Person of Interest/Headscratchers

• I haven't watched the show yet, but I find the premise insanely creepy. The Government is watching you 24/7 to make sure you're not a terrorist? These guys use that system to spy on you and stop you if they think you're gonna commit a crime? Yeah. So question is: Is is better than it sounds? Or is it as bad as that sounds?
  • Much better than it sounds, and their surveillance rarely comes off as creepy. Once the number comes through and they know a person is in danger/may be about to cause harm, they get into their phones and their records. But they never see what made the Machine spit out the number (that's part of the suspense of the show; they never know WHY the person is a Person of Interest, and sometimes they protect the person from the wrong perceived threats). So while there is a lot of "Big Brother is Watching," their actual behavior is no more invasive than a well-funded private investigator."
• I love the character of Elias, but the recent episode, "Flesh and Blood" nearly ruined him for me, and the entire sequence that did felt so out of character. Elias, as a young man, finds his fathers organization and quickly works his way up until his father decides he should be killed. Awesome, and totally within what we know of Elias already. Elias is tricked to going out into the woods where two goons plan to Off him. So i think, Elias, Extraordinarily Intelligent Badass Extraordinaire has got a plan. Except that he doesn't. he was tricked by two idiot mafioso goons. he didn't have a plan, he didn't even know what THEY were planning. when they reveal that he's about to get killed, he begins to cry. seriously. He only survives due to extremely good luck and the fact that the goons were overly incompetent. I figured that Elias would have men hidden in the trees to ambush the two, or even better, he would somehow convince them to fight on his side, or kill each other, which would mark where his organization began. The only saving grace of the episode is the sheer awesomeness of the end where, despite everything up to and including being incarcerated, Elias still completely owns the shit out of the Mafia. But even that only stands to contrast the actions and capability of his younger self.
  • Elias at that point wasn't a badass chessmaster. He just wanted to earn the respect of the father he never knew and figure out who killed his mother (Not knowing that they were the same person). Then he learns that his father killed his mother simply because having a mistress who bore him an illegitimate child was an embarrassment and was now going to have him killed for the exact same reason. Him crying is understandable - he's just had his worldview shattered and his hopes of parental approval destroyed. His journey to become the man he is now started the moment he killed his two would-be executioners.
• Given that a recent study has revealed that at least 25% of all people on Facebook falsify at least part of their profile (And that's just the people who do it to protect themselves from identity thieves), how does the machine know what pieces of information on social networking sites are real?
  • Corroboration, and they've been faked out before.
• At first I had a minor gripe with Episode 10 ("Number Crunch"): Someone has a mortgage which is bigger than their house, and the bank is foreclosing on it. But if the mortgage is for (say) $300,000 and the house is only worth $100,000 then the bank would much rather have the borrowers paying principal and interest on a $300,000 loan than foreclose and collect only $100,000 on the sale. While it's true that New York allows "recourse" mortgages where the lender can then go after the borrower's other assets, it's still usually going to be smarter for the bank to *not* foreclose.