History Headscratchers / PersonOfInterest

* Why does Samaritan attempt to kill Finch by draining all the oxygen out of the room, especially with Greer inside? Yeah, Finch needs to die, but there's about what, thousands of different ways to kill him that were not only more efficient but didn't also kill a rather valuable asset to it. Just making sure Greer had a gun and order him to pull it out and shoot Finch would have done the job.

* At the end of "Deus Ex Machina", how did the NYPD know to go to the library? Did Samaritan tip them off?

** That fits what we saw in "Relevance" though. [[AllLoveIsUnrequited Cole's attraction to Shaw is unspoken]], while Shaw is an unquestioning killer. And we don't know if Shaw loved Cole in turn; she regarded him as a friend, perhaps because he treated her as one instead of a sociopathic freak.

** Would have made sense to stick a SSD in anyway so the machine had permanent storage and somewhere to move. Their not that big and the machine could tranfer from RAM to SSD after it was disconnected from outside sources.

* Am I the only one to think that Harold values his "honour" more than peoples lives? How many people have died because he wouldn't kill two people that the machine had marked for termination. He's said he'll sacrifce anything and everything to save an innocent but obviously not since your life and your possessions AREN'T everything.

* Did the writers totally forget about Shaw's thing with Cole, or are they simply so enamored with [[PortmanteauCoupleName Shoot]] that they refuse to acknowledge it? When the Machine tells Finch about its "what if I was never built?" simulations, she shows that Shaw and Cole continued working together, but their interaction is downright ''icy''. The revelation that Cole was incredibly important to Shaw was one of the very first cracks in her EmotionlessGirl armor, making their relationship a major plot point in the past; even part of the reason Shaw felt betrayed by her former employers was the fact that he died on a mission. So, if Cole were still alive in a Machine-free timeline, it's make sense that they'd be close, even if not romantically involved (though all past information about them would indicate they would have become involved had he lived long enough). Did the Machine somehow not know about their feelings, despite knowing plenty about them otherwise, or is even she such a giant ShipperOnDeck that she refuses to admit that Shaw may have been in love before?

** Fingerprinting isn't perfect. Objects that have a lot of human contact (doorknobs, railings etc.) make it a pain to pull even a partial print

* The machine is not physically present anywhere known to Northern Lights. How can Control shut it down if she doesn't know where it is? At most, she can "stand down" all ISA personnel tasked for Northern Lights, but that shouldn't stop The Machine from being able to keep giving out Relevant numbers.

** Greer is playing to their desire to have an "open system" that gives them more than just the (ambivalent - perp, or victim?) numbers. It's not just that they presently can't keep using the Machine for fear of further public scrutiny, it's also that Samaritan promises them the sort of full access they've been trying to get by suborning the Machine. Northern Lights has also been looking for something more reliable ever since the Machine relocated its own servers and hid them away; they no longer trust the Machine. That's why Control was trying to obtain Samaritan well before Vigilance leaked information to expose Northern Lights. Greer also uses the fact that Decima is a private corporation to claim that Control et al. will have more plausible deniability than they did when they ostensibly owned the Machine themselves. He essentially tells Garrison that Decima can be blamed if Samaritan's existence and methods are leaked to the public. And of course Greer ''still'' doesn't convince them to give him the feeds until he creates a situation in which Control and Senator Garrison [[ItsPersonal are personally threatened]] by an organization Samaritan could have stopped, one that (from their perspective) Decima saves them from. Ultimately, Greer's feeling that humans are imperfect and can be suborned is borne out by the success of his multilayered BatmanGambit. He sees Northern Lights and the U.s. government as driven by selfishness and cowardice, and he therefore plays to their lust for power and information, their sense of self- (and career) preservation, and ultimately their personal fears to maneuver them to give him the feeds. The reliability of the Machine is a *logical* argument for keeping it; Greer is playing to something else entirely.

** Greer is playing to their desire to have an "open system" that gives them more than just the (ambivalent - perp, or victim?) numbers it's not just that they presently can't keep using the Machine for fear of further public scrutiny -- remember, Northern Lights had already been forced to stop responding to "relevant" numbers int he wake of the leaks -- it's also that Samaritan promises them the sort of full access they've been trying to get by suborning the Machine. That's why Control was trying to obtain Samaritan well before Vigilance leaked information to expose Northern Lights. Greer also uses the fact that Decima is a private corporation to claim that Control et al. will have more plausible deniability than they did when they ostensibly owned the Machine themselves. He essentially tells Garrison that Decima can be blamed if Samaritan's existence and methods are leaked tot he public. And of course Greer ''still''; doesn't convince them to give him the feeds until he creates a situation in which Control and Senator Garrison [[ItsPersonal are personally threatened]] by an organization Samaritan could have stopped, one that (from their perspective) Decima saves them from. Ultimately, Greer's feeling that humans are imperfect and can be suborned is borne out by the success of his multilayered BatmanGambit. He sees Northern Lights and the U.s. government as driven by selfishness and cowardice, and he therefore plays to their lust for power and information, their sense of self- (and career) preservation, and ultimately their personal fears to maneuver them to give him the feeds. The reliability of the Machine is a *logical* argument for keeping it; Greer is playing to something else entirely.

