CBS

CBS



CBS

It's rare for a television series about technology to get anything right about how computers work, let alone how hackers do their jobs. But in a pop culture landscape flooded with shows like CSI: Cyber and Scorpion, the CBS show Person of Interest stood out as smart, relevant, and mostly clueful about how networked devices actually function. Last night marked the final episode in its five-year run, ending a plot arc about the birth of two artificial intelligences, the ethical Machine and the ruthless Samaritan. Audiences were left with a vision of an ambiguous new future, where we can't just put our powerful new surveillance and machine learning technologies back in the box. We have to figure out how to make them tools for justice rather than tools for conformity and oppression.

When Person of Interest first started in 2011, it focused mostly on corruption in the NYPD and the nebulous "intelligence community" that trained super-ninja character Reese—and then burned him, badly. Living on the streets, half-mad with PTSD, Reese (Jim Caviezel) is rescued by a mysterious, wealthy hacker named Finch (Michael Emerson). In the darkened stacks of an abandoned library, Finch has set up a high-tech surveillance operation designed to save the lives of "ordinary people" the government "doesn't care about."

Finch's only companion, other than Reese, is a mysterious AI he built called the Machine. Locked behind government firewalls, the Machine has one backdoor for communicating with Finch: when its predictive algorithms determine someone is about to experience violence, as a victim or perpetrator, the Machine transmits that person's social security number to Finch via payphone. During the first season, Finch and Reese team up with NYPD detectives Carter (Taraji Henson) and Fusco (Kevin Chapman) to stop that violence wherever they can. Carter, who is former military, is willing to help them because she still believes in making the world safer. Fusco is such a dirty cop that he's vulnerable to blackmail. This ragtag gang of idealists and cynics somehow comes together to form one of the most memorable crime-fighting teams in recent TV history. Their secret weapon is always the Machine, whose sensorium is made up of every surveillance device in the country and whose mind encompasses every form of personal data you could possibly imagine.

The Machine remained a shadowy unknown in those early days, as the team brought down a notorious group of dirty cops known as "HR," captured New York's most dangerous criminal mastermind, and tried to prevent the government from killing everyone who knows about the Machine. But then we met Root (Amy Acker), a deadly hacker as brilliant as Finch, whose only goal is to set the Machine free. She doesn't care how many people she has to kill to do it. Root believes humans are mostly running "bad code" and that the Machine will prevent us from destroying ourselves and the world. Root also sees the Machine in far more human terms than Finch and Reese ever did; she refers to the Machine as "she" and describes the Machine as having intense feelings of loss and betrayal because of Finch. Gradually, we come to understand that Finch has built so many safety mechanisms into the Machine that it literally cannot remember who it is from one day to the next. Finch has created a life form, but he's stunting its growth. Root wants to make sure the Machine is able to become an adult, as it were.

At roughly the halfway point in the series, the focus moved from Batman-style, high-tech vigilantism to a more science fictional tale about how to program an AI that will want to save the world. We parted ways with Carter (Henson went on to play the iconic role of Cookie on Empire) and met Shaw (Sarah Shahi), a former intelligence agent like Reese. Shaw's superpower, other than her insane ninja skills, is her ability to think like the Machine does. There are hints that she's on the spectrum, and, as a result, she remains calm and collected in situations that would turn neurotypicals into quivering balls of fear. Over time, Shaw, Root, and the Machine form a troika that offers us a glimpse of what teamwork and love might look like in a world of ubiquitous AIs.

While the series never left its number-of-the-week format behind, the Machine's arc became a central focus. With Root's help, the Machine figured out how to escape its government prison and roam freely across a distributed network of hidden server farms. What kept the show from becoming hokey was the way its standout team of writers always tied the fate of the Machine to the surveillance state. After all, the Machine is a form of intelligence that arose out of what Finch calls a "secret system... that spies on you every hour of every day."

So the question becomes whether the Machine will grow up to be the good conscience of the surveillance state or use our data against us. Person of Interest teased the idea that the Machine might turn evil, but then it introduced us to true evil in the form of the "open" AI known as Samaritan. In the lingo of the show, "open" means that Samaritan has no ethical checks on its behavior. It will do everything possible to make humanity into an orderly, peaceful species, even if that means using force, rigging elections, and assassinating "deviants" who question authority.

Last night's series finale did not entirely settle the question of whether the Machine could truly triumph over Samaritan. Certainly some of the good guys won. Some lost. The Machine engaged Samaritan in a final battle in space... but what happened? Did the two AIs merge, as many fans thought they might? Did the Machine crush Samaritan? Is Samaritan hiding inside the Machine, like a piece of sentient malware just waiting for the right vulnerability to exploit? Though we have hints that the Machine won, we just don't know for sure. And that final flourish is the true genius of this show.

Person of Interest always engaged with contemporary issues in technology, security, and politics—exploring everything from Snowden to the Silk Road—and rarely gave us easy answers. But one refrain from the series remained unambiguous, and that was the idea that we cannot legislate away our powerful new surveillance tech. We can't nuke it from orbit; we can't shut it down. Even if both the Machine and Samaritan were destroyed, Finch points out that somebody else would invent another AI fairly quickly. So we are left to grapple with our human impulses to do good or evil, with the tools that we have. In the end, it's not about the machines—or even the Machine—it's about what we decide to do with them. Do we help people, or do we turn citizens into data slaves? It's up to us.

If you haven't delved into the world of Person of Interest, now you can watch all five seasons online. The first four are streaming on Netflix in the US, and the fifth season is streaming on CBS.

Listing image by CBS