Warning: Full spoilers for the May 31st Person of Interest, “The Day The World Went Away,” below.
The 100th episode of Person of Interest was a hugely eventful one, and ultimately a tragic installment that saw the team losing one of their own - even as the Machine took on a very familiar persona.
I spoke to Person of Interest’s executive producers, Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman, about the death of Root (Amy Acker) in “The Day the World Went Away,” how and why they chose to kill her and how Root lives on, in a way, thanks to the Machine taking on her personality (and voice) for itself.
For more on Person of Interest's 100th episode, check out our review, along with our interview with Amy Acker about what occurred.
IGN TV: Obviously, this isn’t the first time you've had a big death happen on the show, but how did you decide on this fate for Root?
Jonathan Nolan: You know, we had been talking about this for a long time, way back to teasing it at Comic-Con just after Season 2. We had sat down and started to break Root's arc at the end of that season. She goes into a lunatic asylum, and we started to break and write her arc for the beginning [of Season 3] where there's this redemptive path, sort of an inflection point for her character. She's desperate to find the Machine. She fights her way to an empty warehouse, and the Machine has moved itself; kind of heartbreaking. So we sat down and charted out her path going forward. At this point we knew we were obsessed with Amy Acker, who's an incredible actor and become a dear friend. Just a lovely person, amazing actor. So we knew we wanted her to be a series regular, and we wanted to build her. We wanted her redemptive story to be believable, because we've invested in this great villain. You don't want to just throw that away and have her become cuddly. But such a fun character to write, and we knew we needed a great arc for her. So we started planning at that point, and then obviously some unexpected turns along the way, most notably her relationship with Shaw, which was awesome to write and see with those two actors. But when we came to the beginning of this season last year, we sat down and said, "Look, this is the plan we had in mind. Do we really want to go this way?" And our only hesitation was we loved working with Amy so much, so what made up for not getting to write her as Root was getting to write her as the Machine, which was always an incredibly cool development and fulfilled the mandate for our show of over the seasons building an AI and anthropomorphizing it one piece at a time, until finally, right at the end here, you put a name and a face to it.
IGN: It's very rare that people know exactly when their show is going to end. You didn't know 100% this was the final season when you made it, although it seemed very likely. If there had been two or three more years of Person of Interest, would things have gone very differently this year? Or did it just seem like this was the right time, regardless?
Greg Plageman: Well, I certainly think, Eric, that things got more compressed. There was more story we could tell, there was more story we could have done with Elias and the merging of the municipal world with the Samaritan and Machine world. That happened in a rather compressed manner. Some of those things we could have taken more time with -- certainly down the stretch of the last couple of episodes, we were compressing some things. I don't think it adversely affected the storytelling, and I do believe we acquitted ourselves well. We went out in a way that I'm proud of. It's a show that I think people will remember fondly, and we always endeavor to tell this incredibly -- when you get over 100 episodes on broadcast television, it's very difficult to sustain a larger narrative, a bigger story, and then finish it off in a way, because you rarely get the notice that this is the last season. And Jonah and I made the decision at the beginning of the year that this was probably it; we should write to that. And I think that in some ways is a gift, certainly on broadcast television, because most people don't know, as witnessed from a number shows that got a sudden cancelation these past few weeks.
IGN: I watched the episode twice now, and first time I didn't see her death coming, and then I watched it the second time and went, "Oh, Root talks about death a lot in this!" Was that one of those things where you wanted to play it carefully because you didn't want to obviously telegraph, "I'm dying in this episode!", while still including these very interesting things she has to say about her philosophy on the Machine and what it means to their existence beyond death?
Nolan: It's a profound point that we're trying to make in that moment, and one that we had three minutes in the middle of a car chase to make, just because we had an attenuated season -- and also because you don't want to telegraph it, as you said Eric. But the idea is that any kind of AI that would be able to anticipate your next move -- and that's really what the machine is there for; it's about reading intent, malicious intent, and hundreds of millions of people simultaneously -- the reality of what that means is you'd have to be able to simulate a person to such a fine degree that you'd essentially have to build a model of that person internally, right? So the Machine has a model, and we've seen it in "If-Then-Else" and then this year, you know, the Machine's counterpart, Samaritan, in "6741" -- and with Samaritan, less so, because it's not as good as the Machine -- but its perfectly capable of simulating not just the world, but our characters within that world. So the implicit idea of there's a literal backup of Root and Reese and Elias and Finch and all of the other people in Team Machine inside the Machine -- as well as all the bad guys; I mean, Greer's in there somewhere too, right? It's the Walt Whitman line: "The Machine literally contains multitudes." And there's something so beautiful…
Greg and I have always played in this show with all of the amazing things that are to come, and this is one of those paradoxical things that's to come. For the Machine to do its job, it would have to contain us inside itself. It's the Venn diagram thing. The set that contains itself. There's a copy of the Machine somewhere in there too, right? You can play these games ad infinitum, and if CBS gave us a few more seasons to do it, we probably would be playing with some fairly loopy quests. But here the point that Root is making is that in their advocacy and protection of the Machine, they've basically created a system in which some trace memory of them lives forever, and there's something to me very beautiful about that. It's not a cop-out, it's an evolution of a character, a Machine that has been, for five seasons, casting about looking for a voice for an avatar, and has settled, for three seasons now, on Root as its analog interface. Well, this is the ultimate evolution of that.
IGN: Root was the first person to so personalize the Machine and call it "she.” Obviously, she didn't want to die, but it feels as though she would be, basically, honored by the Machine choosing her voice.
Plageman: For me, it feels like the perfect bookend. Think about how Root's character was introduced on this show; like her endeavor to figure out, what was this thing? She knew there was something else. When we saw the flashbacks of young Root, she felt adamantly that human beings were bad code, and trying to find Harold Finch, track down Harold Finch -- she abducted Harold, the father of the Machine. She is its purest acolyte. I feel like the Machine was Root's first love, in some ways, and the way she went out, protecting the father of the Machine and understanding the ultimate import of this in the world, is perfect. It's perfect.
Nolan: Yeah, and not to sound like an asshole, but her name is Root, right? The Root directory of Linux-based computer system. I mean, we’re not Babe Ruth calling our shots here, but I think this is definitely the direction we've been headed for an awfully long time.
Continue on as Nolan and Plageman discuss potential fan reaction to Root's death and what's to come on the final episodes, in the wake of this event.
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