* How does Samaritan being activated and provided unrestricted access to the NSA feeds logically follow from the Vigilance bombing at the end of season 3? The reason why The Machine didn't warn about said incident was because the Northern Lights project had been suspended due to increased public scrutiny. That isn't the fault of the Machine. What Greer was selling boiled down to "you neglected to use your tool, and so you weren't able to do the job you needed the tool to do. Would you like to throw away the tool that has never once failed you when you actually used it and buy my version instead?"

* How are Harold's youthful indiscretions considered treason? Treason has a very specific definition under the Constitution, namely waging war against the US or aiding those who do. What Harold did as a kid was crash a set of interconnected computers, which while owned by the military, was intended for pure research purposes (The original purpose of the ARPANET was to allow people to access research computers anywhere in the country - the military applications were added later), which is not an act of war. And how to prosecute him? Under the Constitution, you can't convict someone of treason without either a confession or at least two eyewitnesses. Where are the witnesses going to come from in a crime committed remotely?

* Am I the only one to think that Harold values his "honour" more than peoples lives? How many people have died because he wouldn't kill two people that the machine had marked for termination. He's said he'll sacrifce anything and everything to save an innocent but obviously not since your life and your possessions AREN'T everything.

* Exactly how could reintroducing thylacines to their native habitat disrupt the global food economy? Yes, yes, butterfly effect and all that, but let's look at exactly what that butterfly is flapping about: the thylacine was native to Tasmania, Australia, and New Guinea, but went extinct in Australia 2,000 years ago and New Guinea even longer ago (hence why we call them ''Tasmanian'' [=tigers/wolves=]). So, if the doctor were going to pick a place to reintroduce them into the wild, she'd likely pick Tasmania. Tasmania is, to be blunt, '''tiny''' in the global scheme. Its population is about half a million, but half the land is tied up in nature parks and thus ''not'' in use for food production. Furthermore, most of Tasmania's economy isn't in food production at all, and what of it ''is'' is mostly seafood and crops (neither of which thylacines would be terribly interested in - they were strict carnivores, so all plant crops are safe,[[note]]and might actually be saf''er'' with thylacines around, as they'd be eating small herbivores who damage crops,[[/note]] and the only way they could get seafood would be to steal it from humans, which they were generally wary of). Herding isn't exactly a big deal there. But really, even if they were released in mainland Australia, some studies of the thylacine show its bite was relatively weak, and so even sheep would be relatively safe from predation (newborn lambs would be at risk, but that's about it; they'd be more likely to scavenge the corpse of an already-dead sheep than to kill a healthy one). If they wanted to pick an animal with the potential to disrupt food production, they should've gone for the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon passenger pigeon,]] an herbivore known to have a taste for grain and a native habitat in America's bread basket. However, all "de-extincted" species would have a FatalFlaw: they're all essentially clones of each other, due to lack of well-preserved DNA samples (the current thylacine genome was cobbled together from multiple samples, so while the clone wouldn't be a duplicate of any ''one'' thylacine, all the clones would be identical to each other). Even assuming you could get functioning X and Y chromosomes to produce male and female members, without a carefully-managed breeding program, de-extincted animals would be one errant sneeze away from a species-wide re-extinction event. You simply wouldn't get the large numbers of wild animals required to disrupt food production.

** Where else could they move to, that Samaritan couldn't find them? An abandoned subway station, with untraceable electrical and data lines, is the most secure facility they could hope for. By "[=ShotSeeker=]" we know that [[spoiler:the team has a safe house, but if they plug in the rebuilt Machine there, the power and data usage would be an instant target for Samaritan]]. Plus, they probably know that [[spoiler: Shaw]] would die before revealing the subway station. In SNAFU, Finch notes that [[spoiler:the Machine is completely contained within the trolley, to let it be more mobile in case of emergency, though I'm not sure how the ''trolley'' could be removed from the station]].