I watched all of season 1 of Person of Interest (POI) in three days.
Obviously I got hooked, but I'd have stopped watching halfway through if I hadn't heard that the show gets better.
Network TV is such commercial crap––
the season should have consisted of 8 excellent, tight episodes (like the UK's Life on Mars) instead of 23 episodes, mostly of vigilante porn about as original as Batman.
But I had heard that it gets better, so I kept watching, and it does.
In the last two episodes of season 1, POI finally gets into the sci-fi thought experiment/philosophical meat:
What is human consciousness,
and what might the creation of artificial intelligence mean for us?
The turn comes with the introduction of a hacker who says humans are "just bad code" (flawed design).
And there are other rewards for watching the crime-of-the-week episodes--someone put good thought into the set design.
Here, for instance, we see former CIA spy John Reese (Jim Caviezel) in his apartment. Betrayal & violence, his own and others', have left him a hollowed out man.
What would such a man eat?
Sardines.
This visual detail says as much as anything about Reese, that even though he works for a billionaire who presumably pays him very well, he subsists on cheap, portable protein that needs no refrigeration.
I'd recommend watching the first couple episodes, to get the gist of the show, and then skipping to episodes 22 & 23––
except then you'd miss one of my favorite characters:
Detective Carter, played by Taraji P. Henson (the mathematician in Hidden Figures):
Obviously I got hooked, but I'd have stopped watching halfway through if I hadn't heard that the show gets better.
Network TV is such commercial crap––
the season should have consisted of 8 excellent, tight episodes (like the UK's Life on Mars) instead of 23 episodes, mostly of vigilante porn about as original as Batman.
But I had heard that it gets better, so I kept watching, and it does.
In the last two episodes of season 1, POI finally gets into the sci-fi thought experiment/philosophical meat:
What is human consciousness,
and what might the creation of artificial intelligence mean for us?
The turn comes with the introduction of a hacker who says humans are "just bad code" (flawed design).
And there are other rewards for watching the crime-of-the-week episodes--someone put good thought into the set design.
Here, for instance, we see former CIA spy John Reese (Jim Caviezel) in his apartment. Betrayal & violence, his own and others', have left him a hollowed out man.
What would such a man eat?
Sardines.
This visual detail says as much as anything about Reese, that even though he works for a billionaire who presumably pays him very well, he subsists on cheap, portable protein that needs no refrigeration.
I'd recommend watching the first couple episodes, to get the gist of the show, and then skipping to episodes 22 & 23––
except then you'd miss one of my favorite characters:
Detective Carter, played by Taraji P. Henson (the mathematician in Hidden Figures):
Nice catch, so to speak. The red cans look like the big oval ones. The little silver cans to their right look like sardine cans too. The guy’s prepared.
ReplyDeleteMICHAEL: heh heh, I saw the sardines because of you, of course (and Crow).
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing out the cans on the right are sardines too---they had baffled me. But yeah, now I see they have the crinkle-cut sides of fish tins:
I suppose the crinkles are to give you a grip when you're opening the can, so it doesn't slip and spill fish and oil all over you?
P.S. I went looking for that red & yellow sardine tin, but turns out that's the color of many sardine brands (as you know)--
ReplyDeletethat's probably why I instantly thought "sardines" when I saw this brief scene.
So...are there any episodes in the middle that you would recommend?
ReplyDeleteI'd say the first two, to get set up, then 6 through 10,
ReplyDeleteand then the final Season 1 episodes, 22 & 23.
The rest are all OK, but kind of predicatable/repetitve.
6"The Fix"
7"Witness"
8"Foe"
9"Get Carter"
10"Number Crunch"