Person of Interest
Episode List
Batman with a stupid fake hobo beard. He is broken out of prison by the good guy version of Peter Thiel, the Palantir Oracle. Together, they fight crime, with access to a feed of SSN of interest, exfiltrated from PRISM.
Nolan’s more talented brother knows splitting Batman into two characters is more believable and injects tension. Batman should not be a nerd and a jock at the same time.
This is a showcase for NYC exterior shots, there’s one in almost every scene. Jim Caviezel pre-COVID nuttery as suave Jack Bauer, Jack Ryan, or Jack Reacher as another hobo. Taraji P. Hanson is great, but she might be too attractive to be a NYPD Homicide detective.
On the antagonist side, the NSA woman that buys The Machine is George Clooney’s wife from Burn After Reading, the “cold, stuck up bitch”.
I only noticed Oracle and his almost-cameo girlfriend are actually married IRL.
S01
S01E01
Where everyone is introduced.
The POI is a DA that turns out to be running a cell of dirty cops seizing drugs to sell them off, and framing random people for the necessary murders they required.
There’s also NYPD supporting characters: a dirty cop our Batman supports inside the force, as a mole that gives him access to their data, and Taraji P. Henson as a homicide detective trying and failing to bust our Batman for the series of murders he produces.
S01E02
The POI is a teenage girl living on the lam, after her family was targeted for assassination, just like Wombosi in The Bourne Identity. She lived for a couple of years skimming ATM and shit, impressive for an upper class chick.
After most hitmen and grifters looking for obscene profit in some real estate deal are wiped out, the girl gets back with her loving aunt, a childless lady eager to take care of her.
We discover Oracle works on one of his own companies as a lowly software engineer, and gets treated badly. His boss is almost Mossberg from Office Space. But when Batman finds this out, he is fired!
Trust is a weakness.
S01E03
The POI is an Iraq veteran, just like Batman, with a loving wife, and paying big bucks for his buddy’s wife to bring the daughter to college. Fucking tuition, man.
At first, they think that guy was a bank robber cheating on his wife with another family, but he was just a veteran with a conscience. Of course Batman falls for him, its his own story, but he is too chicken to tell the future wife he abandoned.
The actual villain is not even the dude giving the jobs and laundering the money. It’s some weird dude that pays 400 grand to get proof of a regular murder from the police storage unit. That might be the overarching villain at the end of the first season.
S01E04
The POI is one of the doctors from ER, playing another doctor. She is stalking some Wall Street date rape dude for having raped her sister and driving her to suicide.
She was triggered by watching the guy in a restaurant, leading to her double life of hitting the local bars seeking the mark, so she can turn the tables on him.
Being a doctor, she has access to all she needs, but goes overboard on the premeditated murder: renting a van with cash, renting a house by the sea, and a lot of lye to dissolve the body.
Our Batman catches up with her and convinces he will murder the dude for her. She doesn’t want that in her conscience. The episode ends in a cliffhanger, though.
As a side-plot, the dirty cop is being threatened by the Sinaloa cartel, so Batman takes care of them, using his Sicario connections to keep the cartel on the down low.
As a bonus, Batman blackmails some hotshot guy to transfer the dirty cop to the desk next to Taraji P. Henson, that gives our dudes updates on their investigation.
S01E05
The POI is an hotshot judge, delivering justice after his wife died with cancer and left their children all alone with the Puerto Rican nanny.
The bad guys are the Eastern European mob, a big operation focuses on money laundering, with clients as diverse as MS-13, Sinaloa, and DPKR. The front corporations have hilarious names related to their clients, for some reason.
The judge’s son is kidnapped, the nanny murdered, so that the inside woman in the bank is not busted for a DUI during the Christmas party. She turns off the AML system for a couple minutes so they can transfer all the monies.
It seems the bad guys win, since she is acquitted by judge malpractice. But in the end, Batman just warps around the city, taking down the mobster cell that kidnapped the kid, while Oracle steals all the money from their bank accounts.
The inside woman is busted for AML violations (I guess the prosecutor turns that over to the SEC), and Taraji P. Henson is not closer to our heroes, with the other cop running interference.
S01E06
The POI is the Irene Adler to the greatest detective on Earth. A woman moving in the widest of circles, fixing problems for the upper classes that involve interfacing with the lower classes. The bad guys are the Sacklers.
Our Batman likes what he sees, but she is tough as nails, paranoid, and can take care of herself (mostly). The Sacklers try to bump her off but Batman rescues her, this is a great ice breaker. They team up for a while, and even reach first base, before splitting up in the end, this is another recurring character, methinks.
The important McGuffin is The Conversation, a recording that seems one thing but is another. Oracle outright buys 8% of the company, but after discovering the whole C-suit is rotten, he turns that money into shorts, a one-man Hindenburg Research. The fraudulent FDA report comes out and our billionaire hero gets even richer.
S01E07
The POI is supposed to be a bystander to a Russian Mafia hit job in a bodega, but is he really just a meek history teacher? He really tricks everyone.
Batman and the history teacher hide out in some massive projects straight out of Candyman. The teacher is so popular with the gopnik, they hide them out and let him get away without being gunned down by kitted out Kalashnikov fire.
This is an overarching plot episode, where everyone is going for the same case, but the bad guy gets away unscathed. Turns out the overarching bad guy that has been behind some of the latest numbers is that meek teacher, the Elias fella, illegitimate son of mobster don gunning for The Godfather role, uniting the five families in a massive mobster operation.
S01E08
The POI is a former Stasi agent that was double crossed, tried and fail to run away to the Soviet Union. But the German secret service busted him and locked him up for 25 years or so.
After pretending to be senile, he escaped, and got himself to New York to fuck up all his former team of defectors that betrayed their country for an apartment in New York City. He buys poisons, an acupuncture kit, and a Welrod suppressed pistol for his hit job: the three remaining teammates.
Just as he throws the last guy from a building site, he discovers his wife is also living in NYC under an assumed name, the CIA faked her death all those years ago. And his daughter goes to Columbia, turns out he’s not so lonely after all.
The BND are still hunting them, but our Batman blows up their Mercedes with a fucking Barrett XM500, dangerous as fuck to use anti-materiel rifles in the streets.
Finally, the spy kidnaps the daughter, and meets his wife one last time, but he’s still pissed, and commits suicide by Batman. Oracle is there too, for a full reunion, they run away before Taraji P. Henson arrives with the SWAT team.
Our heroes reminisce on the fact that nobody will remember them after they die. Batman even remembers his mission to Moscow, where he got his name, some hot spy lady came up with it.
S01E09
The POI is Carter, Taraji P. Henson herself! Turns out she is sassy for good reasons, she’s an homicide detective and single mother of a teenager. Of course there’s a lot of people wanting her dead.
In particular, there are three sets of people gunning for her: some wife beater that she noticed visiting the precinct multiple times and threatened her life; some minor gangbangers running guns inside custom cars, which just murdered a kid that talked too much; and Elias, the Moriarty expy.
We also discover she was in Iraq as an interrogator, but the fucking grunts killed the guys that talked to her in cold blood. What an horrible experience. If the protagonists are Batman and Oracle, she is Gordon if they did not know they were on the same side.
S01E10
Oooh, 4 POI? With no obvious connection? Must have all been witnesses to something. They all saw a kind of Hunter Biden crash his car, all coked up, with a million dollars in a case. Those bystanders just split the money and bolt.
The killers don’t like being robbed, so they get the money back by shooting the people. Only the two foster sisters get away with it, because they leave to the sticks and Batman helps them. They wanted the money to avoid their mother being foreclosed on, since she’s in the hospital. A very American story.
Meanwhile, since Oracle nearly got blown up trying to save one of the robbers, he talks to the senior Biden, who is apparently dirty, using a fake Haitian charity to launder money.
One of the remaining women is kidnapped and the exchange nearly goes wrong, but the woman get away with the money.
As a side plot that turns into the main plot, Carter is grilled by Internal Affairs for the murder of the informant. This means she stays on desk duty for a while, until she gets bored and helps solve the case.
Turns out the Internal Affairs are actually spooks, they want Batman. Carter sells him out and Batman gets shot in the gut, but she redeems herself and puts him in Oracle’s car.
Fucking spooks.
S01E11
Batman lives! Oracle takes him to the best Afghan surgeon with paperwork issues, working as a mere coroner, and he cures him of lead poisoning. Carter continues to be followed by the spooks, but she gives them the slip.
The POI is actually some woman that lives in a big apartment building and is being stalked by someone. Cursory hacking suggests the super is a greasy Cuban-American extremely friendly, who bought a gun and has pictures of the girl in his apartment.
Batman is not fully recovered, so Oracle needs to do the legwork, and he hates it. In the nick of time, they notice the stalker is some yuppie rich boy who really wants to have sex with a sexy cook, and won’t take no for an answer.
Oracle, the super, and Batman with crutches take care of him, and our protagonists disappear into the night.
The side plot consists of another POI that comes up in the meantime. Carter takes care of a dude with a house repossessed by a bank and goes full on Luigi Mangione on an executive. She seems convinced to join the team.
In a flashback, we see The Machine is almost god-like, was a gift to the government, and the politician that wanted a tweak to skirt the Fourth Amendment was busted by an earlier version of the same code.
S01E12
The POI is an hotshot lawyer, defending ex-cons from hideous parole officers. Turns out the rot goes deeper, the child protection services had an arrangement to lock up single parents, so the children could be sent to foster care, to cover up “fake” children to suck on that state subsidies. Disgusting.
Carter is now fully in the team, but under duress when it comes to extra-judicial shit. The other dirty cop was not informed about this, and keeps reporting Carter is talking on the phone with unknown parties. Hilarious.
On the team itself, Oracle secretly busted some kid from prison, something to do with gambling, turns out he’s the son of his former business partner, the one that also built The Machine. He plays dumb, but the kid might notice something he shouldn’t, that need resolution fast.
S01E13
The POI is some random family man, it seems. On further hacking, it seems he pulled a Luigi Mangione on some congressman that supported budget cuts. Turns out he was fired months ago, but he still goes out everyday to find a job, like Mr. Incredible.
He finally gets a “job” in a political campaign, setting up a confetti cannon, but as he does that, other dude shoots the politician! The guy stands up like a deer in the headlights, reminds me of North by Northwest.
Batman has to exfiltrate the dude from FBI custody, but they are a bunch of suckers anyway. There’s an hacker setting up the POI as a patsy for the murder, and Oracle is onto him, but the hacker hacks back! Oracle’s safe house is made, he goes mobile to a public library.
This requires help, so they bring up Batman’s Irene Adler from S01E06. She triggers an investigation into the dead guy’s chief of staff, some funny business with bilking money from the city. Batman easily handles protecting the guy.
Alas, this is the end of the danger for the unemployed dude, and Oracle will “waste” some money developing real estate so the dude can have a stable employment for a while. Batman’s Irene Adler even scores a date with Batman, as “payment” for her help.
But the other hacker with the black nail polish is still out there. Oracle’s Irene Adler is not revealed yet, she could be either part of the bad guys (working for Elias), or a wild card.
S01E14
The POI is a very smart kid, such that he read “The Art of War” and watched Seven Samurai at age 14. Give that guy a medal.
Like the Steven Jay Gould quote, he lives in a poor zip code, in the Bronx or something, so his older brother and legal guardian gets shot by local mobsters for defending a waitress in a restaurant.
The kid’s got spunk, he pawns a TV, gets a gun, stalks his brother’s killer and would outright murder him, if Batman did not appear in the nick of time. After that, they team up to hunt down the other killers, but without deaths. Batman even uses fancy shotgun with a night vision scope and beanbag rounds.
The mini-mob has police protection up the wazoo. They were moving half a million bucks before Batman nearly burns it all (suck it, The Dark Knight). The comic book guy that leads the mobster ring kidnaps the kid, but the dirty cop takes a bullet in the ass for him. He will never live that down.
Meanwhile, Oracle’s “nephew” is still digging, he even finds the government spook they sold The Machine to, but she is scared by hearing Oracle’s name. The dirty cop dug around, and found not much more that Batman already knows, but Oracle is onto them now, he will monitor the situation for now.
S01E15
The POI is some deep undercover cop, infiltrated in a smuggling ring about to make their big arrest. Of course, Batman is undercover on the same unit. Together, they help each other, because they want the unit’s client, the really big fish.
This is a complex job that requires Carter for the final shootout, and the dirty cop for stopping an even dirtier Internal Affairs cop that is informing the smugglers.
Before that final shootout, Batman gets mock assassinated in a metal chair, and escapes from a burning car, so the complexities continue to pile up. That final shootout goes well, but the man behind the curtain is revealed to be a spook, which mean career ruin for both Carter and the undercover cop. Poor guy, threw away his life for nothing.
Our friendly dirty cop is taken to a field to be executed, but Batman flew to their spot and took care of the dirtier cop. But after taking a bullet in the ass and everything, his new assignment is infiltrating the the dirty cop organisation, they own him since they know where the body of this guy is buried. Fusco was getting used to be the good guy now…
Finally, in spook land, the guy who was arrested was renditioned by the other guy searching for Batman, just after getting him out of jail. Not sure what will happen here, fucking spooks.
S01E16
The POI is some finance bro, but redeemable due to his working class background, absent father, and loving uncle with a food truck mini-empire. He’s even more redeemable because Batman sticks him in some homeless encampment to hide from a team of assassins that are out to get him.
Why would assassins target finance bros and some disgruntled SEC dude? It’s Elias, the mobster prodigal son. He’s really the Moriarty/Joker for this ordeal, always lurking in the background.
His latest heist is making 300 million of short selling some pipeline company, then buying off state senators to pass a law legalising fracking, tanking the stock. Why deal drugs, when robbing from millions is so much more lucrative.
Carter does the side business of investigating a previous assassination attempt, fake roadworks to guide our finance bro to a killzone, where his Porsche 911 would be T-boned by a truck. A clean way to murder people, cleaner than using guns.
The only reason the finance bro is redeemed is using Oracle’s cash to prop up the failing company with phoney buy orders. But they wouldn’t invest millions into a worthless company, that means selling everything at the top and fucking over the dumb money that entered the second time.
The only winning move is not to play.
