Are you still reeling from the events in Person of Interest's Season 3 finale, "Deus Ex Machina?" Do you still have Radiohead's "Exit Music (For A Film)" stuck in your head as you picture Vigilance operatives being gunned down on the streets of New York while our heroes all walk off on their separate ways with brand new identities? Don't worry. You're not alone. But let's find out what lies ahead for the show now that Samaritan has dug its cyber-talons into the U.S. surveillance feeds.

IGN's Review of Person of Interest's "Deus Ex Machina"

I had the chance to speak with Person of Interest executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman about the finale, the choice to have Samaritan take over, and what it all means for Season 4.

Jim Caviezel in Person of Interest.

: [laughs]: Matt, it all makes much more sense if you have a couple glasses of Pinot Noir.: Yeah, it was. And Greg can talk about the episode because he wrote it. But as far as the mythology goes, for a long time now, I think all the way back from the beginning, we've been headed toward, as Greer put it, a pantheon of super-intelligent beings that meddle in our affairs. And the reality is that there are a ton of sci-fi writers who have gotten to a lot of these themes and questions before us. There's nothing new under the sun. We talked about Colossus: The Forbin Project, which was a film I discovered back in the "Manager Recommends" section of a video store where I was living in Boston many many years ago. And I just thought it was f***n' amazing. So much of speculative fiction converges on a singularity. And the classic singularity of all our consciousnesses being uploaded into one massive hive mind. It's very cool and we found those concepts is fascinating. But all that we're hearing about AI right now - it really does feel like we're in that moment.: And in the next five to ten years, there's this small group of people, who aren't getting a lot of publicity right now because they're deliberately going dark - these are anonymous storefronts - or anonymous business parks up in Mountain View, or in Silicon Valley - they are really cruising on this f***in' thing. It feels steps away from the first AGI [thinking machine]. And so much of the fiction out there seems to hinge on the concept that it will all get sucked into one. One entity. I actually think reality will be a little messier than that.: The series is fundamentally changed, but in a really interesting way. Our heroes are on the run. What Root did is what she said right at the end of the episode. That this was always about pure survival. And she's created a way, even though our heroes are on the run, for there to be a way for them to hide in plain site. And the interesting aspect here too is that there's now a proliferation of another intelligence. A more powerful one. A more aggressive one, certainly more so than The Machine. And how our heroes will be able to conduct themselves under that umbrella. I think it's going to be really interesting. We're still going to have numbers. Samaritan is now tasked with taking on the relevant numbers because of the deal that Greer made with the government. He's going to be getting those feeds. But the question then becomes what happens with the irrelevant numbers.: Their mission continues. It goes back to what Finch said at the beginning of all this. I mean forget the neo-Orwellian state and the bigger problems at hand, The Machine is still spitting out numbers. The country, and the world, continues to be a place where chaotic s*** happens. And so they've got to spin that plate while trying to take out the God's head that has surreptitiously taken over and dug into the U.S. Command and Control. There's a quixotic mission at the heart of the show and that never goes away. The show is very much written in that superhero key. It's a world that I love. If our superheroes up to this point have been anonymous - I mean Finch has dabbled with having different fake identities - but whether it's Root or Reese or Shaw, they're these enigmatic figures. Well now the world has turned and they're going to need their secret identities.They're going to need to be grounded. They're going to need to be normal people. And from a character and performer perspective, we just found that irresistible. And truly the only outliers in this world right now are those who don't exist online. Try doing anything in this country if you don't have a credit record. You don't exist. And the delicious fun of where we will find our heroes next season will involve what they'll be doing and what kind of normal lives they'll have to be leading in order to hide. It was an opportunity that we couldn't pass up.

More from Nolan and Plageman, plus who was in charge of adding the Radiohead song, on Page 2...