Is another season even confirmed yet? Last I heard it was still up in the air.
Latest TV By The Numbers estimates have it at 100% to be renewed, so if you trust their estimates...
A glance at Wikipedia indicates that the show was officially renewed for seasons 2, 3, and 4 on March 14th, 27th, and 13th, respectively.
So while I'm not suggesting panic just yet, we are a bit outside the previous ballpark by a month and change now. September is a ways off, but there aren't that many weeks left to get the green light either.
As for the finale... wow. That was a hell of a thing. And here I thought the end of season 3 was going to be a big change. From what I've read of interviews regarding a potential season 5... wow.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
ok, yeah. I'll get If-Then-Else out of the way. it was fantastic, it played the show's tropes like a finely-tuned fiddle and did exactly what we want from it. the couple of episodes after wherein Team Machine hunts Shaw were infused with the righteous fury we wanted., no, needed.
but other than that? this season was a let-down. the build-up to the finale was half-assed, rushed, and telegraphed at the same time. which is a feat in and of itself.
Person of Interest has always been at its best when it subverts expectations, tackles the 800-pound gorilla of the digital age (the conflict between privacy and security), goes off-script from the procedural formula, and has good music.
the last of these was the most egregious offender, this season. not only is Welcome To The Machine the song everyone has predicted for four seasons it was the only licensed song in... I dunno how long. this, after a series that has done the music thing right from the start. Glitch Mob, Massive Attack, the Black Angels, Johnny goddamn Cash covering Trent fucking Reznor, Radio Citizen, DJ Shadow, a brace of Radiohead songs, David Bowie with more Trent Reznor, and a few other things here and there that made the show a treat to watch because it had this tendency to startle you with an incredible soundtrack at just the right moment. S4 went out with a musical whimper.
beyond that, the plot arc of the season felt phoned in as hell. I'd previously commented that season 3 was so tightly focused on our collective post-Snowden zeitgeist about personal privacy that the show's tagline should have been "it's not paranoia if they're really watching you." season 4 started off with one of the greatest premises I've seen in a TV show: compromised by the emergence of second all-powerful AI, Team Machine goes undercover with Real Lives. the writers squander that goodwill immediately and go right back to square one, with the stakes-less standoffs between them and Team Samaritan culminating in the otherwise excellent If-Then-Else. in between, a couple of boring gangsters chew at the scenery. that's... it. I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to care about Elias and Dominic when there is not just one but two literal deus ex machinas in progress at the same time.
so fine, there doesn't have to be a Grand Plan of a plot tying everything together. Season 3 didn't have one, it just kept riffing on issues of privacy and security until you wanted to buy seventeen rolls of Reynolds and fashion a shiny sombrero out of it. even the most procedural episodes of season 3 dealt with Facebook analogues and questions about what happens to our data when we're dead. that stuff sticks out to me. season 4 avoided anything like this in favor of serving an uberplot that spanned the whole thing, and quite frankly it felt like they ran out of material halfway through. Shaw's departure was a breath of fresh air and made for some excellent television. it took them necessarily writing a character out because the actress was pregnant to do anything creative this season. that is a bad sign.
finally, we're at the issue of expectations. PoI is a procedural anti-cop show. PoI is "what if Batman was real, and so is Bruce Wayne, and they're different people." PoI is evidence that they really are out to get you. none of those things makes any sense, and yet show makes them work regardless by discarding cop show tropes, making superhuman feats of intelligence and skill totally plausible, and giving you an NSA-eye view of the action. this is the way in which season 4 failed most subtly, yet so utterly: it became predictable, and thus boring. the fresh angle on surveillance vis a vis Samaritan quickly devolved into "our scene transitions got a CGI upgrade!" and forewent any interesting angle on having the perspective of a different AI god. action scenes this season were poorly blocked, poorly shot, and entirely without impact; at one point in this series, John got shot every now and then and when he did he was out of commission for a couple of episodes. now not only does he never actually get hit when bullets are flying, when the plot necessitates a chink in his armor he bounces back within minutes.
so much of what has made this show work has been lost in the noise, and it was only as recently as last season that they had their strongest episodes. there's the odd bit of lightning left in the bottle and I hope they can recharge for a season 5. I've enjoyed this show much more than I ever would have expected. that they can produce an outcome like If-Then-Else proves that the writers and cast can defy prediction.
