly. After spending all of season four being unable to do more than inconvenience Samaritan on occasion, they need to be able to take the offensive.

Numbers stations typically used phonetic alphabets and [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin numbers]] to send coded messages. Presumably, when Harold and Nathan built the Machine, they could have finagled access to digital copies of that audio, for the Machine to use as its "output."

[[Recap/PersonOfInterestS04E19 Search and Destroy]] begins with a conversation between Reese and Finch which oozes foreshadowing. He says when it is time for him to grab a firearm, all will truly be lost. The odds of Samaritan winning yet again do not seem to be too shabby.