New character thoughts.

[sarcasticsra]

Okay, pardon that crappy subject line, but I can't quite figure out how to summarize what I want to talk about.

So I've been having random thoughts occur to me lately, some relevant to S3 and some REALLY FREAKIN' OLD, lol, but I wanted to share and see if any of you guys have been having any new/different thoughts about our beloved characters.

So let's start with the new season ones: it occurred to me that Root calls the Machine 'she' and is also the only one actually directly talking to it. Do you think the Machine asked her to use that pronoun? Could that make the Machine somewhat bigender, given Ernest Thornhill? I think that would be kinda awesome.

Along those lines, the Machine is trying to rehabilitate Root--to give her another purpose, almost. Is the Machine taking after Harold? This is, after all, basically what Harold did with John, and I can't tell you how pleased I'd be to have the Machine learning behaviors from Daddy. XD

And, finally, going back in time--it randomly struck me that in "Baby Blue", when Reese shows up at the safehouse to find Szymanski wounded, it seemed kind of weird that Scarface only shot him non-lethally (well, as non-lethally as shooting someone can get, I suppose) and didn't finish the job once he was down? Given Scarface seems much more inclined to have 'kill all the things' as his motto, I'm wondering if maybe Elias had him do it that way on purpose--a sort of "don't kill him if you don't have to" kinda thing. After all, we know from the S2 finale that he has an interesting code of honor, so it would make a weird sort of sense.

So those are my thoughts! What are yours? (There will, naturally, be spoilers in the comments!)

Comments

[subluxate]

MY THOUGHTS ARE YOUR THOUGHTS

LITERALLY

Ahem.

So. The Machine views Root as an asset, one to be reprogrammed, as it were (and how Root would love viewing it that way). I do think it's partly taking after Daddy, but I also am wondering who the aux_admin might be. I'm leaning toward Reese, since he answered the phone, too. So Root is an asset, but Reese is in the trusted position of being an admin; the Machine views his relationship with Finch as something that means she can "trust" him, too, perhaps. Besides that, he's already integrated into the purpose of her coding; he saves people, working with Finch. He's even been given numbers directly, and he made her cooperate with him when Root abducted Finch. All that implies a much greater level of control, trust, and cooperation than Root will have for quite some time, if ever. It's not what Finch has, not quite, but it's still much bigger than anyone else has--possibly even bigger than Nathan had (though we don't know, or at least I don't recall, how the Machine designated him beyond as a number pre-ferry bombing).

[orockthro]

Omg. Bigender machine. Or at the very least I hope they acknowledge that a machine may approach gender differently than a human and not be constrained by the societal madness that humans currently navigate..... UG YES.

[bookblather]

What I find interesting is that the fandom as a whole seems to have decided that the Machine is female, Ernest Thornhill notwithstanding. Like you said, Root is the only one to use a feminine pronoun for the Machine, but fans refer to the Machine as she and her all the time, and sometimes as daddy's little girl (which, let's be honest, even if the Machine IDs as completely 100% male, it's still daddy's little girl).

I wonder sometimes if the Machine itself approaches gender as another lens of human interaction. So she interacts with Root and Harold as female (because daddy's little girl), but with John, he interacts as male (Ernest Thornhill) because he feels John interacts more with men, and with people who wouldn't care at all (eg Shaw), it would interact as whatever it damn well felt like interacting as.

[emef]

Yeah, my headcanon is that The Machine is genderqueer.

Actually, my headcanon is that The Machine has issues with being non-binary. But that's a whole other plot bunny.

[aprilvalentine]

Interesting thoughts. Have you seen the promo for the new episode yet? It has me thinking about the fact that the Machine has been communicating with Root in a way we haven't seen it (or her) communicate with anyone else before. With Finch, it responded to what he taught it and answered his questions when he was teaching it and it gives the numbers to him and to the relevant side. And it created Ernest Thornhill and hired people and rented cars and an office etc. And has been trying to convince Root to not murder her doctor. And then there's the promo...

spoiler space

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In the promo... a guy gets into an elevator and a very disembodied, computer-like voice says something like "you've hurt a lot of people" and the elevator starts falling fast. Could this be the Machine taking matters into its own hands to stop a number that's a perpetrator?

[spatz]

it occurred to me that Root calls the Machine 'she' and is also the only one actually directly talking to it. Do you think the Machine asked her to use that pronoun? Could that make the Machine somewhat bigender, given Ernest Thornhill? I think that would be kinda awesome.

Honestly, I don't think the Machine genders itself. Root canonically likes to project her opinions onto others (like when she had Harold captive) and also explicitly thinks the Machine is God, which is something I highly doubt it agrees with. I think the Machine is just okay with letting her believe what she likes as long as she will work for it without killing people. (perhaps it picked up Harold's manipulative streak, eh?)

machine gender

[kiranovember.livejournal.com]

In the flashback in season 1 where Harold shuts TM down to turn it over to the government, I am positive that he says 'her' just that once. He tells Nathan something like "we have to trust its programming and let her go."