I agree that this season of Person of Interest squandered a lot of serious potential. It was pretty fragmented. There were some major arcs in the series, but also some what were clearly bottle episodes, and the two didn't mesh well, with the bottle episodes badly disrupting the developing tension of the arcs. The arcs themselves were a little too numerous and disconnected: there's the operating without the Machine arc, the police psychiatrist arc, the new identities arc, the Finch wants to quit arc, the saving Shaw arc, the Samaritan ramping up its political game arc, the Elias and Dominic arc, Control's arc, Control's agents' arc, Martine's arc, the Machine counter-measures arc, more I can't recall? And they didn't gel together well, and it feels like the season ran out of time on a lot of them.
For example, Elias and Dominic's on-again, off-again war was incredibly interesting... when it was on-screen. But it seemed like a ton of it was just happening off-screen, and we'd suddenly be dropped into it for an episode or two, and then pulled out again, leaving me wondering what the point of that brief visit was. I kept waiting for the other hammer to fall, because I expected the plots to tie together, but ... nope. Elias and Dominic are just killed at the end of the season. Annnd... I guess the point was to get us involved in their story, so their deaths resonate more? I suppose the show hasn't previously shied away from killing off secondary characters for dramatic purpose, but ... I dunno, it really didn't land for me. But I think I'd rather have seen Elias and Dominic finish their beef, honestly.
I dunno. In some way, I kinda think one of the problems, on a macro-level, was that the show got too unpredictable - it could never seem to keep a story arc going to keep its momentum, and then didn't pick it up effectively later. It felt like there was some serious fragmenting of how the season was plotted and written.
I definitely agree with you that a lot of the battles appeared much poorly blocked. I complained about it in here occasionally, that they were just at times God-mode and at times "forgot to bring ammo" mode. It actually reminds me a bit of how the technical quality and care for detail has declined on Castle too, with the characters just doing incredibly stupid stuff that's just telegraphed based on where the plot is supposed to go: is there no bad guy in the house? Then the cops will wander in like they know it already! Are Reese and Root supposed to lose this fight? Then they run out of ammo!
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I rather expect the ending to this season would have been somewhat more explosive if Shaw hadn't up and had kids and everything.
Also I disagree with you on just about everything.
The two biggest overlooked developments in the finale:
1: The Machine is now an active agent, and Harold condones it. Up until Root and Finch had their face-off at the Nuclear Facility, the Machine was only a provocateur of information. It could see, but never act. The direct threat to its existence allowed itself self-determination. It could move, and act in its own interests, but there were still barriers it could not cross. The machine could not directly interfere in the course of human events - it could still only provide information. We saw this when Root was in the psychiatric facility. The Machine could not enter the code itself, it could only give the code to Root.
This all changed very abruptly in the elevator shootout while procuring the night-vision goggles. Trapped inside, Root said 'It's time to get in the game,' and Harold assented. At that point, the Machine actively hacked the elevator and engaged it, for the first time directly altering the course of human events. For the first time, the Machine acted as Samaritan would have.
2: Harold sees the Machine as his child. There is no real discussion on this one, but it shows Harold's growth cycle over four seasons, going from viewing it as the machine, to a nebulous sentient AI of indeterminable morality, to his child, which he can't cast aside, no matter the Machine's actions.
Concerns for the future:
From what Harold and Root were describing, it would seem to me that the Machine is well and truly "dead." If all they were to salvage from it were 'core heuristics,' that seems to cast off any notion of memories or personhood. I wonder what the machine will resemble when it comes back to life.
