Okay, so I don’t want Friday to be another review day, but this week I’m going to make an exception. I also apologize to anyone who followed this blog because of my PoI reviews, because I haven’t kept up. The schedule with which CBS decides to release new episodes is hardly stable; an episode here, two or three episodes there, with a week or sometimes three weeks in between. I also don’t want this to be solely a review blog, which I feel it was close to becoming.

Anyway, this week’s episode was just too damn good not to talk about, so I’m using the Free for All for a short recap.

Person of Interest is built on a simple enough premise: there’s a machine built to protect people. Thus far, the show has mainly been about a team of rogue operatives going around, keeping people alive.

This week flipped that idea on its head, by introducing the ‘greater good’ argument. What if the only way to sacrifice thousands of lives is to kill one? It’s not the first time this concept has been brought up, not by a long shot, but it’s the first time it’s been really examined on the show, and one that bears particular significance with this cast of characters.

In particular, Reese and Shaw, two people who have spent most of their lives operating as assassins. The interesting thing about it is they choose NOT to pull the trigger. Reese very nearly does (and the show cleverly leads us to believe he has for about three or four minutes afterwards), because he feels he dropped the ball by not killing Simmons when he had the chance. But I like to think that’s also part of the reason why he doesn’t…because the example that Carter set in taking down Simmons and HR legally still hangs over everything Reese does.

Even more, the decision not to kill puts their own lives and the lives of everyone involved with the machine in mortal danger. It’s also safe to assume that the fact that all of this leads to a second AI, Samaritan, controlled by a private company and without the ethics Finch imparted to his own Machine, being unleashed will have dire consequences for the populace at large.
This season has really ramped things up for the show, and continues to do so on a regular basis.

Speaking of AI’s and technological singularity and such, there’s a movie coming out this weekend called ‘Transcendence’. I’m not planning on going to see it, but if anyone reading this does, feel free to discuss it below.

In other interests, Legendary Pictures just released this new short trailer for GODZILLA:

My hope for this movie to be good could best be described as irrational. What exactly does ‘good’ mean for a Godzilla movie, anyway? I don’t know! All I know is I loved these movies as a kid, and Bryan Cranston is in it. But then, he was in the Total Recall remake, too, so…

Have a great weekend!