As much as we learned about the state of the new world order
in “ShotSeeker”, there’s even more that the show leaves in its wake to suggest
we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. Lingering questions or doubts are placed
in the characters’ heads and while some of them are told to count what few blessings they have and move on, others take it upon themselves to continue rocking the boat, which might be
much more dangerous than they could possibly fathom. The truth, in “ShotSeeker”,
is very much something you can try to discern from something that reads false – much like
how the number of the week Ethan Garvin can tell a gunshot from a firecracker
exploding – but digging too hard might rain all sorts of trouble down upon you.
The Ethan Garvin story seems rather straightforward until it
shows us that it really isn’t. He’s investigating the disappearance of someone
familiar to him, Krupa Naik, but wonders why ShotSeeker’s heuristics and
results don’t seem to align with his expert analysis. Those were gunshots he
heard, but the system flags it as firecrackers. It doesn’t make sense to him
because he was the one to update and fix ShotSeeker, on top of running his own personal test by
barging into her empty apartment. It becomes increasingly clear as the
investigation continues that Samaritan could be the only possible entity behind
this, as we learn that it has access to and can obviously manipulate
ShotSeeker. Samaritan ultimately has a plan for Krupa’s research, but it’s
always unclear what Samaritan’s motivations really are. Has it become so
efficient it finds her research tantamount to ending world hunger in some
fashion? Or does it want to destroy it to cause more? (The easy trope of thinning out the heard Malthusian style) I get the feeling it is
more towards the latter, as we have been shown the more benevolent side of
Samaritan last season, which raises some questions about Samaritan altogether. What
if it is ultimately a benevolent force, but for that peace and prosperity, you
exchange it for your free will or self-determination? It’s likely Samaritan has crunched
the numbers and reasoned out that in order to make the omelet that is world peace,
you have to murder or incriminate a few eggs. Maybe it has no use for the 5% of people on both sides of the bell curve. Maybe it's not just the criminal 'outliers' that were removed, but the people trying to make the world a better place, because they stand in Samaritan's vision.
None of this feels right to Fusco though. There are still
lingering threads that seem questionable to him even after the danger subsides. And because the team rightfully
doesn’t want him to learn that he’s basically in the middle of a war between to
A.S.I.s, he has to take it upon himself to uncover the truth, rather than accept
that the best they can do is fix the immediate problem of keeping Ethan Garvin
safe. It just comes at a time where he isn’t aware he is actually being watched
and any breakthrough will result in probably half a dozen SUVs pulling up to
the street and gunning him down.
Because Krupa Naik’s actual study and research files still
exist, Samaritan needs to find it now that Garvin is looking. This brings us to
an encounter between Root and Blackwell. It’s likely Blackwell is less
philosophically inclined to what Samaritan stands for. Learning that he’s basically hired muscle that’s kept
in the dark probably won’t end well when he asks more questions, making him an interesting contrast to Reese in some respects. Perhaps
Blackwell will become one of the human elements that Samaritan might not expect
that could lead to its downfall. But now, the seeds of doubt are planted, and I
hope to see more in the future.
And of course, Elias is still very much alive, kept in the
team’s former safehouse where might likely spend most of his days while the war
wages. It’s likely that Elias knows about the A.S.I. war waging quietly in the
background, but he also knows that his kind is powerless against it; that his
fortune in surviving was but a roll of the dice. The show doesn’t confirm it his knowledge outright,
but we see the other side of Elias reflected in his childhood friend and partner
in crime, Bruce, who is adamant to learn the truth about Elias’ fate that
night, and has learned that Samaritan’s correction also took the lives of the
heads of other large crime syndicates and any attempts to fill the vacuum have
failed to surface. For a criminal, that seems so counterintuitive to their
understanding of the criminal world that there must be some other faction in
play. It’s just that Bruce can’t see it and Elias can only speak cryptically
about it, doing his best to keep his friend safe. There will probably be more in Bruce’s future if he tries desperately
to carve out an existence in a world where his type of criminal can no
longer be allowed to flourish.
Carrying over from the previous episode is Finch’s attempt
to find a way for the Machine and Samaritan to either cooperate or for one to
win against the other. It’s a compelling scene because just when you think the
show might imply or foreshadow that the natural conclusion of the show might
involve the merging of both A.S.I.'s, we’re shown otherwise. Inside the Faraday
cage that effectively acts as a playground sandbox for both baby versions of the
Machine and Samaritan to fight it out, the Machine is like the child that
refuses to fight, but Samaritan is the bully giving out the proverbial wedgies
and wet willies, relentlessly. By the episode’s end, Finch confides in Reese that
basically of none of the 10 billion or so simulations between them has resulted
in any tangible wins for the Machine. Root wants Finch to program more defensive
(if not aggressive) code into her god, but Finch wonders if that’s the case, if
it is not up to the Machine instead. This is his child, a product and reflection of
him; which means that for the Machine to change, we’ll probably have to see
Finch change. If that’s the case, I hope to expect more scenes between Finch
and the Machine as they both work through this conundrum that they face.
No comments:
Post a Comment