I'm also not super thrilled with what they're doing to Shaw. The way they've written this stuff around her pregnancy is super sketch. I think I preferred her dead. Or at the very least, written into a hospital bed until she can come back to the show, sans-Samaritan-Team.
Glad to hear we will be getting at least one more season. Concerning the concerns:
It is probably too simplistic to just think of what they saved as The Machine as a human baby, but that is what my imagination is going with. Like actual human parents with their second child, will Harold try to raise it in the same way as the original Machine or try something different based on his recent experiences? How much input will Root have in nurturing a developing god?
I just hope with the Shaw stuff, she switched sides of her own free will as it was the best option in her mind to protect the gang. Otherwise, she would have been better off dead (best option IMO) or in a coma being nursed back to health by Root.
Edit:
Further thought:
"Mr. Thornhill" was already using printouts and data entry companies to circumvent Harold's nightly memory wipes so perhaps there is a document storage facility out there that has the more mature aspects of the machine ready to be re-entered at the right time?
GONG-00 on
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
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I'm hoping we get two. Two more seasons seems right.
I would prefer if they ended at season 5 - from my observations i conclude, that pretty much every series, if survives by having 5 good seasons, in 6th jumps the shark - House MD, LOST, 24, Supernatural...
Hopefully the next season is better than this one. There were a couple of decent episodes throughout it but we ended it in the exact same place we left the season prior, only now more people are dead. Overall it was a pretty big letdown of a season finale.
Why Control didn't shoot that little twerp Greer when she had the chance I have no idea. It would have been a nice cap on things as Samaritan would continue on completely unaffected, truly showing that it doesn't have to rely on any particular people and will use whoever it needs, underscoring its difference to The Machine and her team. This show is full of people not just shooting other people when they get the chance though so I shouldn't have expected much else.
It gets it just past the 100 episode mark, which did used to be the syndication sweet spot, though I hear it's closer to 88 episodes (equivalent of four 22 episode seasons) these days.
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I'll put it this way, if they don't renew this show, they're gonna wish the Machine was still putting out numbers, because CBS execs won't know what hit em.
Come at me, Samaritan.
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So that’s the internal, quiet life of misery and desperation that America’s version of capitalism bestows upon so many. Bad as it is, however, American pop culture apparently believes it’s still not bad enough. And that’s where Lyons’ piece, which examines “The Briefcase,” an odious new reality show from CBS, steps in. Because what “The Briefcase” does is tell the people who are unfortunate enough to not only be poor but also to be watching CBS that this mental anguish is, ultimately, something they’ve brought upon themselves.
Here’s the premise of the show, as Lyons explains it. A family dealing with what CBS euphemistically calls “financial setbacks” is given a briefcase full of $101,000. They are then shown another “financial setbacks”-plagued family and are told they must decide how much of the cash to share — if any. Unbeknownst to either family, this alienating setup is presented to both. Lyons writes that in the early episodes sent to critics, the families find their responsibility to be so great as to cause one woman to vomit and “several” to say it’s “the hardest decision they’ve ever made.”
How do they make such a decision? By engaging in a time-honored American tradition of separating the poor into two, mutually exclusive categories: those who deserve to be poor, and those who don’t. “The families visit each other’s homes and look through each other’s bills,” Lyons writes. Maybe they could afford to pay for their children’s surgery, if only they switched from Cheerios to Frosted Flakes! Essentially, CBS has decided Ronald Reagan’s stories about “welfare queens” and “young bucks” using welfare to buy Ferraris may not be technically true — but they’re true enough for reality TV.
Lyons calls this “altruism pornography,” but I think even that gives CBS — and the culture that allows the suits at the network to believe “The Briefcase” could be the next “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” — too much credit. Altruism pornography would involve episode after episode of charitable, kind-hearted giving. What’s happening here is much more dehumanizing, and requires much more of a buy-in on the part of its victims. It’s not porn; it’s “The Hunger Games.” And in its own way, it’s no less violent.
