In the fifteenth episode of the fourth season of Person of Interest, the team deals with manipulation. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Person of Interest.
Trigger Warning: For suicide and depression.
Person of Interest exists within a fascinating realm of our cultural and political reality, given that it is a speculative fiction show that developed within a world that began to evolve alongside it. Advertising is already targeted to a frightening degree. (You almost wouldn’t believe how many emails I get from people decrying certain ads showing up when they’re browsing this site, and how many of those people never write back when I tell them that advertising is often targeted based on the other things that they’re searching or visiting. It’s… it’s a lot.) It’s absolutely unreal how quickly ads for something I’ve just bought appear on other sites. (Well, when I’ve got AdBlock off, that is.) Is it really that much of a stretch that people would use technology to further push people to be amenable to clicking other ads? Is it really that much of a stretch to propose a story about someone willing to exploit people’s vulnerabilities in order to make money off of them? Look, I’ve sat in enough marketing meetings over the years to know that there are some people in that industry who care not for the ramifications of their actions. (Whew, some day I’ll talk about the shit I heard at Buzznet. It was horrifying.) It’s all about money. Impressions. Clicks. Return on investment.
Thus, Person of Interest is like this unnerving parallel mirror of our own world. Some of my favorite works of speculative fiction are like this. They toy with the audience because there isn’t as much suspension of disbelief as we might expect. That’s the case with one of the two major plots in “Q&A,†which tracks John as he tries to help a woman who discovered evidence that the search app she worked on had pushed someone to commit suicide. It’s just believable enough that I was transfixed by watching Anna Mueller navigate this disaster. I mean, initially, we didn’t even know whether she was a victim or a perpetrator, and then we got dealt that incredible plot twist with her being an MMA fighter. But the eventual reveal of her involvement in the plot to cover up the deadly advertising technique was fun for another reason: the writers found a way to have Anna contribute to her own mission! The team is shorthanded, so SHE GETS TO KICK ASS, TOO. That confrontation scene during the climax is so good, y’all.
And it was nice to get another plot that didn’t have to do with Samaritan, who I suspected of tampering with VAL to take out someone it had deemed as an obstacle. However, then there’s Claire. Y’all, I wanted so badly for Claire to have been telling the truth. SO BADLY. As I said on video, the team had been dealt so many crushing blows lately that I just wanted something good to happen. And for a moment there, it seemed like Claire was telling the truth: She finally believed Harold. She finally realized that Decima/Samaritan were a million times worse than she could have ever imagined.
Unfortunately, I never considered where this story would go, that Claire would believe in Samaritan. It was a disturbing and upsetting twist of events, y’all, because… well, I expected more of Claire. For someone who had been so suspicious of the world, she seems to have latched on to the philosophy of Samaritan wholeheartedly. To her, the ends justifies the means, and like many others who have done the bidding of Samaritan, she was willing to let other people suffer so that humanity could be “happy.â€
Was that final scene meant to hint at the possibility that she’s starting to realize she’s an disposable pawn? Or does she believe so fully in Samaritan that she doesn’t care?
The video for “Q&A†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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