S01E17
The POI is a baby, luckily this was filmed before the latest law changes, and jus soli would still apply.
She was abandoned outside a clinic and some rich asshole is contributing a big fat stack of greenbacks to that clinic to keep their mouth shut. A simple phishing email mentioning the IRS is enough to put the fear of god into them, so they rat out the rich dude ASAP.
At first blush, they though the son knocked up a 20 years old secretary, but on further look, he is gay, the father did so instead! But the mother is the one that personally killed the mistress, and hired an Albanian gang to take the kid overseas and dump her into some random orphanage. Who knows if she wouldn’t be sold back to some American couple, greatly increasing the GDP of said Balkans country.
Besides some comedy scenes with the baby, Batman, Oracle, and Carter, there is that hilarious scene where the baby nearly fires a SIG Sauer and pulls the pin off a grenade.
For the cops, the main job for Carter is that Elias’s mobster boss father was released, and Elias wants him dead. Carter puts him in a safehouse, a sub-rosa job with another trusted cop, but Elias and the dirty cop network is onto them. Our dirty cop is even being pushed around hard to follow Carter around.
Batman fails to save the baby, and busting up a Croatian bar filled with scary looking dudes is not enough. He makes a deal with Elias, and he comes through, but then locks him in a freezer truck with the baby, unless he reveals the mob boss location. Temperature drops so much, Batman has to cough up the truth, but manages to break free and sprint to the safe-house, with Carter in tow, but it’s all for nought, Elias gets the father, and Carter is fed up with this cloak and dagger shit, his buddy cop gets shot in the gut.
S01E18
The POI is now two people? Some very private persons, no social media presence, no photos anywhere. This requires legwork for both, Batman takes the dude and Oracle the lady.
Yes, this the identity theft episode, with a woman impersonating a man. It all started with the accountant feeding possible victims, but he gets off scot free.
The real criminal is the woman, who does nothing all day but flirt with Oracle when the tail becomes absolutely conspicuous. She pretends to be a poor antique dealer, but she’s the head of a drug ring cooking MDMA in some upscale apartment.
Oracle is absolutely won over by the lady, just name drop Franz Kafka, and he turns to putty, accepting a drink poured by her in her own house. Besides the horrible OPSEC, he gets roofied with MDMA and nearly blows the whole thing over.
Alas, Batman saves the day again, and the dirty cop does actual police work once again, leaving the arrest to others. The muscle you can hire in NYC cannot hold a candle to an elite CIA operative, once again the private sector is exposed as absolute buffoons.
Carter is still holding her grudge, but she gets approached by an FBI task force hunting down Batman for his previous work as CIA operative pulling extraordinary renditions in American soil.
Hot damn, the presidency must be extremely dysfunctional, if the feds and the spooks can fight this much without superior intervention.
She doesn’t warn the boys just yet.
S01E19
This is getting hot. The POI are the heads of the five families of Italian mobsters, mamma mia. Only Elias can be the perp, this needs no big investigation.
Turns out as a kid he took shit for being an orphan, tried to raise in his father’s organisation, but tried to whack him. The two dudes failed to garrote him with piano wire, he still has the scarred hands.
After two of the mobsters are blown up, Carter and the dirty cop burst into their private club and just kidnap them into an Oracle safe-house. Elias leverages the dirty cop network to bust them, readying to kidnap their own families, he wants his own Night of the Long Knives.
As a backup, Elias kidnaps Carter’s son too, but this Batman cannot accept, and he rescues him like a boss, with Unkle music in the background, using his KRISS Vector (this was released just a few years back). Batman also hands a SPAS-12 and a FN F2000 to Carter for her self-defence.
This works, Elias is busted, one of the other dons is killed in the safe-house, bur Elias still blows up his own father from jail, since his number two guy escapes.
Of the five numbers, there’s only a single guy that remains alive at the end. The team “failed”, but since those are mobsters, fuggedaboutit.
S01E20
This is a lore episode, the POI is a smaller case to make way for flashbacks. The POI is a rent-a-cop, the armoured van type, who falls for a coffee shop waitress and gets roped into an inside job, stealing platinum from a pickup.
She’s the real mastermind, fools Batman with a sob story, then shoots the fall guy. They were selling the platinum to the dirty cop network, good thing our dirty cop was being controlled for losing the goods, saves Batman from certain death. It’s a fuck-up once again, the number is not saved again.
The lore part is more interesting. Besides the other CIA black sites, Batman visited one in Morocco, and pulled some “enhanced interrogation techniques”, in 2010, pretty late in the Obama administration.
Batman tries to contact his ex, and she seems suicidal, he tells her he will get back stateside in 24 hours, but the bosses need them on one of those ghost towns in China to recover a Chinese Stuxnet. That’s why our guy turned hobo, he abandoned the only person he truly loved in a time of need.
Off they get to China, their mission is an absolute black op, but they leave half-eaten MRE lying around. Doesn’t matter, because they recovered the package, and both teammates were ordered to shoot the other for cooperating with Hezbollah. Once they set the IR beacons, a drone strikes their location with an Hellfire, and now we know how our dude is KIA. But his partner turns out to be alive too, holed up in some NYC hotel, and she wastes the CIA team hunting Batman down!
She survived an Hellfire strike and her hair is fabulous, the spook partner needs a nickname. I’ll call her Gina Haspel, she cannot be singed by controversy.
S01E21
All lore episodes from now, it seems. The POI is a battered woman that fled her abusive husband, used an assumed name, and fled to New York. But the husband is a US Marshall, so he used LOVEINT, put an APB on her name and deputised an entire organisation to find her.
Which they do, eventually. But Batman tracks them to the motel where she is kidnapped, and takes the dude to some prison somewhere, with 10 kg of heroin in tow, he does not feed him to a wood chipper.
Oracle does not mention this number to Batman, due to his past. Carter is tasked by the feds to look into it, and she even finds his service record, but she shreds it right away. It seems the girl he “abandoned” after going to China get shot married some dweeb (that part we know), and he blew all their money, was extremely jealous and controlling, and treated her badly. But one day, she calls Batman, the husband notices and accidentally kills her. So he puts her body in the car and crashes it on purpose, to fake her death.
Batman arrives a couple months too late, and she was already dead. Devastated, he just murders the husband, leaving a gory mess of a crime scene. Not something he would repeat again.
S01E22
The POI is an NSA analyst, a NOC (like Mission: Impossible). He works in a SCIF, so Batman cannot barge is because the secretary points a gun at him under the desk. Batman knows it’s a .45 just by the sound, amazing skills.
They get in using plain old social engineering, bringing in a new coffee machine.
The whole thing hinges on The Machine, that’s what the POI is looking for. The NSA sends a three man team of batmans, with SMG and pistols firing rifle rounds. Batman can mostly slow them down, not take them out like they were nothing. The only way to rescue the POI is giving him a clean passport, money in some offshore account, and a plane ticket to somewhere far away.
Besides the current NSA heads, there are new antagonists: the NSA person that bought The Machine for a buck is now a paranoid hobo, stalking Oracle, and she found him.
We have time for Batman doing his low priority investigation, Oracle himself. He faked his death a couple years ago, but he was engaged to an artiste living across the street from Washington Square Park, one of the prime real estate areas. She says some guardian angel keeps sending her jobs, nice work Oracle. She illustrates magazine covers, and stuff like that.
S01E23
Oh my, this finale solves nothing, on the contrary. The POI is some hot shrink, working for high powered clients that demand discretion, and she’s got a bounty on her head fulfilled by the dirty cop network.
The good guys pull out all the stops: both detectives are roped in, plus Irene Adler to do all kinds of shenanigans. The FBI is closing in, as is the former NSA hobo woman.
Batman and the shrink are holed up in a high class hotel, and she keeps psychoanalysing him as they are fired at by feds and dirty cops. Batman sends her away, and receives backup from both detectives, but he got the detonator the dirty cops missed and blows them up when they try to get away.
Oracle is supposed to pick up the shrink, by the former NSA hobo gets to him first. She rants about being chased around, demands Oracle should destroy The Machine, but then the shrink shoots her! She’s some hacker called “root” (a very unhelpful name), and she captured Oracle. She put a bounty on herself to capture Oracle, that’s just insane. Still pretty hot.
Batman survives the ordeal, Oracle is captured, both detectives know they are both working for the good guys. Most threats are eliminated, so this “root” should be next season’s antagonist. But how?
S02
S02E01
Root has Oracle, and she takes him travelling along internal locations without views, to save in the budget. They are going to Texas, that’s where she is from, after disappearing at 14 years old. Root is actually Joker, she just wants to see the world burn.
Meanwhile, the “contingency” is still working. Batman receives a phone call with a generated voice that seems like a numbers station. Batman is a little slow, but he figures it out: the words are Dewey Decimal System codes, an easy way to exfiltrate SSN covertly.
The POI is some accountant that inadvertently worked for the Aryan Brotherhood, fucking Nazis. Batman takes care of them, and wants to leave him to the cops, but he is slippery, there’s always something that makes him tag along.
What saves the day is a military Belgian Malinois, responding to Batman’s commands in Dutch. I cannot vouch for the pronunciation, but Batman is crazy prepared.
Ultimately, Batman and Carter will get their asses to Texas to apprehend Root, save Oracle, and get the show back on track, on the next episode.
S02E02
The Root episode, in Texas (which is just a yellow tint, like Breaking Bad). The spooks are after her, but even saddled with Oracle she can evade them. No POI this time.
Batman and Carter gets to Texas and solves the Root murder case: some girl gets abducted by the librarian’s husband, gets killed, and Root sees it all. She then steals 100 grand from a drug dealer, pins it on the killer dude, and absconds. Magnificent bastardry as a teenager already.
As usual, Carter wants to follow procedure, but Batman wants to throw people off plate glass windows. Both approaches work, actually.
Batman uses the NYPD alias to find and rescue Oracle. The CIA spook is murdered by Root in his own love-shack. Root remains at large, and does not know where The Machine is, maybe for the finale. Normality is restored, the next episode should be a regular one.
S02E03
The POI is the daughter of a Brazilian diplomat about to be the president on the PT ticket. So Lula. But she is a party girl, and her brat lifestyle leads to a drug dealer that was thrown out of the penthouse she was in, but she has video evidence (so, alternate universe Hunter Biden). Batman humiliates the bodyguards and inserts himself. The cops help too.
Oracle can work from the safe-house, but he gets panic attacks from walking down the street. Even with the Belgian Mallinois in tow. Nothing a “beer” with Batman cannot cure.
The freaking spooks are still working sub-rosa. Gina Haspel is the mastermind all along. The actual CIA is still rooting around Carter. They don’t get much out of her, other than spite.
S02E04
The POI is actually not mentioned this time, it starts in media res. Batman is at a restaurant with an Irish mobster, he overhears a conspiracy to commit a crime and intervenes, as he should. The assassin fell in love with the mark, and is himself being targeted by the boss, so they try to get away, but the mobsters are onto them. Batman can only help so far.
In the final shootout, the mark survives and gets her new life out West, while the recovering assassin dies in the shootout. Turns out he is the one that killed the mark’s late husband, and his relationship started out with foul purposes.
The big deal is that Elias is still running an crime empire from prison, like Joker. Oracle calls on him to stop the manhunt, and he accepts, in exchange for a chess game with an equal mind. Oracle’s alias is “Mr. Crane”, another The Dark Knight reference.
S02E05
The POI is an intrepid reporter for the “New York Journal”, a mix of New York Times and Wall Street Journal. She must be some Bari Weiss dumbass, because she gets an anonymous tip about the head of the dirty cop network and prints it right away. Other dirty cops are busted too.
The “anonymous tip” was sent by the real boss, and the feds arrest the politician running for mayor (like an Eric Adams type). The real boss is his chief of staff though, but that’s for a further episode.
The bulk of the episode is a comedy of errors, where Batman is protecting the reporter while pretending to be a chartered accountant called “Bruce Wayne” or something. They go one several dates, including ones that involve questioning by Carter and the feds, but they are blind, he wears glasses.
Batman’s Irene Adler is involved too, in making the journalist jealous, and ultimately, she is the one breaking up with Batman. Dodged a bullet there, she no longer believes the “urban myth” about Batman in a suit.
S02E06
The POI is the father from Brightburn. Unlike Superman’s father, he is a boring ass suburban dad with a small hardware store. But that’s the identity of some guy that died in the 90’s, he is a former safecracker that bailed on his last job, making so his crew got busted. And now, they are back.
They really want to make him do one last job, so they threaten his kid and burn down his car. Oracle buys an half million dollar house next to him and Batman’s Irene Adler is recruited to be his wife. Both are bored to death from living in the suburbs for one night, what a nightmare.
The job is in the city, but the crew kidnaps the kids that are partying in the apartment. Batman impersonates one of the guys and saves the day, while Carter gets the collar. But the guy already came clean to his family, so he turns himself in and being a WASP suburbanite, he gets a ankle bracelet.
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, NO RACIST POLICE.
We get a tiny flashback where Oracle uses LOVEINT to track the painter girlfriend, but he takes 2 or 3 years to even say “hi”. This is extremely related…
S02E07
The POI is a doctor that has to entertain donors instead of doing his job. Yes, the big donors are Oracle and Batman, but still. She has a loving wife that brings her chocolate croissants, but she under pressure to do a somewhat simple heart surgery on a Ozymandias-type (Veldt, I saw the Watchmen).
Along come a British Private MI6 (a suave Julian Sands) with a team of Greggs Batmans, ready to assassinate the doctor’s wife if her patient does not die on the operating table. This is nail-biting stuff, involving the dirty cop breaking the balls of a random cop (who turns out to be a Greggs Batman), Batman proper taking out a sniper, Batman pretending to be Morpheus and guiding the target through a market fair, and Oracle in full scrubs boinking an undercover nurse with a surgery light.
Turns out the British Private MI6 was self-funding by shorting the stock and killing the CEO in secret. This is discovered by their temporary ally, the accountant that stole from Nazis in S02E01.
S02E08
The love episode, or Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The POI are a couple of millionaires that put a hit on each other, because they had marriage issues. Batman, Carter and the dirty cop save them from the first round of assassins, but that only works out when they are locked in a room with wine, dinner, and no cellphones.