I'm thinking maybe I'll just wait for PoI to all come out on Netflix and not watch your disgusting network anymore.
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If CBS doesn't continue this amazing show Netflix needs to pick up the slack.
didn't Netflix already add season 4?
there might be a chance of that actually happening.
oh god Person of Interest with Netflix instead of CBS.
oh god oh god oh god oh god
I'd pay $20 a month just for PoI on Netflix. I'm not kidding. Just make Shaw actually be dead and cast Bear 15% more often and I'll toss in another fifsky.
Edit: Oh, and throw Leon through another window. or two.
Fuck you CBS you miserable pile of rat shit. I'm specifically not getting invested in Limitless because I fully expect you to pull the plug after you realize it's not your run of the mill police procedural.
We’re told the return of Person of Interest and the series premiere of new cop comedy Rush Hour will be announced at a later date.
:-(
According to a glance at the wiki, CBS 'isn't sure if the 5th season will be PoI's final one'.
Oh, good, so it's a half(ish) season but you aren't even telling them (or just admitting it out loud yet) if it'll be the last opportunity to provide closure to characters and story arcs. Nope, can't see any problems with that.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
At least if they know for sure it's the final season they can tie up all the loose ends?
yeah, hopefully the writers were told a head of time so they can end it properly rather than scrambling for and ending last minute or worse, leaving it on a cliffhanger.
At least if they know for sure it's the final season they can tie up all the loose ends?
yeah, hopefully the writers were told a head of time so they can end it properly rather than scrambling for and ending last minute or worse, leaving it on a cliffhanger.
They knew coming in that this was going to be a half-season, which obviously does not bode well for a continuation of the series.
Also, goddammit Sarah Shahi, but could you stop getting pregnant, please? First Life, now Person of Interest?
-Bear and Fusco are the only survivors
-Episode focused on brainwashed Shaw getting deprogrammed by the power of Shoot
-the rebuilt Machine merges with Samaritan
-the above requires a Butch and Sundance last stand with Samaritan's Bolivian Army
-Harold gets a final moment with Grace
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
They've said they were writing this as a presumed final season, but leaving enough to pick up if the ratings suddenly shot up.
So we should get a wrap-up, but I doubt it'll be a 'kill everyone' ending.
Posts
Or is is more or less dormant because it doesn't have access to the government feeds in those countries?
A glance at Wikipedia indicates that the show was officially renewed for seasons 2, 3, and 4 on March 14th, 27th, and 13th, respectively.
So while I'm not suggesting panic just yet, we are a bit outside the previous ballpark by a month and change now. September is a ways off, but there aren't that many weeks left to get the green light either.
As for the finale... wow. That was a hell of a thing. And here I thought the end of season 3 was going to be a big change. From what I've read of interviews regarding a potential season 5... wow.
season 4 sucked
ok, yeah. I'll get If-Then-Else out of the way. it was fantastic, it played the show's tropes like a finely-tuned fiddle and did exactly what we want from it. the couple of episodes after wherein Team Machine hunts Shaw were infused with the righteous fury we wanted., no, needed.
but other than that? this season was a let-down. the build-up to the finale was half-assed, rushed, and telegraphed at the same time. which is a feat in and of itself.
Person of Interest has always been at its best when it subverts expectations, tackles the 800-pound gorilla of the digital age (the conflict between privacy and security), goes off-script from the procedural formula, and has good music.
the last of these was the most egregious offender, this season. not only is Welcome To The Machine the song everyone has predicted for four seasons it was the only licensed song in... I dunno how long. this, after a series that has done the music thing right from the start. Glitch Mob, Massive Attack, the Black Angels, Johnny goddamn Cash covering Trent fucking Reznor, Radio Citizen, DJ Shadow, a brace of Radiohead songs, David Bowie with more Trent Reznor, and a few other things here and there that made the show a treat to watch because it had this tendency to startle you with an incredible soundtrack at just the right moment. S4 went out with a musical whimper.
