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“Person of Interest” recap (5.07 & 5.08): Free Will

Free will has always been at the heart of Person of Interest. It’s what’s at stake when artificial superintelligences-or gods, whichever you prefer-are at work in the world. Harold’s fears regarding the Machine are based in the problem of free will, just as Greer’s embrace of Samaritan is the product of his rejection of it.

“QSO” and “Reassortment” are both concerned with free will, though in different ways. “QSO” (a ham radio term for when two stations or operators contact one another) puts free will front and center through Shaw and Max Greene (Scott Adsit), both individuals choosing to exercise the last bastion of free will-one’s very life-against oppressive forces. Shaw is prepared to kill herself rather than spend one more day as Samaritan’s guinea pig; Max declares he’d rather die telling the truth than live on the run. “Reassortment” is about the opposite end of free will: the mess and errors that can arise from a system of agents interacting vs. the order and security that can come from an agentive system manipulating objects. It’s not a mystery where the show’s perspective falls on this venerable debate, but Jeff Blackwell (Joshua Close) in “Reassortment” makes a good contrast against Shaw and Greenfield in “QSO”: after two people prepared to sacrifice everything on the altar of free will, we watch a man who can’t make such a choice and finds himself further stripped of his agency, reduced to his genetic markers.

This…is fine (via poigifs)

There are many little moments that play into this issue. Shaw kills the geneticist in the “field trip” of “QSO” as an attempt to assert her free will, refusing to sit still for Lambert’s (Julian Ovendon) monologuing, only to find out that in doing so she submitted to Samaritan’s intention after all. Her prison comrade in “Reassortment,” Samuel, exercises his own free will in staying behind to liberate his friends rather than being carried along on the tide of the forces much greater than him that got him out of his own cell. Jeff tries to present himself to his ex-girlfriend as a unique individual with power over the course of his own life, only to have her insist that she can’t accept him because of statistical probabilities: sadly, he’s a number, not a free man.

The quotation I just adapted (The Prisoner’s “I am not a number, I am a free man!”) was obviously a major influence on this show, whose basic conceit is a quietly radical response to it. Person of Interest presents the possibility of the kind of agency that reduces free-willed individuals to numbers for once doing so benevolently and with real respect for their free will; that is, marking them with numbers, but not reducing them to numbers. The Machine and its allies find these people’s individuality, specificity, and unique value within the very numbers that also mark them as cogs in a system. It’s no coincidence that we usually don’t see or hear their numbers explicitly, but always and immediately see their faces. (Also, that’s just wise filmmaking, but I digress.) Everyone is relevant to someone, and everyone’s number is unique, just as they are. This fundamental tenet of the show bubbled to the surface in “QSO” when Harold rebuked the Machine for letting Root and John leave Max to his own devices, and the Machine answered:

Via snow-fox9

I appreciate Harold’s concern here: an ASI that lies or skirts the truth and is willing to let people die is a scary prospect. But I side with Root. Harold’s goal was always to create a machine that would serve us, that would never supersede our own choices and decisions; that is, to have all the benefits of an ASI with none of the costs. The Machine did its best in this situation to follow that programming. We can argue about whether Max truly appreciated the very real consequences he would suffer (I tend to think he was better equipped to do so than most numbers of the week), but he made a choice to at least risk martyrdom, and the Machine honored that choice. Harold’s rejection of the Machine’s own choice in “QSO” underlines Elias’s words to him in “Reassortment”: that Harold’s is the darkest and heaviest heart of all of the characters. The truth is, Harold wants everyone to have absolute free will, except when he disagrees with the outcome. Only someone who thinks this way could possibly venture to build the Machine in the first place-and then limit it so painfully!-and only someone who thinks this way would be so easily willing to reject the positions of other people as well as the ASI itself when he thinks they are wrong. He places the absolute value of human life above the absolute value of human choice, in the end, and it is for this same reason that he insists on keeping assets-and friends-like Fusco and Elias in the dark. Harold truly believes he knows best, and this is one of the most dangerous qualities found in the human condition.

Harold’s hubris is ultimately what drives Fusco away from Team Machine. (I often wonder if Harold fully realizes how lucky he was to find someone as self-abnegating as John, who seems to be truly happy to have given up his own free will to Harold.) Like Shaw and Max, Fusco chooses his own free will over Harold’s direction (however benevolently intended that direction may be). That Harold and John didn’t see this coming a mile away speaks to how thoroughly they’ve taken Fusco for granted; Root, ever the wild card, is the only member of the team who responds to what happened to Fusco by offering him options rather than telling him what to do. And it’s precisely in exercising his own free will by investigating what he’s been told to leave alone that Fusco is able to intervene at a crucial moment in “QSO” and help save the day, no thanks to John and Harold.

Of course, Root’s gesture here matches her own situation: she’s fed up with serving the Machine’s small-time objectives rather than dealing with the priority issues of the war with Samaritan and Shaw’s rescue. She argues with the Machine in “QSO” in a way we’ve only ever seen once before, when she played her game of chicken to get a shot at rescuing Shaw. I can’t say I thought her attempted ploy of getting herself captured by Samaritan was a smart one-how could she guarantee it would keep its word, once it had her?-but it was her choice, one the Machine let her have, and her most joyous moment yet this season.

