This past week, Person of Interest wrapped up its amazing, ambitious saga after five seasons on the air and there was plenty to talk about - hence, our two separate interviews with the creators of the show.

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In addition to our recent series finale-specific conversation with POI's executive producers , IGN's Matt Fowler and Eric Goldman also sat down with series creator/EP Johnathan Nolan and EP/showrunner Greg Plageman for a discussion about the way the show coming to an end, the music, the ambitious nature of the premise, the multi-world style of storytelling and a few lingering questions about the series finale, "return 0."This year sort of unfolded in a bittersweet way. It's very difficult because you want to devote yourself to one thing and other people want you onto the next thing. When other people start talking about the next thing you sort of know the thing you're working on is about to experience its demise. You don't feel that way necessarily in the moment, so that part's just weird to me.Greg's been through this a couple times but this is my first trip to the rodeo and it's heartbreaking. Everyone's so great. The cast, the crew, the writing staff, the support staff, in [both] New York and LA. It's a big community. It was just an extraordinary experience. And these characters too, I will dearly dearly miss writing for them and thinking about them and they become part of your life as well. As Greg said, in this business it can be, "What's the next thing?" and that's great, but this was a very special experience for me and I'm going to miss it greatly.It was fine, but it was stressful. Westworld was up on floor three of our building and Person of Interest was on floor two and I'd ride the elevator back and forth a lot. I'd find myself going down to Person of Interest because I enjoyed working on it so much but then I'd be like "I really need to be upstairs." I just liked hanging out because it was like family. So that was a cool experience - two writers rooms, over fifteen different writers working on different projects and bouncing back and forth. But with Person of Interest there was such a shorthand and everyone we worked with we'd been with for at least four years and so by the end it was such a tight-knit group, it was so, so fun dropping into that room. It was effortless breaking with that team.There was another aspect to this final year given the delay in the air schedule and it was that you'd get stopped by people continuously saying "When's your show coming back?" And then they don't know if it's the last season too, so there's a lot of anxiety there because your cast and your crew have questions so you just start sounding like a broken record after awhile, because you just don't have any answers for them.It's everything I imagined it could be and a whole lot more in terms of making it. In storytelling terms, we covered a lot of territory I wanted to get to, but there's always more. You always want to go further and you're inching the whole time toward something big. And actually, we did a good job of keeping it all sort of in the "five minutes into the future" conversation. The conversation in the beginning was all about the state of surveillance and then that caught up with us a couple years in. And then by the time that happened, the AI conversation came back to the forefront very much with the show. And then you have to consider the events of the last six months with AlphaGo defeating a grand master at chess. We're out of intellectual challenges that we're superior at and that's a heavy, heady moment. And so it was great fun for five years staying just a little bit ahead of the curve and then to inch ever further into the future. But that's okay, we'll take the remaining ideas and put them into other projects. I'm definitely not done with this subject. Whether we're done with these set of characters though remains to be seen.Certainly one of the things we knew we had to reconcile was not only what would happen with Samaritan but also what would be the ultimate fate of the Machine when it came to how we wanted to end the show and I think we did what we wanted to do in that regard.I think a part of it was all that relentless training, in a sense. Finch and Root trying to scheme out how this would work but also running these simulations with the Machine in order to figure out how it could win in its most paired down form. So you've got this decommissioned Soviet satellite and these things were up in there in their most compact fighting form. Sort of like how armies used to march out and select one champion to represent them, and the fight would be decided with that champion and the rest of the army would abide by that outcome. But at this point, the armies have been decimated and destroyed and only the champions remain. The sparest algorithmic versions of these ASIs uploaded into the satellite like two strands of DNA having a kung fu battle. So kind of fun, but also kind of hard to visualize.Also, keeping in mind that Finch unleashed this virus that could hobble Samaritan enough to put the two ASIs on more equal footing.Both of them have been reduced to their respective essence, and in that form, the Machine was going to kick Samaritan's ass.

Continue on as Nolan and Plageman talk Root, what could have been beyond Samaritan and more on Page 2...