beyond that, the plot arc of the season felt phoned in as hell. I'd previously commented that season 3 was so tightly focused on our collective post-Snowden zeitgeist about personal privacy that the show's tagline should have been "it's not paranoia if they're really watching you." season 4 started off with one of the greatest premises I've seen in a TV show: compromised by the emergence of second all-powerful AI, Team Machine goes undercover with Real Lives. the writers squander that goodwill immediately and go right back to square one, with the stakes-less standoffs between them and Team Samaritan culminating in the otherwise excellent If-Then-Else. in between, a couple of boring gangsters chew at the scenery. that's... it. I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to care about Elias and Dominic when there is not just one but two literal deus ex machinas in progress at the same time.
so fine, there doesn't have to be a Grand Plan of a plot tying everything together. Season 3 didn't have one, it just kept riffing on issues of privacy and security until you wanted to buy seventeen rolls of Reynolds and fashion a shiny sombrero out of it. even the most procedural episodes of season 3 dealt with Facebook analogues and questions about what happens to our data when we're dead. that stuff sticks out to me. season 4 avoided anything like this in favor of serving an uberplot that spanned the whole thing, and quite frankly it felt like they ran out of material halfway through. Shaw's departure was a breath of fresh air and made for some excellent television. it took them necessarily writing a character out because the actress was pregnant to do anything creative this season. that is a bad sign.
finally, we're at the issue of expectations. PoI is a procedural anti-cop show. PoI is "what if Batman was real, and so is Bruce Wayne, and they're different people." PoI is evidence that they really are out to get you. none of those things makes any sense, and yet show makes them work regardless by discarding cop show tropes, making superhuman feats of intelligence and skill totally plausible, and giving you an NSA-eye view of the action. this is the way in which season 4 failed most subtly, yet so utterly: it became predictable, and thus boring. the fresh angle on surveillance vis a vis Samaritan quickly devolved into "our scene transitions got a CGI upgrade!" and forewent any interesting angle on having the perspective of a different AI god. action scenes this season were poorly blocked, poorly shot, and entirely without impact; at one point in this series, John got shot every now and then and when he did he was out of commission for a couple of episodes. now not only does he never actually get hit when bullets are flying, when the plot necessitates a chink in his armor he bounces back within minutes.
so much of what has made this show work has been lost in the noise, and it was only as recently as last season that they had their strongest episodes. there's the odd bit of lightning left in the bottle and I hope they can recharge for a season 5. I've enjoyed this show much more than I ever would have expected. that they can produce an outcome like If-Then-Else proves that the writers and cast can defy prediction.
For example, Elias and Dominic's on-again, off-again war was incredibly interesting... when it was on-screen. But it seemed like a ton of it was just happening off-screen, and we'd suddenly be dropped into it for an episode or two, and then pulled out again, leaving me wondering what the point of that brief visit was. I kept waiting for the other hammer to fall, because I expected the plots to tie together, but ... nope. Elias and Dominic are just killed at the end of the season. Annnd... I guess the point was to get us involved in their story, so their deaths resonate more? I suppose the show hasn't previously shied away from killing off secondary characters for dramatic purpose, but ... I dunno, it really didn't land for me. But I think I'd rather have seen Elias and Dominic finish their beef, honestly.
I dunno. In some way, I kinda think one of the problems, on a macro-level, was that the show got too unpredictable - it could never seem to keep a story arc going to keep its momentum, and then didn't pick it up effectively later. It felt like there was some serious fragmenting of how the season was plotted and written.
I definitely agree with you that a lot of the battles appeared much poorly blocked. I complained about it in here occasionally, that they were just at times God-mode and at times "forgot to bring ammo" mode. It actually reminds me a bit of how the technical quality and care for detail has declined on Castle too, with the characters just doing incredibly stupid stuff that's just telegraphed based on where the plot is supposed to go: is there no bad guy in the house? Then the cops will wander in like they know it already! Are Reese and Root supposed to lose this fight? Then they run out of ammo!