Ultimately, the assassins are taken care of, and they get indicted, but with their expensive lawyers and white skin, they get away with nothing, while the gangbanger and the professional hitman that chased the all mighty dollar got lead poisoning. Love conquers all.
Carter requires some assistance from a new detective we never seen, and they will go on a date together. The dirty cop removes the battery from his phone so he can go on a date with some nice woman, and she doesn’t like fancy dinners, preferring going on a stakeout.
Yes, what about Oracle you say: there’s a flashback about his painter girlfriend, their date with a treasure hunt all over NYC (including the ice cream truck that already knows him), that finishes on the Guggenheim museum. An “anonymous donor” purchased the painting she was raving about on the last date, someone was listening. I’m taking a mental note once I have millions to buy Italian Renaissance paintings…
S02E09
The POI is a cab driver, a Cuban baseball player that defected to America, courtesy of a smuggler that wanted a cut of his contract. But then he had an injury, which means no more jet setting in the pitch, he is driving a cab instead.
One of his fares is a Russian hacker that got popped by an Estonian mob before selling the laptop with some kind of DHS database. But the cab driver is being shafted by the smuggler and his family is being persecuted, he sold it through some computer repair dude that gets whacked by the same Estonian pretty girl with a bunch of goons in tow.
Batman takes care of them temporarily, but what really puts them to rest is the Secret Service, trying to solve a fuck-up. The laptop is returned, in exchange for bringing the cabbie’s wife and kid back from a dictatorship. Too bad Trump would put them all back in CECOT before the kid can go to college.
The dirty cop does his final dirty cop network job, kidnapping the final mob boss for Elias, but this was a double cross. The beat cop that controls our dirty cop doesn’t buy that, and just burns his bridge. Fusco is fucked, the detective he ratted him out is Carter! Not sure she will buy his story.
S02E10
The POI is some girl with a dead soldier brother in Afghanistan that got involved in a veteran “charity” which was truly evil: they funnelled poor veterans to low interest house loans, jacked up the interest rates, the houses were foreclosed by the bank which kicked back money to the charity chief. 30 million bucks, that’s thousands of homes stolen.
Batman is supposed to stop them from re-robbing the money and distributing it to worthwhile charities, but even he can see what they are doing is morally right, so he helps them. They stole the Semtex and got the blueprints, so they blow the bank floor and steal the safe deposit boxes. The dude was storing the money in a Venezuelan bank!
Meanwhile, Fusco is checking out Carter’s new boyfriend, and he is close to the head of what’s left of the dirty cop network. His reputation is for being flush with cash, sounds fishy. Carter is not too eager for his advances either. The feds offer her a job as a temporary federal agent, the good guys will be happy to have a woman on the inside so higher up.
Oracle will Robin Hood the money in the future, he had to pull a crazy stunt to get the Bonnie and Clyde couple out. But Batman is pinned down by the charity’s hired guns, so the feds bust them all at once. Batman is in federal custody now.
The good version of Timothy McVeigh is played by the fair cop from Sense8!
S02E11
The POI is some kid with average grades, which turns out to be a massive hacker that created a new compression algorithm (called Pied Piper, perhaps). He knows the answers but only gives the right responses half the time, keeping everything sub-rosa. He even enlisted his computer teacher to sell the algorithm to some VC fund, to give the money to his drunken mother.
He is extremely depressed because he went out boozing with his brother, they played stupid games and won stupid prizes: playing chicken with the subway was deadly for his brother. His idea: become millionaire, give the money to his mother, then kill himself. Oracle is the only one that can save him from suicide, by impersonating a maths teacher talking about Gauss.
Oracle does the heavy lifting, Fusco only deals with some drug dealers that our boy making work for him, through intermediaries.
Batman is still doing time in Rikers Island, the feds are onto him. Oracle smuggled a cell phone to his cell, but he just stares into a dirty wall all day. Piece of cake, actually. Carter gets the hard job: being the inside woman in the FBI, tampering with the investigation, including seducing some dude, sedate him, then collect his DNA and replace it from Batman’s actual DNA. This works, the 72 hours are up and they are released.
But wait, there’s a last minute twist. The feds gets some PATRIOT Act FISA bullshit and characterise them as unlawful combatants. Which means Carter will need to interrogate Batman, see if he is the man in the suit.
S02E12
The POI is some Czech supermodel, being chased by Albanian mobsters, but that doesn’t matter, it’s left for Fusco as a kind of comic relief, and she gets the girl’s phone in the end. Might be a story for another episode.
The real story is how Carter and Oracle are working together to free Batman from jail. Even Elias is there, but he will stand down.
The FBI dude is ultra paranoid, but the story checks out, the cover story is extremely tight since it’s almost real, just changing some locations and names. That’s how the cover stories work, do not deviate so much from the real deal.
The CIA is also trying to kill Batman, but they don’t know who he is, so they kill one of the other dudes. Other is a former Navy SEAL, deployed in Iraq during the time Batman was active. That leaves two guys, the other dude will clearly talk.
Oracle steals a couple millions from his Cayman account, and knows where his family lives, so he accuses the dead guy. Our Batman is free!
But the fed is spooked, he doesn’t trust him. He think he was made, and Carter is the mole! Which she is. When Batman meets her, the fed is there, a lone ranger. There is a twist: a new number comes up: the fed! He is brutally murdered by Gina Haspel with a truck, and she kidnaps Batman. Carter is left for dead.
More special episode where Batman is kidnapped, but she might be friendlier. Perhaps…
S02E13
Yeah, Gina Haspel is not friendly, not at all. Batman gets the same bomb vest Snow already wears, and they go around doing pretty much the same thing they were doing before. Kidnapping ATF agents, etc etc.
She is working for some private intelligence agency, “CIA Inc” is what some headline said. She uses her new assets to break into a SCIF with the kind of shit Vault 7 had, plus an internal DOD network node. She just wanted them to defeat the physical security so she could infect the DOD with some kind of virus, somewhere.
Batman erases the Vault 7 data (he’s better at this than the real spooks), and since his vest is almost going off, he runs to the roof. Carter and Fusco are dismissed, but Oracle is there too. Goddamn, that SCIF is a freaking sieve. Oracle can hack the triggering phone so he can disable the detonator and make sure their organs remain inside their bodies.
Gina Haspel does her job, but Snow is waiting for her in the car and both blow up. She got the name of the person responsible for sending them to China: it’s Oracle!
The plot thickens, is Oracle a CIA plant all along? At least he was in the past… Is Root the real hero?
S02E14
The POI is a crazier Zuckerberg, closer to a modern day ketamine-infused Elon Musk. He runs a social media company with reckless abandon, shits all over his buddies and corporate suits, but here, Eduardo Saverin really wants to kill him. He almost does, in Saint Petesburg. There’s also the whisky, requiring Batman to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a hose.
A billionaire that seems just insane, but is smart enough to follow Batman and meet Oracle too. Threats to his life do not work.
Ultimately, he is saved and can do his corporate coup: abandon his company, then open a new one on the side, with his former competitors. What a waste of time for our heroes. Musk even gives Batman a fancy watch, with a tracking device inside. Insidious, I think he will come up in the future.
We also discover Oracle’s pal is the one that used the backdoor to attempt to save an “irrelevant” number. My guess is that he will die in one of those attempts.
Carter and Fusco do nothing this time, but she is still searching for the dead cops. Fusco tries to come clean to have her drop the case, but she won’t take it: she accepts he has changed, but will prosecute him for past crimes anyway.
Who better to play a deranged billionaire than the crazy dude from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? I think he played another character on Season 1, no?
S02E15
The POI is a lowly hotel cleaning lady, but this is a deep cover job, so Oracle is the concierge at the front desk, while Batman carries the bags, like a brute. The manager is an absolute idiot, and that’s before you know about his side job with a prostitution ring.
The important woman is another victim of the Balkan wars. Her whole Albanian family was murdered by a Serbian general (not named Milosevic), while she watched from across the street. She was sheltered by a Serbian woman.
Milosevic sends a professional hit squad to avoid ending up in The Hague. They already took care of the neighbour, and they bump off a reporter staying in the Hotel. That guy knew about Milosevic, wrote about him, but needs our cleaner to make a statement in public. She is afraid to end up six feet under like the others. Batman is there for her, delivering her to Fusco. She is taken to the precinct, where there’s another killer that Carter puts down.
Speaking of Carter, she was supposed to be promoted to the FBI, but that was put on ice after the other dude died. She even does the polygraph test, but fails because her boyfriend is being investigated by Internal Affairs. Just as she was taking the relationship to the next level, meeting her kid. No love for thee.
S02E16
The POI are a duo of official male hacker/female operative, following up on The Machine numbers, but instead of sub-rosa like Oracle and Batman, they are one of the official spook teams. They blow up a Berlin terrorist hideout. The Nolans are obsessed with Russians poisoning people with gaseous fentanyl, just like Tenet, but this is a lower budget version.
The next number is in New York, but as it happens, it’s a dummy job to burn their team. The hacker guy takes some bullets, not before declaring his secret love for her. Batman shows up to rescue her and gets a couple of bullets in the chest. She can use some low level drug dealer to get patched up.
She scores a meeting with some CIA operative, but Root is there, pretending to be the poor woman. She gets nothing, but the spooks attempt to kill her, before Batman rescues her. She refuses our protagonist’s help, even after taking her revenge on her direct handler. The other DC spook above them remains in place, she is a true believer. Even after that dude tries to kill her, and our protagonist faked her death, she refuses help and runs away alone. This seems like a stealth pilot for a spin-off.
Ken Leung is back, your friendly neighbourhood Mafia accountant/MMORPG gold farmer robber.
S02E17
Multiple POI once again, this time across the country, seems fishy. It’s just The Thing on Owen Island, the furthest bit of New York proper. All the six people are dead, the assassin takes their identities. There is no blood test scene!
It seems Gina Haspel put that virus on the SCIF and The Machine was on the fritz, it missed some people. Like the FBI agent that came to investigate on his own. Killed by the serial killer.
You know the rest, a storm pins them down, everyone suspects one another, there are strangers amongst the small community, unknown people disconnected the generator. The fisherman is smuggling drugs, a drifter deserted from the Marines, you got it all. The local cop is murdered with a Ka-Bar. Carter radios in, by the local cop mishears her name as “Carpenter”, that was a nice touch.
Actually, Carter is the hero. She is still pissed with the boyfriend, but he perseveres and saves his life. She softens on him, but not enough to talk to him properly for now.
S02E18
The POI is some old geezer living in Atlantic City, low rent Vegas for Donald Trump. That dude has a very boring life: wake up, have breakfast on the same diner everyday, where he knows the waitress, fill a “prescription” that includes thousands of dollars hidden in pill bottles, then get to a casino and blow it all. This is a very simple way to launder money, and hard enough to trace.
That old guy really loses all that money, because he is an expert card manipulator. He prefers baccarat, fast and simple. But he skims just a little money every time, so the mobster that runs the casino is out to get him. Batman is there for the first attempt. Then they pull a small Ocean’s Thirteen, until everyone is captured, and they play a little Russian Roulette, before Batman beats the shit out of everyone.
On the cop subplot, the dirty cop network rebuilds with the help of financial contribution from Russian banks, until they hit a non-corrupt cop that will testify in a court of law. He gets a visit from Internal Affairs, a bunch of cash is planted, the whole shebang.
Carter helps him out, so the mayor’s right hand man, head of the dirty cop network, invites that non-corrupt cop to have him shot, along his boss. He then takes a bullet himself, to make sure the story checks out. Carter might be next…
S02E19
The POI is a VP of a Cisco-expy, a network hardware company. She seems to be the only true believer in a company filled with spies and double-crossing cheats.
At first it seems the whole network is compromised by the Chinese government, but the internal lore takes over: PRC actually sub-contracted the work to the “CIA Inc” featured before. They are the overarching villain this time. The freaking CEO was compromised from the start, since the dotcom bubble. It’s like a future Cloudflare instance.
The woman is a tech wiz (not the writers though, they put a rant about hexacore tablets), so she starts working for Oracle’s front company.
The side plots are growing and growing. The official spook from Episode 16 (Shaw, like The Manchurian Candidate?) was tailing Batman, and reaches out to Oracle in the safehouse. She still works alone, but Root seems like a good hobby for her.
The dirty cop network is getting cockier, Carter’s boyfriend is connected to them indirectly, since his godfather is the top of the food chain. He still orders an hit on him anyway, just as Carter finds out he wasn’t dirty. Can’t get away with nothing…
S02E20
The POI is an old doctor who has a “friend” in an hedge fund, clearly an inside information source only. Fucking finance guys, you people are scum. This is pre-Trump 2, so the SEC could still put the fear of God into the most hardened billionaire, and there is an investigation into the hedge fund where that “friend” works making 500 million bucks from a tip.
Those finance bros go full on Putin on this doctor and poison him with radioactive polonium in water, instead of tea. Why not simply order a hit, a robbery gone wrong? Because Litvinenko, that’s why.
Batman rescues the doctor, keeps him alive for longer, and they pull a Luigi on the hedge fund guy, after he ran way to some luxury lodge upstate. The doctor does his rant, while Batman serves him the poisoned wine. Eat the rich!
Meanwhile, Fusco is in big trouble, the investigation into the murder of that guy from the very first episode is on, they found some possible locations for the bodies. Internal Affairs don’t fuck around. Batman is far away, Oracle is dealing with the virus, so Carter has to decide if she goes deeper into the dark side to save her partner. She borrows the dog from Oracle and moves the body, even with the ground frozen solid, that’s some mammoth arm muscles.
The next morning, the Internal Affairs dude gets a whole bunch of nothing. He gets his reprieve.
S02E21
The POI is a fake person! The Machine is dying so, it sets up a man-made memory system, and office of people copying up whatever is written. This is like a power regulator for AI, avoids it getting too powerful.
Root finally stalks Oracle, and they go around the city, while Batman hangs out with that former spook girl that travels alone.
They lock eyes with the head of “CIA Inc”, but he reveals Oracle is the one that send the virus to China, a nice little arc welding, everyone is related now.
The Machine is nearly dead now, it will reboot and call a payphone to select a new Administrator. Root nearly got it, but Oracle manipulates wires with sleigh of hand. The new Admin is now Batman! Way to go, but Root still has Oracle.
