The episode starts out delightful (facial recognition!), becomes intense and terrifying, then gives us back a tiny bit of relief and happiness (family picnic!) while reminding us that greater horrors loom in the distance.
At the core of the episode was a powerful discourse on the nature of good and evil (and whether or not human nature is even compatible with the idea of there being inflexible goalposts of good and evil) and how time and change affect what good and evil can mean – because of how the machine was ‘unstuck in time’, she was smacked with all the good and all the bad at once. The concept of a ‘redemptive journey’ doesn’t mean anything if you can’t sort out before and after from each other.
As a child, Root did some terrible things out of revenge and loyalty. She was good at doing terrible things and so she started doing terrible things as her way of life instead. Who the machine was originally was able to look at Root, at the totality of her journey from the young child Sam to the grown and terrifying Root, and could step back enough to say ‘There’s potential here. Root could be a good person if directed towards good purposes’ (which is exactly what Harold did with John in the pilot, of course, and what we get a very ominous and scary echo of Samaritan doing at the end of the episode with the painter ex-con). The rebooted machine couldn’t sort out that context – we saw that first, and more humorously, with all the numbers it got wrong, and then it became tragic when it recontextualized Harold, Root, and John as threats.
We had so much machine PoV in this episode and I adored all of it. Again, the Harold/Machine interactions made me very emotional and kinda teary. When Harold realizes that he can ‘stick’ the machine back in time by giving it solid timeposts to hold onto – and then those timeposts also help it contextualize the actions of the three it had temporarily classified as threats. All those ‘thank you’s made me cry.
And the conclusion that Harold reaches – that perhaps it’s never fair to classify people as good or evil, only acts themselves, because every person is, to a certain extent, a mixture of positive and negative choices – rings very true to me because it’s my own brand of morality as well.
Fusco trying to teach John to be a functional cop with cop friends seems too little, too late to me (plus I’m pretty sure it has a negative chance of success, lol, John’s so miserable when he makes the attempt) but… you do you, Fusco. You do you.
Original Post:
POI 5x02
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