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Warning: these Person of Interest thoughts are unlikely to be new, though they’re new to me!
(1) I love Joss Carter, and scarily sort of ship Carter/Reese. Cavaziel’s choice to act smugly amused by every situation has grown on me, and my liking was cemented by the Finch/Reese exchange “Please don’t do that [maintain/assemble your sniper rifle] here”/“They look at me funny when I do it in the park.” Yes, I am that easy. (Though given that they started the show with him assembling his assault weapon in a cab, which apparently went unremarked by the cab driver, I contest the premise of his assertion in the alternate New York in which this show apparently takes place.)
(2) The most unrealistic thing about the show is the idea that “we’d all go to jail if the public found out.” Seriously? This America would give Finch a fucking medal. Or if we threw him in jail, it’d be for failing to predict more (see below).
(3) There’s something deeply TV-standard about the intro voiceover, which disavows the actual diegesis in favor of something more heroic: Finch says that the government doesn’t care about the irrelevant numbers but he does, when in fact it’s almost exactly the opposite. He deliberately built the Machine to ignore the irrelevant numbers, then eventually felt sad about it. There’s no coherent reason the Machine couldn’t at least give the irrelevant numbers to an official source as well, whether or not the government would devote the resources to investigating them/decline to follow up on most to protect the integrity of the system. I imagine there are a few non-New Yorkers who might benefit from something like that. But the storytelling part of it that fascinates me is that the intro voiceover, explaining the premise of the show every week, feels the need to reverse the causation on that: the government wants these numbers ignored; the government doesn’t care. (Joss Carter cares—what is she, chopped liver?) It’s very much like the way Dollhouse kept saying “the Dolls consented to be Dolls!” and then showing us that, no, not so much. I don’t know what it means that the show can’t live with its own premise, other than that it’s easy to rag on “government.”
(4) Fandom, where is my Root vid to Flawed Design? Can someone get on that?
(5) Second most unrealistic foundational assumption: the standard gov’t bad guy assumption that there is an infinite supply of loyal, highly trained operatives who can therefore be thrown away the moment they acquire a smidgen of sensitive information, kind of like surgical gloves. If surgical gloves cost millions of dollars to train and replace and were likely to come back and kill you if you missed your toss to the trash, anyway. Just sayin’, why not at least give them the benefit of the doubt? See: Samantha Shaw.
(6) Separately: Samantha Shaw! Who should be seen, heard, and otherwise present all the time.
(1) I love Joss Carter, and scarily sort of ship Carter/Reese. Cavaziel’s choice to act smugly amused by every situation has grown on me, and my liking was cemented by the Finch/Reese exchange “Please don’t do that [maintain/assemble your sniper rifle] here”/“They look at me funny when I do it in the park.” Yes, I am that easy. (Though given that they started the show with him assembling his assault weapon in a cab, which apparently went unremarked by the cab driver, I contest the premise of his assertion in the alternate New York in which this show apparently takes place.)
(2) The most unrealistic thing about the show is the idea that “we’d all go to jail if the public found out.” Seriously? This America would give Finch a fucking medal. Or if we threw him in jail, it’d be for failing to predict more (see below).
(3) There’s something deeply TV-standard about the intro voiceover, which disavows the actual diegesis in favor of something more heroic: Finch says that the government doesn’t care about the irrelevant numbers but he does, when in fact it’s almost exactly the opposite. He deliberately built the Machine to ignore the irrelevant numbers, then eventually felt sad about it. There’s no coherent reason the Machine couldn’t at least give the irrelevant numbers to an official source as well, whether or not the government would devote the resources to investigating them/decline to follow up on most to protect the integrity of the system. I imagine there are a few non-New Yorkers who might benefit from something like that. But the storytelling part of it that fascinates me is that the intro voiceover, explaining the premise of the show every week, feels the need to reverse the causation on that: the government wants these numbers ignored; the government doesn’t care. (Joss Carter cares—what is she, chopped liver?) It’s very much like the way Dollhouse kept saying “the Dolls consented to be Dolls!” and then showing us that, no, not so much. I don’t know what it means that the show can’t live with its own premise, other than that it’s easy to rag on “government.”
(4) Fandom, where is my Root vid to Flawed Design? Can someone get on that?
(5) Second most unrealistic foundational assumption: the standard gov’t bad guy assumption that there is an infinite supply of loyal, highly trained operatives who can therefore be thrown away the moment they acquire a smidgen of sensitive information, kind of like surgical gloves. If surgical gloves cost millions of dollars to train and replace and were likely to come back and kill you if you missed your toss to the trash, anyway. Just sayin’, why not at least give them the benefit of the doubt? See: Samantha Shaw.
(6) Separately: Samantha Shaw! Who should be seen, heard, and otherwise present all the time.
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