Carter doesn’t really help out on this one, she is trying to take down the dirty cop network. She was about to be shot in the back, but she shoots some armed dude, which turns out to become unarmed as the Internal Affairs shows up. She was framed, the protagonists were busy dealing with plot stuff.
S02E22
Root still has Oracle, but now Root and Batman are both admins? Something to this effect. Both are in God Mode for 24 hours, and The Machine is trying to save them. Since Batman also has the irrelevant contingency, he still needs to save random people from silly situations. But all roads lead to the location: Washington state, a nuclear fuel storage facility. Of course only the workers have bunny suits, all others know this is just like that Utah NSA data center.
Root and Oracle get there, but it’s all empty! It moved itself, piece by piece, into some unknown location. Root goes catatonic, she was about to meet God but he wasn’t there, she has a BSOD. Batman arrives in the nick of time to shoot her and disable her shooting arm. Actually, the former spook girl is the one that most of the work, from driving the Ferrari, to taking care of Root.
The official spooks get there too, and there’s a small standoff, but they are also baffled The Machine is gone! Only the enforcer is left alive, some mysterious “Madam” on the phone is the new spook chief.
We finally see how Oracle turned into a good guy: the spooks knew about a terrorist attack, but did not stop it so that Oracle’s buddy could be killed for talking to a reporter.
Not one that worked for the New York Times, probably a Glenn Greenwald instead. This is what lead him to fake his own death, be crippled, and then eventually find Batman. We also note that Batman’s past girlfriend was one of the irrelevant number they did not save.
As for Carter, she is being fucked over by the dirty cop network, which means the “Internal Affairs” charges might be unofficial. She hears Elias is being rubbed out and saves him, what a turn of events, she goes full on rule breaking.
It kinda returns to status quo in the end: Batman and Oracle keep fighting crime, the former spook girl lives somewhere but might show up from time to time, Root is in some mental asylum. But Root receives a call from The Machine, what the hell?
S03
The team grew, they all have callouts on the intro now. It’s all red lines too.
S03E01
The numbers never stop, we even get a sort of intro introducing the new assets the good guys are working with. Oracle and Batman, we already know well. The former spook girl is like a even grittier version of Batman, I’m calling her Batgirl from now on. Carter is demoted to a beat cop, with an uniform, while that Internal Affairs stuff is resolved. Fusco is introduced as the comic relief, with a stupid fake beard.
The POI is a US Navy sailor, a “squid”. Just like Batman, he was shanghaied into serving by a judge, after minor kerfuffles with the law. His buddy got involved with smuggling shit for some SOCOM dudes, which turn out to be raw diamonds.
After a barroom blitz, Batman whisks him away, but his partner is strapped to a IED. Fusco is called to help, and he defuses the bomb as if by magic. The Bats track the Russians they are selling the diamonds to, Batman with good old Krav Maga, and Batgirl with a precision high powered rifle.
The tip about the Russians came from Elias, but only Carter can talk to him for now, she is still on the fence about saving him. What’s worse, Elias gets the diamonds and the money, in the end, what a shrewd businessman. She only cares about taking down the dirty cop network, and probably get a promotion back to detective.
Root is still daydreaming in the loony bin, but the connection to The Machine is real, she is really talking to God. She demolishes the psychiatrist that is “curing” her, but The Machine cannot predict this wildcard, the outcomes are either “Violence”, “Admin Death”, “Mass Casualty Event”, I bet it’s a season finale type of deal. It’s always there, lurking in the background.
S03E02
The POI is a sort of Equifax-lite, a people-finding service. Like a private The Machine. He gets shot in the head like the worm he is, by some kind of organised Luigi Mangiones, headed by a kind of Unabomber. Fuck UnitedHealthcare.
The dude is a CEO of a major company, married for 15 years, and still fucks some random woman, like a Bezos. Someone has video evidence and replaces his anodyne marriage slideshow with that sextape.
Those people are hardcore, they hack his SUV ECU and crash it, but he is buttressed by Batman. Batgirl blends in the office and doesn’t get to shoot anyone.
That guy disables Oracle, steals a gun, and nearly shoots the guy that wanted to kill him, after his daughter was killed by his stalker. But the Luigi Mangione dude was the real mastermind.
Carter is back training rookies, the dirty cop network is onto her, and the dead boyfriend’s file is sealed. She won’t take no for an answer. The rookie wants to learn too, I think he is cannon fodder.
S03E03
The POI is some rich dude dating an enormous amount of woman. He turns “Wall Street bro” to date someone, then in the same day, he goes to a bar as “hipster skater”. A chameleon, and so, possibly guilty.
Alas, he is the victim. His wealth came from a sizeable contribution from a shell company a while back. Turns out, he impregnated some heiress, and the patriarch made his own daughter get an abortion and sent him away.
He took the money, got rich, and fucks a lot of girls, to avoid thinking of the recently deceased that got away. One of them is undercover Carter, in a girl’s night out including frowny Batgirl and Irene Adler.
Turns out the abortion never happened, her sister raised the boy as her own. Our Casanova is so infatuated with parenthood, he kidnaps the boy for a stroll in the park, but gets cold feet and calls Carter to take him home. He has a birth certificate, so he will get at least shared custody.
Meanwhile, Root is nearly rubbed out by the remaining CIA spook, but The Machine helps her, and so she is at large in the world, free to be a wildcard. Oracle gets there, but it’s too late. He should have summoned some asset, they are getting underutilised.
S03E04
S03E05
The POI is a Green Card holder instead, the machine doesn’t produce just SSN. But it’s a kid, but extremely smart, sorta like a Russian Inspector Gadget kid, without an accent.
Batgirl is onto her, impersonating an ICE agent, and his “caregiver” doesn’t give a shit, he just does drugs in the open. She seems safe enough, until she gets kidnapped off the street by freaking thugs! Batman prevents that, and Batgirl is there to rescue her.
Turns out she was not kidding when presenting herself as “international spy”, she bugged her building, and accidentally recorded a conversation between Russian mobsters and the dirty cop network.
Batgirl gets some backstory too, on her lack of emotions: she had a car crash where her dad died in front of her, and she was unfazed. Doesn’t seem to be caused by the accident, an army brat must have seen some serious shit.
Carter is onto them too, on the other side. Somehow, she knows her “rookie trainee” is part of the dirty cop network, so she resists an attempt to murder her in some bar and kills the barman with the rookie’s gun. She pulled a Fusco on the dirty cop network, went all in the grey area.
Out of the freaking blue, Root kidnaps Batgirl!
S03E06
The POI is some kind of administrative detective, somebody tasked with determining possible next of kin when someone without known relatives dies unexpectedly. Oracle goes undercover as his new partner, but this guy seems extremely lowkey. Other than breaking into an apartment handled by somebody else…
Turns out that dead guy was his foster brother, he wasn’t stealing a gold watch. He knows his brother is no addict, particularly to heroin, and his fully furnished apartment points to funny business.
Which involves being a hacker, joining the Luigi Mangione organisation, but getting cold feet when they murdered someone. These centrists…
Anyway, he ratted them out to the spooks, so he is renditioned to a mobile Abu Grahib, and he will get to some black site for interrogation. His death was faked! That serves you right for going “by the book”. It seems Root’s plan intersects here, she kidnapped Batgirl to create an escape route for this dude. He gets away to Cartagena, and is just lying there, a sleeper agent for The Machine.
Oracle and the administrative detective do some great investigation, including escaping from a burning storage unit by way of Batman busting in.
After setting up part two, Batgirl impersonates a CIA officer and delivers Root to the cell next to the hacker, so they can talk and prepare for the final showdown. Batman is after the hacker too, and loses a Mangione to save the POI. Root is captured by the team.
Carter is handling the rookie kid, but his last job for the dirty cop network is burying a friendly shopkeeper he has been collecting money from. He is so shaken, he tells her the Russians have infiltrated dozens of people in NYPD, as if it needed less effectiveness.
S03E07
The POI is a sophisticated con man, a fake hypnotherapist that uses his questions to discover the patient’s security questions, and steal their money using fake charities. This is extremely convoluted, but it gets even worse when he plans a big heist to run away with the secretary and lover: one of his clients is laundering the dirty cop network money. He is an antiques dealer, takes their cash for baubles, and then overbids of phoney articles on some auction.
This fails when the conman switches the money around, and he buys a real baseball signed by Babe Ruth. Which means the cops want their money back, and they send Vector-wielding cops. When that doesn’t work, they kidnap the girl. This means Carter, Fusco, Batman AND Batgirl go on a shooting spree, since their investigations intersect.
It’s all for nought, I though the conman was being conned by some kid he hires to fetch the ball, but the girl was the mastermind all along. She gets away with the millionaire ball.
As for Carter, she faked the antique’s death, so her bitch and rookie dirty cop could avoid murder, but they get suspicious anyway. There’s a shootout, and the rookie gets shot (called it!), but Carter gets eyes on the real dirty cop network head: the mayor’s assistant! We already know it, but Carter just talked with him a couple days before!
The Root subplot is simmering in the background. She seems like Cassandra, warning of impending doom. She really believes The Machine wants her out there as a wildcard to prevent future shenanigans. That’s either the mid-season cliffhanger, or the finale.
S03E08
The POI are 38 cops, hot damn, this might be the Night of Long Knives. The Russians are decoupling from the dirty cop network, but Elias is also on the loose, and gunning for the Russians. This bloodbath can come from anywhere! Not from Elias, he’s just Carter’s messenger.
Carter really is the perp behind all this. She has a big plan of going after the dirty cop network boss by the book. After she steals a Russian shipment and false flags it a dirty cop protection scheme, dozens more numbers come up, the whole Russian Mob. This is going to turn into Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre with cops.
Alas, doing things by the book was her thing, but she turned a new leaf. After a final phone call to her son, she drove into the judge’s house, and found a bunch of plastic tarps on the floor, beside a bunch of dirty cops. Good thing Batman was right there to blow some kneecaps, and rescue Carter and the dirty boss.
In the meantime, we get a bunch of extra Carter backstory: her ex was also a soldier, but with tougher PTSD, he seems to be lower class. When herself was a rookie, he would refuse help and had anger management issues, including showing up unannounced at her house. But after a few years, he turned it around, and Carter can trust him with her son. That was the final click that made her call Batman.
It’s all well and good, but this means Batman is now wanted by all dirty cops and the most criminal enterprises. Something he could shrug off easily.
S03E09
Noooooooo! The POI is John Rooney, and other Johns, it’s Batman! The dirty cop network is vast, and it is out to get him.
They take the dirty boss on the subway, but the dirty cops know a guy, and they shutdown the whole thing: subway, roadblocks, gangs of marauding thugs roaming the streets. For a night, it’s like The Warriors or Escape from New York.
Batman, Carter and the dirty boss hole up on a morgue, for what seems like a last stand, similar to Assault from Precinct 13. But no, after putting the dirty boss to sleep, it’s really a bonding scene, where they trade war stories, compare scars (nothing beats a C-section), and Batman admits he would kill himself if not for her. 😢
Oracle is powerless to do anything here, he won’t let Root loose. She begs him, but he won’t budge. Fusco is about to lose his kid, but psycho Batgirl saves him (it’s the reverse from I, Robot). Fusco has to break his own thumb so escape from handcuffs and choke the other guy, No Country For Old Man-style.
There’s a brief moment when everything is fine. Carter gets her old detective job back, Batgirl and Fusco are friendlier now, all seems well. Shame about that dirty cop that got away, though.
Alas, they pull a On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Out of the darkness, while a phone booth rings, out comes the dirty cop and shoots Carter and Batman. Carter is bleeding to death, I think she bites the bullet. Just as Batman told her he was about to kill himself, if not for her.
S03E10
Carter is dead, un-fucking-believable. Black people always die first… There’s no POI this time, I think, only a target: the dirty cop that pulled the trigger.
Batgirl is out there, busting faces, and so is Batman. He is a loose cannon, and Fusco cannot keep up with the trail of bodies. Batgirl is easier to find, and is willing to help them, good thing about lack of feelings is that her anger never raises either. Like a volume dial turned down.
Anyway, the dirty cop is on the run, bought a very expensive Canadian passport, and the only person who knows how he will escape is the dirty boss. Which is being kept in some witness protection scheme, incognito in some unknown location.
With Batman and the Russian mob tracking him, the dirty boss won’t last long. The rest of the gang has nothing else, they need Root. Oracle protests, but they do it, her Cassandra shit leads them to a random motel, guarded by US Marshalls. Batgirl is enough for them.
Batman is already inside, taking care of dozens of soldiers with heavy gear, but they brought long rifles to small corridors, and night vision goggles to flare explosions. Rookie shit. The dirty boss will die whether the information about the dirty cop is forthcoming or not. Oracle reaches him just in time for him to faint for a lack of blood, the dirty boss is left for Fusco. And so is the paper he wrote.
This means Fusco gets the collar for the guy on every newspaper cover. He punches him up as he was leaving for Canada, probably over Niagara. Elias visits him in the hospital, and collects the old debt he was due, and avenger Carter at last. Requiescat In Pace.
We also get some more backstory on the rest of the people. Fusco revenge killed some gangbanger, Batgirl was almost a doctor (what‽), Oracle went to therapy a lot.
S03E11
The POI is some random IT guy, but that’s just the cover story, he is a former MIT engineer that worked for the NSA on another machine. Oracle remembers him, so he stays out of it, mostly. Batgirl takes point, playing another doctor.
The dude is half senile, with a Secret Service security detail, but that is easily taken care by the people after him, those revolutionary war cosplayers, the Luigi Mangione conspiracy. The woman pretending to be her wife is really the head of that organisation, and they recruited the other guy that should have been blown up the last time. She is the freaking Madam.
Turns out The Machine is not the only of the AI that was built, there’s also another one on disk drives. The only way for our protagonists to get out of that pickle is Root saving them.
With Carter dead, Batman is still moping in Colorado, on his dad’s bar. Fusco is keeping tabs on him, and also duking it out, like a more dramatic They Live!
S03E12
Yes, that’s right, Root disables the ankle monitor, picked the lock, geared up and saved their asses. In the subsequent shootout, Root is captured by the Madam. Batgirl and Oracle are still babysitting the other dude, and since they live life in hard mode, they get stuck in a bank vault, where the other AI’s drives are located.