Also I disagree with you on just about everything.
http://deadline.com/2015/05/csi-cyber-odd-couple-poi-hawaii-good-wife-ncis-renewed-cbs-1201424574/
This all changed very abruptly in the elevator shootout while procuring the night-vision goggles. Trapped inside, Root said 'It's time to get in the game,' and Harold assented. At that point, the Machine actively hacked the elevator and engaged it, for the first time directly altering the course of human events. For the first time, the Machine acted as Samaritan would have.
2: Harold sees the Machine as his child. There is no real discussion on this one, but it shows Harold's growth cycle over four seasons, going from viewing it as the machine, to a nebulous sentient AI of indeterminable morality, to his child, which he can't cast aside, no matter the Machine's actions.
Concerns for the future:
I'm also not super thrilled with what they're doing to Shaw. The way they've written this stuff around her pregnancy is super sketch. I think I preferred her dead. Or at the very least, written into a hospital bed until she can come back to the show, sans-Samaritan-Team.
I just hope with the Shaw stuff, she switched sides of her own free will as it was the best option in her mind to protect the gang. Otherwise, she would have been better off dead (best option IMO) or in a coma being nursed back to health by Root.
Edit:
Further thought:
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
fffffff
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Come at me, Samaritan.
I'm hoping we get a save of some sort because of exactly that. I'd be surprised if he didn't at least get a phonecall about moving the show.
CBS
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/30/americas_never_ending_war_on_poor_people_why_the_briefcase_is_just_the_latest_assault/
I'm thinking maybe I'll just wait for PoI to all come out on Netflix and not watch your disgusting network anymore.
didn't Netflix already add season 4?
there might be a chance of that actually happening.
oh god Person of Interest with Netflix instead of CBS.
oh god oh god oh god oh god
I'd pay $20 a month just for PoI on Netflix. I'm not kidding. Just make Shaw actually be dead and cast Bear 15% more often and I'll toss in another fifsky.
Edit: Oh, and throw Leon through another window.
or two.
Anyone notice anything missing.
Fuck you CBS you miserable pile of rat shit. I'm specifically not getting invested in Limitless because I fully expect you to pull the plug after you realize it's not your run of the mill police procedural.
:-(
According to a glance at the wiki, CBS 'isn't sure if the 5th season will be PoI's final one'.
Oh, good, so it's a half(ish) season but you aren't even telling them (or just admitting it out loud yet) if it'll be the last opportunity to provide closure to characters and story arcs. Nope, can't see any problems with that.
The article doesn't say anything definitive on it being the last season or not, but at least we know when it'll air.
Saw a headline the other day where JJ Abrams was saying he expected it to be cancelled after this season.
JJ came out and said this is basically the end and not two days later CBS is out going "no no it's still up in the air"
CBS doesn't want Netflix to get it or something.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
http://deadline.com/2016/03/person-of-interest-premiere-date-season-5-mike-molly-return-cbs-finales-1201721521/
http://deadline.com/2016/03/person-of-interest-canceled-5-seasons-cbs-1201721683/
Fuck you too CBS.
yeah, hopefully the writers were told a head of time so they can end it properly rather than scrambling for and ending last minute or worse, leaving it on a cliffhanger.
They knew coming in that this was going to be a half-season, which obviously does not bode well for a continuation of the series.
Also, goddammit Sarah Shahi, but could you stop getting pregnant, please? First Life, now Person of Interest?
-Episode focused on brainwashed Shaw getting deprogrammed by the power of Shoot
-the rebuilt Machine merges with Samaritan
-the above requires a Butch and Sundance last stand with Samaritan's Bolivian Army
-Harold gets a final moment with Grace
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
So we should get a wrap-up, but I doubt it'll be a 'kill everyone' ending.