Actually, a lot of what's going on now had the foundation laid from the very first season. There has been in show build up to this as well as hidden clues for uber fans to spend their time deciphering. All kinds of things like the color coding of the recticles placed over characters, single frame flashes of code inserted with greater and greater frequency as the show progressed, and various text boxes from the machine with snippets of important information.
Elaborating on some of your questions.
1./2. The same machine, but not the same machine as at the start of the show. The Machine has 'evolved' and continues to evolve.
The Machine's biggest leap probably came when it figured out Harold had programmed it to purge its memory every night, to try and avoid it evolving too far, and figuring out how to runaround those instructions. Happy birthday
Ernest Thornhill.
The Machine's relations with Finch, Control and everyone else is... complicated.
According to producer Jonathan Nolan, thinking of The Machine as a single mind is thinking too small.
""...we imagine the machine would be different. What that means is that it [can be] authentically itself while also entertaining different relationships with everyone. It has a different relationship with Finch than it does Root, and it honors the terms of the relationship that Finch wanted."
The Machine as Nolan sees it is a kind of massively parallel mind..."
4. Far from out of the picture, "Northern Lights"/The Machine, is at the epicenter of it all. The quasi off the books government program (that thought it was) controlling The Machine was shut down after Vigilance leaked documents regarding Northern Lights. The Machine itself however, is as active as it ever was.
Gorge on Machine knowledge at
The Machine wiki page.
davemchine wrote:
This show started with a very simple theme and I really liked it. Now the show is extremely convoluted and I can't figure out what's going on. So here is my list of questions:
1. Is the machine Root talks to the same as the machine Harold talks to?
2. If so why does the machine talk to Root differently than it talks to Harold?
3. What is the goal of the machine that works with Root?
4. Is the Northern Lights machine totally out of the picture at this point?
5. Does the machine run by the evil corporation (can't remember who that is) have a name?
6. Why do they want Harold?
7. Did they fire the original writers/producers? The show has a very disjointed and confusing format this year.
I could probably come up with a lot more questions. I'm very confused at this point.
And as for POI's "DNA"? Well the pilot itself contains easter eggs referring to both Lost and Fringe.
A character's in box includes messages from Peter Bishop, Philip Broyles and Charlie Francis.
And those damned numbers.
And if you thought I was kidding about clues for uber fans, here's some of that hidden code.
An oblique clue in the form of an excerpt from Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Of course you first have to take the text, convert it into ASCII hexadecimal, with A-F replaced with Greek letters, and then mapped from Latin letters to Greek letters. Or something close to that. I got kind of lost somewhere around "A=Omega".