There are now fake bank robbers, the Luigi Mangione organisation, and the fake SWAT team, the Madam’s government spooks. The Madam herself is busy torturing Root, injecting her with barbiturates AND meth at the same time, remnants of the old MKULTRA The Men Who Stare at Goats.
The Madam goes harder, and destroys Root’s inner ear bone, on the right side. She is extremely tough, and The Machine talks to her in Morse code using near-ultrasound, inaudible to people over the age of 40. The Madam lives as a kept woman, ironically. At least the spooks are neutralised now.
Oracle and his old pal are on the vault, debating whether to destroy the drives and the AI in it, or let them be used by anarchists. They choose death over killings. But it’s all for nought, the bank manager is some agent of the CIA Inc, those were undercover for a while. She switched the disks around, the AI spores were preserved.
Batman and Fusco arrive in the nick of time to save Batgirl, Oracle and his buddy, but Batman is still moping, he cannot get over another lovely lady dead after his failure. How many times can his heart be broken?
We also get more Oracle backstory, a modern day Gauss. Rebuild an engine as a kid, got into computers because his dad had dementia, ordered the Phrack magazine to his Bumfuck town and figured out the Captain Crunch whistles could “hack” the AT&T phone systems. He was Zero Cool, hacked the ARPANET and got visited by feds.
S03E13
Batman is still moping, so he gets a one-way flight to Turkey, but he overbooked, so is re-routed to a layover in Rome, first class. He almost felt like he could do it sober, until his seat mate is an old lady and there’s some asshole executive trash talking the hostess. North by Northwest on the screens. It’s gonna be a long flight…
Alas, it’s even worse than that. The Machine moved him to this flight to avoid a mass casualty event, the plane is going down! There is no POI, just a relevant number: Dread Pirate Roberts of Silk Road fame, with the serial numbers filed off.
It seems that nerd pissed off everybody: the spooks were skimming a cut for their black budget, the Colombian cartels and the Israeli ex-Mossad sent their finest sicarios to get him. But Batman can take them all, with the help of the nice hostess. He is still moping, and hasn’t joined the team yet.
After a lot of improvised weaponry, and a food cart battering ram, they reach the final boss: one sicario is crashing the plane before BASE jumping into the Atlantic. While Batman is beating the bad guys, Oracle has to remotely land the plane, he even busts out his HOTAS gear! Crisis averted.
The team sits this one out, Batgirl just has to poison her former spook boss and beat up some desk jockey. Oracle gets to Rome to whisk Dread Pirate Roberts somewhere, but Batman consorted with the air hostess, so he is done moping, he wants to help people again. He gets an even better Italian suit, as the nerd says “that salt-and-pepper hair already turns on all soccer moms”.
S03E14
The POI is a recent American citizen, a former Olympic gymnast, whose career was cut short by some Prague business. She seems the perp, after stealing a Cezanne from a black tie event, attended by the team.
Batgirl explicitly throws a bone to all shippers in the audience, since Oracle has Batman as his plus-one, and the homoerotic charge is not denied. Batgirl wears a revealing white outfit, for plausible deniability.
Our perp drops tire spikes on some street to bust some SUV, and Batgirl foils her, but the plot thickens: she is stealing all this shit to avoid getting her daughter killed, in Prague. This gang of evildoers has a hold on her, and the team wrecked her plan.
Then, this turns into a small Ocean’s Eleven, it’a a heist movie now. They are stealing a Gutenberg Bible, from some his security building with laser grids, fingerprint readers, heat sensors, the works. The gymnast is the grease woman, but there’s time for a fake out robbery with Batman in a stupid moustache, Fusco leveraging fingerprints, 3D printing.
The soundtrack doesn’t have any Orrin Hatch songs, but it does have Propellerheads, the one about Nixon taking California. A deep cut.
In the end, Batman is “busted” by Fusco and catches a plane to save the daughter in Prague and get her back safe. The Interpol dude lets her go, he takes the credit for busting the Prague dudes.
Batman is no longer moping, but on the final toast, he pours one out for Carter. Gone, but not forgotten.
S03E15
The POI is a 911 operator / supervisor, being shanghaied into eliminating evidence of a murder. The people that perform the last mile criminality are random cartel hitmen, but as usual, the masterminds are white collar dudes. Is this case, the girl’s bosses, since the big boss was pulling a Bill Clinton on the job.
The wife knows a guy who knows a guy, I saw this exact plot in S01E17.
The true purpose is to introduce another criminal mastermind chasing our protagonists, but Oracle doesn’t even flinch against death threats.
It’s not the Luigi Mangione conspiracy, or is it? Batgirl is keen on shooting kneecaps, and Batman can defuse a level trigger while talking about baseball.
This episode is much better that dedicated films like The Call.
S03E16
Uhh, a lore episode, a flashback to one of Oracle’s previous “Batman” types, I’m calling him Batboy. The legacy POI is a nerd that was hired by the spooks to hack The Machine.
He found the backdoor and extracted bits and pieces into a laptop, but his assassins failed. So the spooks sent the big guns, Batman himself and his partner. The CIA Inc also sent some dudes.
Batboy is a suave James Bond type, he even bangs attractive numbers. But he doesn’t trust Oracle, and double crosses him. Oracle tries to save the nerd, but he fails, except Batman does it himself. He sends him to some Canadian frozen hellhole.
Batboy sells the laptop to the Chinese, but the spooks send Batgirl to mop up. Oracle literally buries him. This triggers the whole Chinese mission for Batman, etc etc etc, it evens welds Batgirl’s plot.
The epilogue follows the nerd that hacked the machine. He is still holed up in the snow, but Root shows up, sends him to Cartagena and leaves. The nerd abides, since she “is pretty and all”.
S03E17
The POI is a janitor, but Root got to him first. She works her charm on him, and protects him from assorted gun danger in her trademark butterfly effect manner. It’s super effective, but she is being chased by the Luigi Mangione organisation and CIA Inc, at the same time. Batman and Batgirl are valuable assets.
Batgirl goes for the Luigi Mangiones and takes down a lot of them, but she is being tempted to join them, as a Patriot that got betrayed by the United States Government. She seems resistant to a message of black ops for a good cause.
Batman tracks the janitor, who seems much more than that: started a small financial firm with college friends, pulled The Big Short with the 2008 crisis, until a masked men gunned their office down. He gave away all his money and lives an ascetic life, mopping up floors.
Still doesn’t explain why Root is after him: some company he cleans invented a super fast chip, cooled with liquid helium. They want his biometrics. “They” being CIA Inc, the guy is kidnapped and the chip taken away. But the guy lives, with Batman and Fusco gunning down mooks, and Root taking one on the arm.
Root sends him away, after recognising she was the corporate drone that put the hit on him, to earn a couple millions. She might have the ear of God, but she is a fallen angel. The chip can be combined with the tapes from the bank to create another machine, targeted to the protagonists. But they seem pretty chill about this CIA Inc threat.
By the way, Root is a bona fide FBI agent now, with real warrants, and implemented a new un-jammable communication device with The Machine, after cornering some doctor.
S03E18
The POI is an engineer at one of those big firms that does public works overseas. One of their contracts is supplying a hydro plant near Mosul, but corrupt UN people and armed terrorists divert the generators to a Turkish location, into some boat somewhere.
Someone got shafted, particularly the translator who has a bounty on his family’s heads in Iraq, Shia militias do no appreciate being fingered in some UN corruption charge. The engineer is being targeted in New York by her boss and their UN cronies, using French Foreign Legionnaires. Merde!
Batman and Batgirl rescue the engineer, but it is much harder to spring the translator properly. Diverting prisoner transport is easy, but they need to break into the UN to fetch smoking guns, so our guy can have a proper asylum application. Good thing this wasn’t during Trump’s “Shithole Countries” policy.
Batgirl sends a smoke grenade, causing the UN security to call the fire department, and Fusco comes along, honking the big fire engine horn like a kid. A lot of pointing guns, kneecaps blown up, and bonking dudes with canisters later, and they succeed.
Our Hispanic engineer and the Iraqi translator get a nice little date on a restaurant with a great view of New York. The CEO gets away, sells the generators to CIA Inc to power their own machine, and gets rubbed out by them. Root is onto him.
We discover Batgirl’s mum was an Iranian teacher who fled the country after 1979. Maybe a supporter of the Shah. That explains why an Iranian descendant was let in the spooks, she was on the right anti-communist side of history.
S03E19
The POI is some random office from the OPM who deals with boring ass paperwork, like security clearances. She live in DC, just arrived at New York for a Mamma Mia musical, yikes. Despite all that, she does not deserve getting blown up by the Luigi Mangione organisation. Batman and Batgirl could not do much.
Oracle will follow up on this in DC, while the bat people track a new POI, requiring vanquishing a greater foe: an high school reunion, 20 years later. That guy is a DA, and through gossip, they discover a weird sex thing between her wife and the nerd hot dog guy, causing her to OD on his car last year.
Batgirl gets the hots for that DA dapper dude, but keeps it professional. It gets deflated when we discover the nerd is the victim. The DA does not appreciate the rumours, and that his wife cheated on him with a nerd, the highest crime.
But wait, Root leaked the bat people’s location to the Luigi Mangione’s organisation, so they strike hard. Poor Batman, he doesn’t get to use his P90 in a suitcase. Batgirl saves them with her rudimentary chemical skills.
In DC, Oracle is being cucked by the feds, so he strikes back, after avoiding an hotel Fusco knows that bills by the hour. He cracks the evidence safe with a portable X-Ray machine, but the Unabomber is there already.
Root saves them with her incredible skill, and tracks down the head of CIA Inc, but she is jumped and has to let them go away. Franklin publishes the files, so the spook codename for The Machine is public now.
Some random senator, probably some Mitch McConnell expy gets heat and orders The Madam to shut it all down, now. The Machine is being shutdown, so shifts priorities to her wellbeing first. This means Root has another important job nobody knows about.
S03E20
The POI is like a milquetoast version of Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi, a boring ass congressman with extreme power and no ideology. He just looks out for his stock portfolio and being loved by all.
Batgirl leaves early with Root, since she is taking care of the relevant numbers, now that the spooks closed up shop.
His number comes up, so our guys assume he is being targeted by the Luigi Mangione organisation, but as it turns out, they are protecting them from our protagonists. Yes, they have to shoot at him to get him Secret Service protection, so that Batman can dump the true agent in some podunk hotel.
After some jokes about Opera at Kennedy Center (oh oh oh, another institution Trump wrecked), Batman kidnaps a sitting congressman, Batgirl shows up, but the dude remains mum about CIA Inc, until Oracle threatens him with an SEC investigation. As if Pelosi cared… That representative is too realistic, he hates PRISM, but supports something similar from a private company, the idiot.
So, it seems nobody is really after the senator, he is on the take from the guys creating a rival AI. They got the software, and the hardware for a full scale setup, just need the NSA feeds. The Machine selected his number for murder instead. Batman and Batgirl cock their guns and trot out the utilitarian argument, but Oracle is not willing to continue if it involves murdering people. He wants to save people instead.
After some back and forth, the guy lives, Batgirl gets shot in the leg, so the good guys lose. Oracle then mopes for about a week, it’s his time now.
CIA Inc has a senator is their pocket, and the head of the Rules Committee, so they trail that to some must-pass bill or something. The Rival AI is now being tested in production, for 24 hours, and is seeking Oracle. The Machine is protecting him.
S03E21
The Rival AI is now online, but only as a beta test, of New York City, for 24 hours. It is being run by a random quant in a suit, CIA Inc is in control. They (ironically) call it Samaritan, so I’ll call it Jericho. AIs duking it out.
The Machine can access more data, and has better hardware, but the software has the Three Laws of Robotics, or something similar. Jericho is all bloodlust, bringing the walls down.
Root saves the bat people from a kill zone with SMG and an RPG, but Oracle is still no way in sight. The Machine is protecting his original admin, even after being reset the last season. They skulk around, escape to Jersey, and sneak into a loading dock that holds no people but some weird computer servers.
Jericho has no qualms, so they find out about Grace, Oracle’s former future artiste wife, and CIA Inc kidnaps her. They try, but the bats are there to help, they kidnap her! They take him to Fusco in the precinct, but CIA Inc surrounds they and is almost willing to go all Assault on Precinct 13 on them. Root solved whatever it is she did, so she shows up to cover their asses. They all run away in a car that gets T-boned, so they have her.
After kidnapping the asset, the CIA Inc CEO debriefs her, but she thinks Oracle is dead, there is nothing she knows. The gang roots around and finds her location, but it is too late, they left the nerd behind to burn the beta test. Which means, they propose a trade: Oracle for the artiste. This makes him come out of hiding, and he will turn himself in, the surprising part is the order to kill every single motherfucker of them in case his beloved gets hurt.
They do the prisoner exchange, she wears a blindfold to avoid funky business for now. It seems CIA Inc is winning, they have a proven system, politicians in their pocket, and now Oracle too. Root is onto them, she has some of Jericho’s servers. I sense a prisoner exchange, man vs machine.
S03E22
Oracle is locked up in a CIA Inc “safehouse” with massive windows. Doesn’t look very safe to me. Maybe those are one-way mirrors.
Anyway, the Luigi Mangione organisation is taking point now, the Unabomber himself wants blood. We get some of his backstory, his brother fell off the wagon, but got better when he joined the AA (that evil cult).
One of his AA buddy was the cousin of some Al-Qaeda dude, do by PRISM’s three connections rule, he was just abducted by government goons with secret warrants. That dude lost his job, the house, the kid he shared with his ex. He then killed himself.
Our Unabomber guy was a lawyer, future prosecutor, so he dug around and got nothing but national security bullshit. He raged at the pencil pusher, but she is just following orders. He then gets a recruitment text, who sent him that? It would be freaking hilarious if it was The Machine itself, but I’m betting on another AI.
Root is putting the seven servers she stole back into Jericho, to fuck it up from the inside. Just like The Machine, Root is banging.
The Luigi Mangione organisation livestreams a trial with the upper echelon of the surveillance state: the NSA chief, Gina Haspel, the senator on the Ways and Means committee, the President’s confidant, and Oracle. They go full on Robespierre, while taking out the power to the entire city. This is Summer of Sam.
