I just got done watching the episode from season 4 called "Karma." It is the one where the psychologist is trying to frame the guy he thinks killed his wife for actually killing himself. Harold plays largely thematically in the episode. The way he plays thematically is the flashback thread of him almost killing Allison with a bomb for the death of Nathan Ingram and the theme of "does vengeance bring closure" (a nice touch too, in the present timeline, with the thing about the dog being from a former "spouse" as a lead in to Harold's recalling his grief about things with Grace ... in a scene where dealing with grief is what the shrink is talking about).
What is interesting from looking at the way the show uses tropes and borrows from previous works, in this case the whole AI theme, is when the machine is trying to call Harold (in the flashback) on the payphones in Battery Park to keep him from going through with killing Allison as he has her trapped in her car with the bomb under it. He looks to the camera and asks if the machine is trying to say something to him, and replies that it can't because he never gave it a voice.
What this is an allusion to, I think, is Isaac Asimov's I-Robot. I. that original work (not the movie with Will Smith - I liked the movie, and I liked the book, but they are almost not the same work, definitely not the same story arc, at least not the original I-Robot; I haven't read the works with the Spooner character in them ... I had the same reaction to World War Z, loved both book and movie but two totally different projects, although the movie did a nice job of working as much in from the book as they could)
... sorry bout that digression, as I was saying, in the book of I-Robot, the development of speech is the key turning point in the evolution of robotic AI. I don't think they really go any further than allusion in PoI, but I do think it is a concrete allusion distinctly hooked to the AI theme of the show, which is what makes the machine like humans, because, as I have said before on this blog, I think AI sci-fi, when done well, is about certain aspects and potentials of humanity.
For Asimov, this human/AI connection plays out in contrasting I-robot with Second Foundation. In the latter, we finally meet the psychologists (the second, hidden, foundation), who view the development of speech expression as actually a DEvolution in humans. They have learned to have very complex and intricate conversations with very few actual words. Most of the communicating is done through body language. If speech is an evolution for robotic AI (I-Robot) but a devolution for humans (Second Foundation), and the re-evolution for humans involves BODY language, then being embodied (incarnate ... which as a Catholic Christian is very important to me) is central to our humanity ... and what Harold is all about was teaching the machine to value human life the way humans do.
Maybe in light of this, Root, while maybe not the most solidly developed as a character, is very central to the development of the theme of the machine's relation to humanity, since she is the one the machine actually talks to in a way it does not talk to Harold.
Just some random interesting thoughts about my current fave show and arguably the father of sci-fi (or one of them, can't ever leave Frank Herbert out of that scene)
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