interest of person
Sep. 15th, 2024 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishSurvived my first day at work in seventeen months, despite being woken up at four AM by the enterphone ringing and not really being able to get back to sleep. Helped that it was just orientation and online HR training. I go back on Friday, and I guess I'll find out more of my schedule then. I think it'll be alright.
In other news, after I noped out of Prison Break with the Nine Deadly Words ("I do not care what happens to these people," and I made it about halfway through season 4 which was at least ten episodes more than it deserved) I finally picked back up on Person Of Interest. I'd been watching with Erin and we stalled out almost exactly halfway through, on the resolution of the police-corruption storyline.
That turns out to be an interesting place to pick back up. Season 3 is best understood as two separate half-seasons. The second half introduces another supersurveillance AI, who becomes the primary antagonist for the rest of the series. In retrospect I suspect this is also the point thatsartorias referred to when she said she stopped watching "when the delight, wit, and mystery went out of it, so to speak, in favor of more big bads and violence." It does feel like a different show in the last two seasons, and I think one I don't like quite so much.
It's still compelling, I'd still rewatch it in company and possibly on my own. But: the writers feel the need to overmelodramatize anyone they're planning on killing off, which was obnoxious with [SPOILER] midway through season 3 and has become merely eye-rolling now. Quiet human relationships, they're really good at: Reese and Finch, Reese and Fusco. They even managed to make me not hate Root sometime in season 4, which is a neat trick considering how much I wanted to throw things at the screen every time she appeared in the first half. But it's like they don't trust the simple raising of stakes to suffice for the emotional heights. Don't trust that we've grown to care about these reserved characters, and they don't need to monologue or Develop Huge Feelings for their perils and deaths to be meaningful.
On the other hand, sometimes they make it work. I've just finished S5E10 (three more to go). Near the end there's a scene where Finch the programmer has been captured and imprisoned, and he's talking with an FBI agent. Calling it a 'scene' is stretching it a bit, maybe, it's really two monologues. First, the FBI agent describes how Finch is just not present in their data: "We’ve got records of records of you going back nearly forty years... but no actual records." It's a bit wry and very much the kind of dialogue that PoI excels at.
And then Michael Emerson, for what is I believe the first time in the series, demonstrates why he picked up a couple of Emmy nods and one actual award for his work on Lost. Finch sums up his ethical dilemma of the previous nine episodes, and the season and a half before, and arguably the whole show, and admits that he may have been wrong to not give the Machine the tools it needed to defend itself / to go on the offensive.
Less than five minutes later, in a new scene, a payphone next to him rings, and the melodrama pays off. I confess I gasped at the for once perfectly clear, sweet tones of "Can you hear me?".
I'm genuinely curious as to where the next three episodes are going.
In other news, after I noped out of Prison Break with the Nine Deadly Words ("I do not care what happens to these people," and I made it about halfway through season 4 which was at least ten episodes more than it deserved) I finally picked back up on Person Of Interest. I'd been watching with Erin and we stalled out almost exactly halfway through, on the resolution of the police-corruption storyline.
That turns out to be an interesting place to pick back up. Season 3 is best understood as two separate half-seasons. The second half introduces another supersurveillance AI, who becomes the primary antagonist for the rest of the series. In retrospect I suspect this is also the point that
sartorias referred to when she said she stopped watching "when the delight, wit, and mystery went out of it, so to speak, in favor of more big bads and violence." It does feel like a different show in the last two seasons, and I think one I don't like quite so much.It's still compelling, I'd still rewatch it in company and possibly on my own. But: the writers feel the need to overmelodramatize anyone they're planning on killing off, which was obnoxious with [SPOILER] midway through season 3 and has become merely eye-rolling now. Quiet human relationships, they're really good at: Reese and Finch, Reese and Fusco. They even managed to make me not hate Root sometime in season 4, which is a neat trick considering how much I wanted to throw things at the screen every time she appeared in the first half. But it's like they don't trust the simple raising of stakes to suffice for the emotional heights. Don't trust that we've grown to care about these reserved characters, and they don't need to monologue or Develop Huge Feelings for their perils and deaths to be meaningful.
On the other hand, sometimes they make it work. I've just finished S5E10 (three more to go). Near the end there's a scene where Finch the programmer has been captured and imprisoned, and he's talking with an FBI agent. Calling it a 'scene' is stretching it a bit, maybe, it's really two monologues. First, the FBI agent describes how Finch is just not present in their data: "We’ve got records of records of you going back nearly forty years... but no actual records." It's a bit wry and very much the kind of dialogue that PoI excels at.
And then Michael Emerson, for what is I believe the first time in the series, demonstrates why he picked up a couple of Emmy nods and one actual award for his work on Lost. Finch sums up his ethical dilemma of the previous nine episodes, and the season and a half before, and arguably the whole show, and admits that he may have been wrong to not give the Machine the tools it needed to defend itself / to go on the offensive.
Less than five minutes later, in a new scene, a payphone next to him rings, and the melodrama pays off. I confess I gasped at the for once perfectly clear, sweet tones of "Can you hear me?".
I'm genuinely curious as to where the next three episodes are going.