S03E23
Whelp, the trial is not very trial-y. If you plead the Fifth or argue with the prosecution, you get shot with a 12-gauge at close range!
Root manages to install the special servers, with some Batgirl help. The UST between them is through the roof.
The spook protecting the Madam is also after the trial, so they join forces. With some elbow grease, our protagonists find the trial location, but only after CIA Inc starts murdering them. Once again, the spook dies in a explosion, this time for good.
We get to know the Unabomber was recruited by the head of CIA Inc himself! They were controlled opposition all along! Even the “livestream” was faked. The Unabomber is shot in the back like a dog, a sad ending for someone with some good ideas with questionable methods. He was Kerensky, but Lenin wins over in the end.
The trial is invaded by the cops, along with some hotshot lawyer, press people, they all blow up in massive attack. CIA Inc did a false flag, with their Luigi Mangione organisation front, and since the senators our guys did not murder was still in power and one of the kidnapped guys, he approved the NSA feeds, meaning Jericho is fully operational.
This is basically the Singularity. There’s no way to beat it (at least for now), it’s like fighting The Machine. The glitch Root introduced with the funky servers, are their seven new identities, those are always considered irrelevant. They spread out for now, living their unassuming lives, atomised. Curiously, Fusco is not one of the safe ones…
The worst crime of CIA Inc is their techno-optimism. Those are basically AI Vestal Virgins, they want to be subservient to machines. They are no longer humans, mere vessels for a paperclip maximiser. Scum of the highest order.
The feds failed to put their agent provocateur in the Luigi Mangione organisation, CIA Inc was not fucking around, even before being priests at the digital Oracle of Delphi.
Root reminds us of the story about Pandora’s Box, how something remained after all the daemons of the world left: hope. Let us pray The Machine can exploit some weakness, somewhere.
S04
The intro is now “we are being watched”.
Sarah Shai is being written off because she had a baby! Real life continues to write the plot, even more that the writers themselves.
S04E01
The POI never stop, even when our team is scattered and literally keeping up appearances to avoid getting murdered. The Machine thinks We Can Rebuild It. Oracle is spooked, the others eager.
Someone had a lot of fun giving out the hidden identities: Batman is a cop, Oracle is a university professor. So far, so normal. But Batgirl is a perfume saleswoman! Must be some kind of joke. Root is still the wildcard, shipping herself with Batgirl and keeping dropping hints of Batman and Oracle.
The POI is some Egyptian tech wiz, ex military intelligence. He builds an Encrochat for some gang, but can only ship v1 when Oracle tweaks it. It’s a great idea, to repurpose the existing VHF antennas, but this is outdated now, since 5G is using those frequencies.
He failed before, so his son is kidnapped. He tries to blow up the kidnappers, but Batman saves them. So Batman needs to saves the kid too. Good thing they were splitting a massive shipment of H, Batman is still technically a Narcotics cop.
Oracle complains, but also gets enough hints to discover a new Batcave, courtesy of The Machine, sub-rosa.
S04E02
The POI is a teenage girl, involved in the kind of game that turns smart people into Pi, like Cicada 3301. The whole thing is a Jericho ploy to turn special people into assets.
The game is actually Cicada 3301 on steroids. The players are supposed to have a gun to scare people off or just shoot competing players, and it revolves around finding Nautilus shells in weird places.
Everyone who plays the stupid game is technically brilliant, the POI who “wins” is an orphan, so has much less fucks to give. Not sure the others did not fail on purpose… One of the competitors has a Google Glass, what a dweeb.
Turns out Jericho really wanted to take out a renamed Blackwater, the POI stole some documents proving Erik Prince himself knew about the Nisour Square massacre. As if the NYT would ever print that…
Root nags Batgirl about signing up for Tinder and accepting a “match”, that was some criminal gang that needed a driver. But she cannot be exceptional, or Jericho takes a closer look. Oracle says he doesn’t want to, but helps out anyway.
Oracle has time to finish the new Batcave in some abandoned subway line, with a single static carriage. Comms were fixed the last time, what else do they need?
We are back, baby! Less money, less freedom, all spunk.
S04E03
The POI is some former longshoremen turned “Pick-Up Artist”, that’s about the least likely career change. This before Andrew Tate, so pickup-up artists were just astrology for slightly pathetic dweebs, not a manosphere where having sex with women is gay.
Having Batman hire a PUA would be simply ridiculous, so Fusco gets stuck being Kevin James, while the number is Hitch.
Ironically it works, there’s a lady at the art gallery that likes him.
The police chief was breaking Batman’s balls over his lack of progress on the cases piling up, so accessed personal resources for a public good, and solved a bunch of them at once. Illegal Evidence was only used as parallel construction, the rest was plain Fifth Amendment violations, and tricking criminals to confess. A law-abiding day at the NYPD.
Eventually, both cases merge, meaning Batgirl can help out too, from the dark shadows. The police chief likes Batman so much, she gets friendlier.
The organisation is low on cash, but The Machine delivers Root with a magnificent plan, multi-pronged, jailing at least two gangs, providing Oracle with loads of cash, guns, some massive TVs, and an AT-4 missile launcher. 50 grand seems cheap for that over engineered RPG.
S04E04
The POI are some kids from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds. Their father died long ago, but their mum got busted for an illegal weapon and is rotting away in Riker’s.
After a shooting leaving seven(!) dead bodies, the drug money is gone. Those kids got it, bought new clothes, and went straight to a lawyer that can spring their mother. Brother and sister cannot even live together while in foster care.
Batgirl dragged a gangbanger around, but they pull an Elias again, the guy is actually the chief of a new gang that even Elias cannot control! That dude seems too smart to be doing this, I predict a future gangbanger battle.
There’s a DEA agent taking care of the case, she seems extremely friendly, before being revealed to be on the take by the gang (fucking feds). Nothing a shootout cannot solve, the older boy even gives himself up, but they only want the money.
The kids are all right, no attitude adjustment needed. They just need to get their mother back. This would be something our protagonists could solve, but not anymore.
S04E05
The POI is like a Nate Silver, but working internally for the incumbent campaign. There’s an election for governor of New York, and the incumbent (Cuomo?) is being challenged by a woman (Hochul?).
Jericho wants someone they can bend, so the woman wins the election by a hair. Nate Silver goes catatonic, his spreadsheets said otherwise, so he rants about election interference and hacked voting machines. So far, so realistic.
But wait, Jericho actually rigged the election! People did not get the final call to make them go to the polls, so they didn’t, the incumbent lost! As the new governor does her victory lap she chokes on something and drops dead. It appears the Vice-Governor is the ideal politician, eager to please, friendly, no ideology. A perfect blueprint for the kind of dweeb CIA Inc can nudge.
They try to save this dude, when he is eager to “leak” the conspiratorial mess. He cannot, and finally, he is “mugged” and gaslit into believing he did not predict the other win. Moving on from that makes Nate being kinda flip-floppy, but our protagonists are even worse.
Batman shot too many kneecaps, and Internal Affairs is onto him, he has special psychiatric help. Root is no longer in contact with the machine, she no longer has God mode. She still goes on a shootout to save the dude, but gets banged up badly. Her hots for Batgirl are basically in the open now, but not sure how reciprocal are those feelings.
When Nate Silver no longer predicts election results, does he get downgraded to Nate Bronze? Nate Tin?
S04E06
The POI is a Batman fanboy, this is like that The Dark Knight scene with the fake Batmen. An excuse for purely fan wank, jokes about Batman’s voice, Batgirl and Fusco walking about like superstars.
The plot itself is a bitter mafia struggle between Elias and the new gang that tried to kill the kids. Calling it Black Bloc from now on.
The Black Bloc smuggled 100 Barrett XM500 anti-materiel rifles, and it’s as ridiculous as the last time. The only reason for them to use that shit is pure product placement, and they paid extra for having the cast manipulate the product. A completely worthless gun, like the Desert Eagle.
Oracle is actually in Hong Kong, at some conference about his boring ass generic academia. He meets some woman there, a startup owner with interesting algorithms. Our Oracle gets really friendly with her, until they get mugged. He goes crazy and proposed retrieving their stuff with an umbrella. This bonds them further, Oracle made a new friend.
But it’s all a ruse. Jericho is looking forward to control those algorithms, and Oracle was in a sub-rosa mission to install a RAT or something in the CEO laptop. The “mugging” was a ruse, the guy was hired by Oracle! Fight the power!
S04E07
The POI is a latino hotshot wine salesman, and Batgirl is giddy about surveilling his ass. Better look closer at his hot hairless body… Turns out that is just a day job, he is actually an hotshot safecracker, part of a team of thieves. They were hired for a big score, two million bucks each?
It is very easy to tip off Fusco for a drug bust, even when she wasn’t carrying any seconds before. Since the crew is missing a member, Batgirl slots right in to driver-shaped hole. That job interview is extremely sexy and filled with double entendres. And Root as mission control, her disdain for that guy is palpable, even from afar.
Anyway, the job goes well, but they are not stealing any “valuables”, it’s a case of Marburg virus vials, Ebola’s nastier cousin. This number turned relevant, just as it comes out the busted girl and the other dudes are supposed to double-cross our POI. The client is an ex-gang member who got abandoned in Prague, faked his death, and is after their old partners.
So now, we almost reach a Mexican standoff: the not-quite-dead guy and his mooks, Batgirl and her ladrón, and a team of actual spooks. They are all after the same virus vials. Batman and Fusco don bandanas to help Batgirl, but it’s just a delay tactic. Jericho directs the spooks, and turns from destroying the virus, to secure it. Something fishy is going on here, I bet CIA Inc interfered here.
Good thing Batgirl is the one that trained the head spook. He got them at the last minute, but let them go, since Batgirl is someone he was just celebrating managing to get out of their assignment. He will be rubbed out in South America, I know it.
Root and Oracle have a second job: making sure some secret OLPC project does not get off the ground. Root pretends to be a French Mary Poppins to get into the dude’s house, and after pulling network cables and sabotaging some 3D printers, everything goes up in smoke.
Oracle is not very happy that the good guys are nuking something like the OLPC for fear of being weaponized by Jericho. Again, this reveals the date, more screens for young kids out be verboten now, smartphones are being banned in classes.
The head spook that let Batgirl go was doing good, but Batgirl might have been made, not sure how exactly can Jericho route around the hacked servers. I’m guessing Root will work overtime soon.
S04E08
The POI is some random Police Academy rookie, but she is smart enough to kneecap Batman! He was probably distracted, but that is still crazy. Turns out she is a cop already, Internal Affairs, and is tracking a criminal mole sent by the Black Bloc. Our guys are only discovering now that the guy Batgirl was dragging around was the head of the organisation in disguise. Dominic/doMINIc.
The Black Bloc is doing the Elias playbook, gathering up all the gangs under one umbrella, The Godfather, but Elias doesn’t do second fiddle. This means war, Elias either complies or gets wasted. But that’s for the next episode.
The mole in the Police Academy is looking for some files that allow him to track Elias down, why do the same work the cops already did. Snowden is mentioned explicitly, why attack the NSA directly, when you can get the same data from Booz Allen Hamilton. Same thing with the NYPD and the Police Academy. Extremely intelligent.
The undercover cop is the target, so they start with her handler. She is adrift now, there is no proof she was ever a cop now. When the affiliate gang guarding the mole is wasted by Batman and the undercover cop, the Black Bloc empower the second in command to be the new leader. No direct attacks, indirect exploits.
Jericho is still tracking down Batgirl, and starts with the woman they sent to jail for a drug charge. That leads to the other gang that recruited on Tinder-expy. The asset used a shotgun and apologised for pulling a Dick Cheney, that’s a deep cut.
She tracked Batgirl to her cosmetics cover job, but is dumb enough to pull a gun on her in a crowded store. Jericho seems to be too clever by half, as the Brits say.
S04E09
The POI is Elias himself, that’s a tough cookie. He’s got Batman and his own right hand Scarface covering his ass, but the Black Bloc has an army of mooks. The odds are stacked, and they have to fight in some old home with special meaning for Elias.
Batman can only do so much, and Elias really needs to get some stuff from the penthouse, there’s a surprisingly sophisticated vault there. They can’t open it before the Black Bloc barges in and captures Scarface. This is unacceptable for Elias, he is willing to give himself up.
Alas, the Black Bloc won’t be gentleman about it. They try and fail to flip Scarface, so Elias seems to submit and gives them a code. When entered, the whole penthouse blows up! The safe had a duress code, that’s crazy. Scarface is gone, but Batman saves Elias! We also meet the accountant, the three were all in the same orphanage, located in the very building that blew up!
The Black Bloc head doesn’t give a shit and turns his attention to our protagonists, they are always there to fuck up his plans. His second in command doesn’t take it in stride losing so many foot soldiers with nothing to show for, Scarface managed to flip him, he knows how disposable he is.
All this falls on Batman, because Batgirl was made by Jericho’s fake DEA agent. Batgirl keeps a P90 under the counter, so she runs off and gets picked up by Root, her own Trinity. They drive the motorcycle into a moving truck and snuggle in the back (Root loves this), and get rescued by Fusco. Jericho is almost onto them, but she gets back to the safehouse, after Root drugs her. She will be so pissed when she wakes up.
Jericho’s minders, CIA Inc, notice the issue that the AI is being blinded somehow, so they ramp up HUMINT, actual goons with guns patrolling the city. NYPD et al won’t like this, their cachet will be tested now.
S04E10
This is a lore episode, there are hundreds of POI. Jericho and The Machine are brawling now. When two gods hurl boulders at each other, the ants scurry below. There’s not much the ants can do to affect the outcome.
Batgirl is still mothballed, she can’t even be plied with food. Her hunger for action is barely being tamped down.
Jericho picked up the irrelevant numbers and is “solving” them too, usually leading to even more gruesome deaths than the usual kneecap injuries. This last for one day, then it does the opposite, exposing secret information, leading to chaos and mankind’s inner most desires to be exposed.
Jericho arranges for a battle of wits with The Machine, but neither convinces the other. This higher-level chess match cannot really be won by either super intelligence, the humans just suffer because they must.
Amongst the chaos, Jericho pulls a Black Monday all over again, crashing the stock market. That should create even more violence between coke-heads, better split from the city.