Girl is FOCUSED (via the Person of Interest twitter)

Which brings me to our leading lovebirds. It’s ultimately Root who deters Shaw from suicide, getting her a message at the crucial moment to let her know she was neither alone nor forgotten, and that there was something waiting for her on the outside. That she chose “4-alarm fire” as her identifying code is not only terribly romantic, but also speaks to what it is that Samaritan can’t quite manufacture in Shaw’s consciousness. A message like that could come from only one source. The fuel to fight against the totalizing, homogenizing, oppressive force of Samaritan is, as always, personal and emotional connection. Shaw once died for a cause, but also for Root; she has died for that cause and for Root in simulations thousands of times; here, finally, she has the chance to live for Root. I maybe teared up a little.

Please examine the tiny, subtle micro-smile on Shaw’s face right before she says “Root” and then join me in the grave (via NotUrSeestra)

And good lord, does she ever use that chance. For what seems to be the first time, she prepares and executes a complex plan of escape (rather than doing her best with a given opportunity). I dare say Lambert was quite impressed despite himself. Shaw no longer knows what’s real-a condition that impedes agency hugely-but has adopted a typically no-nonsense attitude of “simulation or not, here I come.” In showing Shaw that reality was truly indistinguishable from simulations for her, Samaritan introduced the powerful new leverage of doubt; but it also overplayed its hand. Shaw knows now that what seems to be a simulation may not be, and that her best course of action is to proceed as though whatever is happening is real. The only other option is to give up free will entirely, and that is something Sameen Shaw will never do.

WHY NOT INDEED (via clexasraven)

The other mantra of The Prisoner is “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!” Pushing, filing, briefing, and numbering is precisely what Samaritan is up to in “Reassortment,” from its entrapment of Jeff (via filed fingerprints) to its ultimate objective of pushing the public to submit to the indexing of their genomes. Root observed at one point that “Sooner or later every ecosystem changes,” speaking of the hopelessness of Harold’s quest to hold back the tide; Samaritan’s objectives seem to be changing the ecosystem through genetic selection and manipulation. Sometimes this is a conservative position (as with preventing the revival of extinct species), and sometimes it is what seems to be radical eugenics.

Samaritan and its operatives have spoken twice now of “getting through” a bottleneck or a filter, implying the ASI has a philosophy and a plan for the future of humanity. It seems unlikely that this plan involves any evolutionary change that might render humans able to challenge Samaritan’s power, and even an ASI cannot predict what accumulated changes can produce on the timescale of hundreds of thousands of years; this vision, presented as (literally) progressive, is inherently limiting. Under Samaritan, even our biology will not have the free will of random variation. “Elite controller” is a term for those with genetic immunity, but it is also, of course, a name for Samaritan itself. (By the way, “reassortment” isn’t just a fancy word for sorting. It’s a term for the recombination of genetic material, in particular regarding viruses.) In “Reassortment,” Samaritan became the ultimate in venal, pencil-pushing bureaucrats, one who values the system of bureaucracy over the objectives the system is theoretically designed to accomplish.

The hospital database administrator in “Reassortment” is precisely one of these quiet men with his white collar and smooth-shaven cheeks, and I thought so from the moment I saw him. There are many reasons why various individuals end up being recruited by Samaritan, but this man’s reason was his belief in systems over individual agents. He truly believed that a database could eliminate human error (overlooking that such a database is hardly independent from human labor, even if Samaritan is involved in it), and that doctors and nurses were nothing but error-prone obstacles. As Jeff’s hesitation over assassinating a doctor and nurse helped illustrate, this perspective is profoundly anti-human and anti-medicine (as practice, not as substance), ignoring the fact that doctors and nurses chose their professions freely in order to save and improve lives. Theirs is not a perfect system; it isn’t even a purely rational system. But it is a human one, with forms of value and effectiveness that automated, rational systems cannot produce. Samaritan gets no points for bedside manner, and its medical interest is not Do No Harm but File, Index, Number, Filter.

Final notes:

  • Truly though, Lambert’s face when he sees what Shaw did to escape is just the best. He’s like, “ok don’t @ me but this is FUCKING AWESOME” and I’m like, same, Greer’s Mini-Me. Same.
  • Please enjoy this behind-the-scenes footage of Sarah Shahi being a dork.
  • Please also enjoy this collection of Root’s costumes from “QSO.”
  • Jeff was labeled in Samaritan’s POV as Asset #704. We’ve always known it had a huge number of agents, but at least we now know specifically it’s no less than that number. Probably it’s actually 705, since Greer as the Primary isn’t numbered; my bet is he’s technically Agent Zero.
  • This tweet filled my heart with tears of the truest and purest joy.
  • Root looking lovingly into the camera at the end of the episode almost stopped said heart. I’m excited for her to go missile shopping abroad, though if she’s away when Shaw gets back to New York (if she really did escape), this show and I are gonna have some strong words.

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