Friday, August 7, 2020

Person of Interest Ideas

 August 2020, I am on another rewatch of Person of Interest two episodes at a time, one time per day on the elliptical to try to keep lockdown from going to my gut now that I have canceled my Y membership for social distancing. Two things, one of them a list I am making of film hat tips, either whole-episode or one-scene. Whole-episode, that I have written down so far either from this watching or remembering having noted them in previous watchings are: Rear Window, Les Miserble, Usual Suspects, It's a Wonderful Life, Frequency (a nice hit tip because that was Caviezel), and Wings of Desire (the series finale with Root in the half trench coat as the machine watching human lives like the angels in the Wenders film). A smaller, and much more latent, allusion might be The Man Who Fell to Earth in the form of the cabbie in season 2 who is trying to bring his wife and son to American from Cuba and looks like he might not be able to. A season 2 momentary, one-scene hat-tip is the episode that introduce the tech billionaire Logan Pierce, whose car computer gets hacked and locked in third gear and unable to stop ... going fifty miles per hour ... the speed the bus has to stay above not to blow up in Speed (Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper). 

So that brings me to thing number 2, which is a more structural thing for the whole series. They introduce Logan Pierce, who will become Harold 2.0 as the reclusive tech billionaire supporting team 2.0, the DC team shown in the final season, in the same episode that they reveal Harold 0.0 ... Nathan Inrgam in his car with the gun getting ready to go try to help the first ever number. I don't think they necessarily had concrete plans, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a kind of contingency-plan element ... if you're gonna do an interesting episode with a tech billionaire who you're gonna wind up liking in the end, and you're also going to introduce Nathan Ingram having tried the venture first and been the one to build the back-door with SSNs, it's a good move to couple them ... just in case you ever decide to to a Harold 2.0, it's a nice literary thing to have had that character introduced at the same time as Harold 0.0. It puts me a little in the mind of thoughts that I have had about John LeCarre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, that the kid Billy who Jim Prideaux says is a "watcher" is the kid version of George Smiley and Control is the old-man version (but Smiley is a much more tragic character than Harold, as LeCarre's work has, albeit a very true point, also a much more depressing one), and I have already had ideas of J. Nolan being a LeCarre fan in having one of the government higher ups in PoI be called Control. 

It also reminds me of something I have said in recent years about Tolkien ever since reading Shippey's Author of the Century and hearing that he really didn't have a solid narrative plan for LotR until he wrote the council of Elrond, and my line has been "he was just pulling stuff out of his ass, but he has an exceptionally good ass from which to pull such things." And by that I mean the same type of thing as here: not necessarily a clear plan (for the ring in LotR [what we all know now as the Hobbit is actually the second edition, in which the story of how Bilbo got the ring from Gollum changed to meet what he now realized he was going to want to do with it, because if it was what it comes to be in the LotR, it would naturally have such a grip on Gollum that he would never give it as a prize, or at all] or Harold 2.0 in PoI), but enough acumen in good narrative to pack it with the kind of stuff you have a hunch might be good to have in there to connect to later, and because Tolkien and J. Nolan are good and studied authors, the kind who have spent time soaking in a wide variety of good stories, they have an amazing intuition for what might be useful to make a good story tie out.

And Person of Interest had a real set of balls: there is a lot of pathos in that last scene with Ingram in the car: the desperation of a one-percenter frustrated feeling like he can't do any good to help somebody he knows is in need, in part precisely because he is a one-percenter ... he knows he's no John Reese with that gun, but he has to try, out of desperation to actually be giving a damn in some way.

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