We know the backstory about head of CIA Inc: his MI6 director sent him to kill some KGB double agent, but the boss was the double agent all along. Our guy gets pissed, released the double agent, and kills his, then burns his own file. No more following orders from humans.
S04E11
Another lore episode, our gang needs to one-up Alan Greenspan and prevent a financial crisis, by counter-hacking the NYSE HFT servers, to undo Jericho’s mass sell off.
The IT disguise always work, and with all hands on deck, there are plenty of solutions to get into the inner sanctum. Until they get pinned down in some kitchen with slo-mo exploding muffins, apples, and coffee machines. The Machine is simulating a lot of potential ways out of that mess.
So we see some alternate futures, one by one. They all die in the end, but sometimes there are no better options. One of the choice is selected, and financial meltdown is prevented, that was the first order of business. The secondary objective is rescuing the assets, and it kinda works.
Batman gets shot, and Batgirl prevents a subway bomb vest dude, then runs to meet our people in time to save them by staying back and getting acute lead poisoning by the Jericho army. Root is distraught, but she got a single passionate kiss to lower her guard and allow time for the rest of the guys to hold her down, as her lover gets blown to bits.
Oh, it’s on! Root is off the leash now. In one of the simulations, The Machine “simplifies”, and it turns into Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer. In other, Fusco kisses Root, it’s absolute bedlam! There’s also some nice slo-mo USP shots, suck it, Inception!
S04E12
The lore never stops. For some reason, Batman and Root believe Batgirl is still alive, after being brutally shot. Oracle, less so, but he is a Gramscian “Pessimism of reason, Optimism of will” kind of guy.
The Madam is happily bringing her daughter to school, then gets back to her job murdering Americans and others illegally. They are tracking a group of Islamic PhD working on something in a garage. They bought nails, pressure cookers, the hallmark of terrorism! They kill three of them, but when she wants an analysis of the contents of a laptop, Jericho puts up a permissions screen. Calling it “irrelevant”.
This pisses her off, the vents at the Jericho representative, but since there is no smoking gun to present to her superiors, so she keeps quiet. When she is about to avoid our guy getting into Canada, Root fires an AT-4 at her SUV and captures her. No ear operations now, Oracle is still in control, but they discover she is just a Jericho janitor now, a kind of remote hands for an AI.
The Madam tracks the final guy down to Canada, and he tells her the truth about what they were doing: the laptop is the output, they are ACTUALLY just some PhD that were roped into a startup by Jericho. But the Madam shoots him anyway, even though she suspects he is right.
The Madam herself doesn’t buy this directly, but the nagging feeling is always there. She doesn’t say anything about Batgirl, because she does not know! They keep blabbing about a NYSE shootout, but she investigates further and finds that scene was already cleaned up. Now she is very much intrigued, but what assets does she have?
S04E13
The POI is some milquetoast guy that turns out to be a massive freelance killer. He even has a kill room in some abandoned building, complete with chainsaw and lye to dissolve the bodies. Fusco takes care of that, and the former undercover cop from S04E08 is also tailing the guy, so they both team up.
The rest of the gang is just searching for Batgirl. Sure, she was all shot up, but they did not see her die, so there’s still hope, particularly for Root, after that goodbye kiss. 😢
The only lead is a refrigerated truck going to some Punxsutawney-like town. Pleasantville on the outside, but with some very strange things happening: a trust fund kid working, homeless guy wins the lottery for 10 million. The police chief is swayed by Root’s ass…ets, but when they go check the security camera feeds, he gropes her directly! Meanwhile, Batman raids the armoury, and when they meet up again, the police chief is in a burlap sack being taken to a B&B.
The town had a dying textile factory, until some unknown corporation bought it and turned into a transponder corporation. Maybe Jericho should be in charge of industrial policy. Anyway, all the CEO and board people are figureheads, just random people plucked from obscurity to heading a major manufacturer. They are just following orders.
After a liberal application of torture and C4, they find out the brunette being kidnapped by Jericho to install a transponder-enhanced chip in the brain is not Batgirl, she’s a secretary at the NYSE. Root nearly has a BSoD, she will not accept Batgirl’s death. Even when The Machine tells her to stop, directly.
Hard to tell if this did not break Root for good. We know Batgirl still lives in Jericho’s hands.
S04E14
The POI is some retired English high school teacher, that might as well be possessed by a daemon when she was a child (Linda Blair, from The Exorcist and all JJ Abrams shows). She is on jury duty, and so is Oracle.
Batman is taking care of other POI on the backlog, the few that aren’t dead of jailed. But he monitors the trial, some high powered CEO gets murdered by her husband, says the DA. Irene Adler shows up for unrelated business, and they team up trying to help Oracle fix the trial.
Irene Adler manages to take the Midwestern nice out of him, but it’s the other way around, the real killer is trying to make the husband take the fall. The company is making 5G which is potentially unhealthy, and the CEO was killed by her right-hand man for jeopardising more Jericho’s data collection.
This might be the first jury fiction I saw that does not ape Twelve Angry Men.
Also, the “killer” husband who doesn’t say a word is a random Portuguese actor, what? He is credited, but without lines, no SAG card for him. What a shame.
S04E15
The POI is a human working for a tech bro company with an AI assistant, Alexa, Siri, you know the drill. She transcribes conversations, this is the science fiction part, as if one of those megacorps would hire actual humans. She moonlights in underground MMA fights, to pay for her sister’s medical bills.
The company is nudging users with queries about payday loans, suicide, and gambling to its profitable advertising products. It’s just as Google was enshittified, incredible.
The visionary owner is the one buying into surveillance capitalism, while the CEO is more reticent. But in the end, after Fusco punches him in the face, the CEO will be unable to fight an hostile takeover by Jericho, yet another way to inject data into the system. A microphone in every house, always listening, Gangsta’s Paradise.
Speaking of Jericho, the girl who was being recruited shows up again, seemingly on the run, but Oracle smells a rat. She is shot from a high-powered rifle though, that must be real. He patches her up, and her story nearly holds up, but it does not, in the end. She moves Oracle to a school created by Jericho to brainwash the next generation of lackeys.
Root shows up to save Oracle, but the laptop is captured by Jericho. There’s a tracking device there, but Jericho finds out about it. This is a draw, but that kid is a real believer in the cause, murdering undesirables is a small price to pay.
I see now this is the anti-Million Dollar Baby.
S04E16
The POI is some grifter that goes through identities like underwear. Like a slightly exaggerated Anna Sorokin, but black and fabulous. Her latest con: stringing along a roach-infested college boy, to pickup his shift at the medical marijuana dispensary. Since this was when marijuana was a federally controlled substance, no banks would touch that money, so they need muscle to move it. The Black Bloc is onto this legal private security opportunity. But a Mexican cartel also loves money.
Our girl informs them both, and there’s a big firefight in the street, but they are holding a bunch of phonebooks: she stole them all! Now she is being chased by both organised crime instances, Batman intervenes, and Oracle tries to argue it is not always about “winning”.
She tries to play with our protagonists, but they do not appreciate such anarchy. She has a nice ring, but she does not want to talk about it. Maybe this is for a next episode…
In the end, the Cartel is busted, but the Black Bloc remains as-is, they are legally laundering money from medical marijuana using WoW Gold or similar. A very sophisticated operation, and our new POI is recruited for the organisation. Not sure she won’t comply.
Meanhwile, Root is trying to get hired by one of Jericho’s companies. Her “CV” speaks for herself, she is a shoo-in!
S04E17
The POI is another shrink, what a dangerous job. His wife was murdered a while back, so he has some association for victims of violent crimes, but his night job is framing people that threatened or harmed his clients, a vigilante.
His main frame was the wife’s murder: her assassin was never found, our shrink just framed the delivery guy, but he swears he didn’t do it. After being attacked at the gala, the shrink plants a gun and some pictures of the alleged killer, attracts him to a secluded place, and was about to shoot himself to make the other guy go away, but Oracle talks him out of it. Maybe he will get together with the cute girl working in the same building.
Oracle himself tried to avenge his friend, by blowing up the spook that was responsible for The Machine. She was nearly crapping her pants, being threatened by a voice on the phone about an IED on her car. But Oracle relents at the last minute, revenge is never the answer.
We don’t even know if the delivery guy killed the woman or not. Not all questions can be answered.
S04E18
The POI is some Florida woman, posing as a clumsy waitress, but actually a skip tracer, a bounty hunter for bail jumper. Like that guy in Jackie Brown, but much better looking. She just snatched her target, but Batman intervenes and he gets away.
Since that guy is being chased now, he needs to get out of the country, which means paperwork. His contact is the grifter from episode Episode 16.
She saves his bacon, then provides the papers for 50 grand, but he will only “pay” her the information that can put his boss away for 10 years. They meet in some boathouse, and a firefight ensues, but the grifter manages to make a deal with everybody.
Most of those are busted anyway. We discover the grifter is getting jobs from The Machine, so Batman lets her go.
Meanwhile, Oracle is busy meeting the woman from Hong Kong, with the laptop that will be integrated into Jericho. His Trojan is ready to activate, but since the woman is also a POI, Orqcle requests Root to help. He tells her of the plan, but Root sticks around.
Oracle puts two and two together, and notices the Root is the actual threat! She will kill the woman, since Jericho will murder Oracle minutes after seeing him with another parts of the source for itself. Oracle is livid.
To avoid that outcome, Oracle himself drinks the poison, to avoid Root has enough “medicine”. He nearly dies, his office is ransacked, but what hurts him much is that Root would kill the woman directly.
As an alternative, Root fakes a Letter to the journal editing her papers, accusing her of plagiarism. Now the woman hates Oracle, the trojan is not released, and both people remain alive. All it took was making Root persona non grata, a worthy sacrifice.
S04E19
The POI is some tech CEO, built an anti-virus software from scratch, until it grew into a gigantic corporation. A talented version of John McAfee, natch.
Overnight, someone hacked him and leaked everything: his wife’s dirty pictures, his personal email, proof of embezzlement. This is target to him personal, the McAfee stock is still booming. He goes fully paranoid and thinks an AI is after him, since his personal stock choices also took a bath in a flash crash.
He remains the whole episode dazzled and confused, like a deer in the headlights. Jericho is after him, The Machine sent its agents to protect him, it’s all happening very fast. Jericho is trying to track The Machine, so it uses the company resources to run a SHODAN search on the whole internet. Clever.
The team pulls out all the stops, even with a temporary truce between Oracle and Root, but they are unable to save him: our guy gets so worked up with the AI stuff, he does not run away from Jericho’s agents and gets personally shot by the head of CIA Inc.
Root has a side job looking particularly stunning in raven black hair and pulling a Tenet Opera House in a restaurant, to steal a suitcase. That case has a Fabergé egg there, maybe with something inside it.
S04E20
The POI is some richy-rich guy, allegedly murdered all his family for drug money. The catch: this is a case from Carter, she looked into this before dying like a Bond girl. Batman is taking that case for himself, the rest of the team is checking if the machine is working after an apparent glitch: an Elias goon murdered two Black Bloc dudes.
The investigation for the other guys is simple, the Elias dude was cashing a coupon for a sandwich when he saw the other guys that had a bounty on them, so he just shot them. The Machine is working, same as usual.
The rest is a simple case: the bodies were found on Park Avenue, on a building with a doorman, so breaking and entering is not likely. The suspect is pretty shook up, after witnessing all the death. Carter knows he did not do it, he loves his mum too much. So he bolts to Paris. No harm, no foul, I guess. He gets back to New York, but Carter no longer exists, so Batman is retracing the crime.
The crime was actually committed by another half-brother. This is probably the only time the rich dude is not the perp. This is so Batman and Carter can talk for a long time, and conclude he did not really talk to her much about anything. Their “relationship” was very rushed, then she died.
Oh, and all this episode seems like a delirious dream of Batman, he got shot by the murderer and is bleeding to death in some bungalow in the mountains, so cold… He hold out for a long time, until a car shows up…
S04E21
The POI are Elias and the leader of the Black Bloc. Batman and Fusco get there to save him, while Oracle and Root get a message from Batgirl! She is alive, and asked for help, so Root complied immediately.
Meanwhile, the Madam located the Jericho moles in her team, kidnapped and murdered them. The nice lady gloated about a future event where Jericho will remake our existence into a perfect world, all watched over by machines of loving grace.
Philosophy aside, the rubber had to meet the road somewhere. For Batgirl, that is some psychiatric hospital, which turns out to be Jericho’s base of operations, the place we saw all this time, with the CIA Inc dude and his goons. Root and Oracle are not a great infiltrator team, they get captured and Jericho can just murder them with impunity. Root still kills the main goonette that has been chasing them for so long.
The Machine willingly gives away its location, to save their lives! Root was about to be lobotomised for the implant that communicates with The Machine. They get away, but Batgirl seems to have been turned (or is it‽).
Meanwhile, Elias planned the while Black Bloc invasion. Since his right hand man was killed, he concocted a similar setup, where he implies there is a mole, fingers his right hand man, and lets the boss take care of him right away. Now they are even, both murdered their right-hand people. The Black Bloc still has some worthy people, like the enforcer girl, but morale must be really low.
Batman and Fusco are tortured, but they live. Maybe even Elias can get out of this.
S04E22
It all comes down to this. Root has been collecting the suitcase and other stuff, The Machine itself gave itself some extra powers, since the war with Jericho is all in the open now. Root and Batman have God mode now. Oracle is like a father watching the child in a school recital.
Even so, it’s still hard. They hole up in some electrical substation and save the core parts of The Machine. When she disappeared a while back, it split itself up into a distributed system, attached to the power grid. Jericho knows this and it glitching the power until The Machine dies off, an incredible power attack, this is extremely realistic.
Turns out the “correction” that Madam was tracking was much more surgical that blowing up the Supreme Court justices. Particularly because the Heritage Foundation did it IRL without ammonium nitrate, not even murder, just plain old propaganda and stupid opinion pieces in newspapers.
It’s just murdering a couple hundred people, the deviants, an attitude adjustment for people which do not follow orders.
Elias and the Leader of the Black Bloc are both gunned down, and so are most of the spooks. The Madam is renditioned into some private black site, this is scarier that most other stuff.
