POI 4.15: Q&A

[Dave]

Surprised I'm the first to comment on this because I'm a week behind. Anyway, spoilers follow:

There was a lot happened in this episode - enough to have split the two stories and had one per week - though it gave an excuse for Reese not to be around when Harold was captured and enabled the board meeting at the end. However, I almost felt it was rushed - like in the final episodes of Dollhouse.

It was good how they did the "is she/isn't she" with Claire, but sad really that they eventually made her stupid and dumb as she is obviously intelligent. And I had a bit of a roller-coaster ride with first thinking 'Great, they are finally going on the offensive' to 'Oh! No, Harold is captured' to 'Ah! Root saves the day' to eventually 'Oh! Nothing has changed.'

I did think that, even near the end, Claire could still be converted to play for the Machine, but since they've tried twice now, maybe not.

I'm not sure what vital information will be recovered from the laptop. Was it really worth it to Samaritan/Decima? I'm not sure why Harold only owns one laptop though. That seems remiss of him.

Was there a lot of Chess references in this episode? I caught one or two which makes me believe there were a lot more if I re-watched it again.

 

[markpud]

I've been offline recently so I'm also behind on comments, but I enjoyed this episode. They did a good job of showing Harold's mistrust of Claire and how she almost won him round. It does seem unlikely that she was unaware of the darker side of the Samaritan operation up until Greer's callous remarks at the end of the episode. But, as with Control, the seeds are now laid for her to join the "rebellion" against the Empire!

Chess is a regular theme of the show for sure. Samaritan is playing a good game, but as Finch noted previously, it's view that humans are mere pawns in the game is where the good guys have some kind of advantage(?).. The Machine was programmed to value those lives, even if its original programming labels them irrelevant.

Root came from nowhere to save the day. But this is an action show and there has to be some slack for that kind of thing. It makes for good TV