Onto the final season, with Batgirl MIA (and presumed turned), the core of The Machine in a suitcase, and barely any more ammo.
On the Supreme Court scene, there are 5 assets and 3 deviants, in the Jericho UI. Those three must be Sonya Sottomayor, Elena Kagan, and RBG?
S05
The intro changed again, now it’s all glitchy, besides Oracle, the head of CIA Inc also scolds us for trading liberty for security, and Batgirl is “presumed dead” for a while. Root as the “Analog Interface” remains too.
How will this end, with Jericho ruling the world with its jackbooted fascism hidden by hippie bullshit, or a benevolent mindless minder, surveilling us?
S05E01
The Machine is mobile, in a suitcase of RAM chips, compressed up the wazoo, battery backed. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
There’s a small intro for each of the three main characters now:
- Batman shoots kneecaps and chokes Jericho assets with chains, then hijacks an Uber and takes off.
- Root muses about running over children, then shoots some feet across a car, then gets into the subway.
- Oracle pulls a /tag/franchise-bourne.html and boards a bus, then bolts not before switching hats.
Oracle and Batman meet in a ferry, they get to the Batcave to repair the machine, give him some extra juice. It’s still an AI, so as soon as it’a plugged in, it tries to escape to his workstation, but Oracle stops it and creates a fire! The RAM is faint now.
Root ducks into some Russian mobster she knew a way back. He looks friendly enough, but sells her off to Jericho before being killed himself. Bummer, no honour among thieves. Batman saves her ass, and they haul his massive stash of first generation PS3, maybe all RROD’ed.
There’s still time to build a cluster of PS3 for the machine to live in. A puny body, but it will have to do for now. They can mine bitcoin and rent cloud space, or buy some nicer x86 hardware, instead of that PowerPC monstrosity.
Fusco gets his balls broken by Internal Affairs and the feds, but he rants about a sniper, so Jericho intervenes, by killing the Internal Affairs guy, and making the FBI fake a ballistic report and give him a commendation. He must keep his mouth shut.
I fucking knew it, The Machine runs Linux, it’s canon now! When they are building the cluster of 300 PS3 (the fat model), Root explicitly mentions the Cell architecture as the OS. Incredible, as if this show could not get better.
Did Chappie cribbed it’s idea from here?
S05E02
The Machine is back, sort of. It’s quite underpowered, I knew networking PS3 is just a meagre Beowulf cluster. They have to steal a bunch of GPU clusters just to get by.
Once they do, they receive 30 backlogged numbers, but they are either people that died years ago, suicides, or even actors “killing” people in small theatres. There’s an ex-con painting houses, bored out of his ass, but he seems on the straight and narrow. At least until Jericho recruits him.
For some reason, The Machine forgets about the passage of time, and so detects assets as threats. Batman gets attacked by a hitwoman, but he can hold her off for a while. But Oracle and Root are stuck in the subway car, the calls are coming from inside the house.
Root has to give herself anaesthesia, Oracle has to intubate her (yikes!), and after some AI psychiatry, The Machine gets back to normal, to consider the gang as assets. They are no longer pure heroes, we all know the line that separates good and evil crosses the hearts of every human.
Once that threat is solved, after months of burning the midnight oil, they all go for a picnic in Central Park, Root dressed like a Girl Scout to make all the nerds in the audience ejaculate forcefully into their collective pants.
S05E03
The POI is some software engineer working at one of those massive consultants. His brother was deployed to Afghanistan, received some memo about a shipment of Stingers, then got paid off by the Taliban to “displace” that crate.
The problem is that the spooks were giving away those weapons on purpose. Probably one of those “gun walker” scandals. Killing people in a warzone it’s one thing. Being Keith David and hunt escaped fugitives in the US, that’s bold. He remembers Batman from while back.
This being pre-Trump, a spook being threatened with publicity will always actually works. Keith David keeps mum, after not being murdered in the evening.
Revisiting past missions where Batman just shot someone always makes him brooding. The shrink girlfriend just about had it, she cannot help him of he does not talk, and he won’t. Not even after meeting her parents at some pirate-themed restaurant.
S05E04
The Batgirl episode, with a twist: it’s all part of Jericho’s torture programme to turn Batgirl into a double agent. Just The Matrix with sillier VR glasses, instead of punk brain needles.
Batgirl pretends to be a drooling vegetal and escapes, but she cannot just waltz into the Batcave. She pretends to attempt to murder some random shopkeeper, so Root shows up. This is actually clever. They put her up in Root’s apartment (purely for the inevitable sex scene), they do not trust her yet. She doesn’t trust herself even, she’s got some brain-computer interface that makes her into a Manchurian Candidate at random.
She gets fed up with suspicion from the gang, so she lures Jericho’s agents, captures the head of CIA Inc, and stuffs him into a church basement. He implanted an USB drive on his arm, which contains a kill switch. But wait, it’s all a ruse, Batgirl is indeed a unwitting double agent, but being triggered makes her go nuts, she kills both the head of CIA Inc and Batman. When she is about to kill Root, she kills herself.
This is when the simulation is reset. Again. And again. She will indeed be a vegetable by the time they are through with her.
Hilarious that a super-intelligent AGI is used to simulate lesbian porn, that is too realistic.
S05E05
The POI is a PhD in chemistry that invented a freeze-dry process that should extend the shelf life of produce. She wants to be Jonas Salk and basically give away this boon to humanity, by licensing it to a anti-hunger non-profit, but she is being pressured by the Monsanto CEO (with another name). The company is suspicious, since they already dodged prosecution in some Ecuador business.
The only one that notices the disappearance of a young woman of Indian descent is one her colleagues from kindergarten. He works at a 911 centre, minding the ShotSpotter mics (with another name). The system is crap, but the human listening is even knows the weapon models.
Jericho is behind all this, the Monsanto involvement is faked, the woman is murdered by one of its agents, the objective is to avoid dissemination of that research. So Root publishes it on the Internet, so the ShotSpotter guy is safe now.
Oracle finds a piece of Jericho’s source code during the hack investigation, so he puts it together with a simplified Machine model, and makes them fight on some laptops inside a Faraday cage. The Machine doesn’t stand a chance.
There’s also a subplot with Elias’ accountant friend. He wants to avenge him, so threatens Fusco and his kid. This gets him a meeting with Batman, who shows him “the truth”: Elias is alive! He cautions his buddy to let it go, they cannot fight this last battle, but he won’t give up. It’s his funeral.
S05E06
The POI is a marriage licence‽ Insane. This requires Root, Batman and Oracle to travel to some farm upstate for two days and trawl the guest list for targets. And that’s after Batman has to pretend to be a stripper cop to get an invite.
The real POI is a photographer attached to the same billionaire family, one of The Help, you know the drill.
The gang thinks at first the Father of the Bride is trying to kill the groom for potentially inheriting tons of money, or that ecoterrorists are targeting the family for mistreatment of its thoroughbred race horses.
And it’s that, drugging horses to make them compete injured, but the perp is the ambitious older sister, the snake. Hiring foreign military goons to her sister’s wedding to kill a photographer, Jesus fucking Christ.
Should have pulled a Gary Webb instead. At least the gang had fun, Oracle sang some folk song and did his best thick Irish accent, Root baked a quiche.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Fusco tracks down the deluge of missing persons, and it intersects with a new number and Elias’s buddy: some City official was getting kickbacks for demolition jobs, but the company applying doesn’t belong to any of their figureheads. It’a actually Jericho getting rid of nuisances: the Chemistry PhD from the last episode, Elias’s friend, the dirty City Hall official.
Fusco is next, it seems they pulled a I, Robot and are trying to demolish the tunnel while Fusco is rooting around.
Batgirl is still in custody of Jericho, which is trying and failing to make her turn. Not even showing her Russian nukes destroying New York can make her betray her friends.
S05E07
The POI is a crazy-ass AM radio host. Not a Rush Limbaugh, we are closer to Bubba the Love Sponge material. Just a steady stream of conspiracy theories, the usual callers, you name it.
Their last craziness is that the white noise has a pattern, not Morse code, but some kind of proprietary encoded message.
Alas, Jericho doesn’t fuck around, this is true. Exploiting issues on electronic equipment, it is bypassing explicit antennas to communicate with other infected devices, or its agents in the field.
The kooky radio host and its unemployed veteran listener accidentally stumbled into a kind of numbers station, and Jericho is wiping them down.
They go further, and spoof their voices using the hours of past transmissions, to make their eventual suicides more plausible.
Root and Batman take care of the agents, but not before Root can piggyback on this back channel and send a message to Batgirl, still stuck on the Jericho lair.
She had done so many simulations of her escape, she did not even know the last one was real. Now she cannot tell apart dreams and reality. She hears Root’s message, but how can she know this is not another ruse?
Fusco was nearly killed by Jericho, and got pretty close to blowing the whistle on that. The gang still thinks he will be safer if they keep him in the dark, but he rage-quits over this, with a rant about lack of trust.
At least he accepted new identities for him and his child, just in case… Hopefully he will be able to use those.
S05E08
The POI is a high powered executive, fluent in Mandarin, just returned from Hong Kong. They are calling my flight.
It’s a small scale pandemic, it is contained to a single hospital. Jericho concocted the correct mix of viral material to produce a super COVID, and The Machine produced a vaccine (suck it, German guys). This leads to some crazy full-on government mandated screening and vaccination for H5N1, imagine that, it would never happen in reality. Anti-vaxxers would be considered deviants by Jericho and dealt with appropriately.
Fusco investigates the missing people anyway, his anger was absolutely real, and he won’t give up on this thing. He even talks with Elias to reach the guy that Jericho sent to kill the doctor and nurse, so the pandemic would spread even more. That dude is immune to H5N1, but he is getting cold feet, after being ignored by his ex-girlfriend.
This only strengthens Root’s argument to let The Machine loose. Oracle resists, but he is getting worn down.
Batgirl escapes what might be another simulation, but it sure seems real now. The prison is located in some Joburg hardcore facility, and his first contact with other inmates is two white guys beating up a black dude. Batgirl steals a Jeep and gets the hell out of there, she will be in NYC in no time.
S05E09
The POI is some generic locksmith on a 6 am job in an hedge fund. But wait, he really is breaking and entering this time! He was about to plant a bomb, before Batman defuses it and arrests him.
Apparently his wife was kidnapped, so he had to do it. They track the message to some warehouse that blows up the SWAT team. Oracle then takes Elias as a partner this time, they can then track the bomb maker that has been known to the gang since S04E01, the kid in a bomb vest.
The killer was the locksmith guy all along! He arranged for one of his hitmen to be arrested so he could kill him, and greased the palms some gang to invade and lock themselves in the police station, like Assault on Precinct 13. Elias blows that dude up as a he gets away, whole Oracle watches. He really is the darkest of us all.
Root is also tracking a telco maintenance dude, a Jericho plant to receive more data. But someone else is killing the Jericho agents, this is Batgirl! She is back in NYC, and has nothing better to do than to kill all the agents she can find. Root tries to hug her, but she is too fragile for now. Killing herself 7000 times to avoid killing Root, watching VR porn with her, her mind must be thoroughly broken. It will need a lot of mending.
Fighting off an army of gangbangers brings Fusco into the team, so the gang reveals the rest of the truth. He just would not drop the missing persons, like a dog in heat. He better keep those aliases he received in the hospital ready to use, he and his kid. Batgirl is also there, fearful and pale.
S05E10
The POI is Oracle! As he closed direct access to the machine, he is targeted. Actually, it’s all because he went to the same coffee shop he went once with Grace, in the old days. Sloppy, it only takes a slip up.
The team gathers for fighting back, Elias bring him to the same projects he was introduced in. Seems cleaner now. That’s a good enough safe house to be protected from humans, but not from rogue AIs. Most of his criminal buddies are killed and Elias bites the bullet too. Sad, he would make a great puttanesca.
As Oracle is being spirited away, Root and Batgirl fight back, even against Jericho agents with M249 and a freaking Minigun mounted on a Suburban! Is this New York, or a war zone? Root handles it with their BMW, the cops pickup Batgirl, but that Jericho agent, you know the one, he shoots Root with a high powered rifle and Oracle gets busted by the cops.
Oracle speaks directly to Jericho now, he is mad as hell and he is not going to take this anymore. Mad as hell, and he is not going to take this anymore. The interrogating cop gets feisty, but our hero shuts him down with damning accusations: when we was a kid, the President (Nixon) was sending death squads to Laos, and COINTELPRO MLK and other civil right activists. Proper ones, not Charlie Kirks.
The Machine has the voice of Root now, she succumbed to her injuries at last. Her last speech was all about we being information, we can never die as long as someone remembers us, and of that someone is machine, we are immortal. Rest now, sister. We have the watch, and we will see you in Valhalla, as Jericho falls.
I knew I saw that student complaining about her grades in the start. She is the crazed dancer from Turn Down for What! And she did other stuff too, good for her!
S05E11
The POI is POTUS‽ How is that not relevant? Unless Jericho is pulling a Lee Harvey Oswald and considers him irrelevant. I don’t fully disagree, actually.
Of course the president is a old white dude with white hair, not Obama not even Bush Junior. Trump is at least one year out too, he was probably coming down the escalator when this came out.
The crazy tech guy is back, and he pulls a Lavabit, refusing to give in to NSA. The president is all-in on this law, but the AI already access everything, it truly is irrelevant.
The president is being threatened by some underground group of privacy nuts, sorta like the Luigi Mangione organisation, but actually grassroots.
Google, Facebook, and Palantir are named directly, as the poster children for the surveillance-industrial complex (fucking Thiel, that anti-christ). Batgirl saves the president by shooting at him, failing on purpose. That keep the secret service people off Beast 1, the domestic terrorists hijacked a Predator drone and are crashing it.
How ironic that an Iranian woman saves the president from blowback from deploying military drones, where the GPS is spoofed. The team itself is rescued by former people they saves in the past: the crazy tech CEO from S02E14, the soldier from S01E03, and the wildcard from S04E16. They all work for Thornhill, the alias for The Machine.
Oracle is doing his thing alone, driving cross country to Texas. He is arguing with The Machine about what to do, unintended consequences, and mentions Thomas Midgley Jr., the CFC dude! Not even a peep about leaded gasoline, or his ironic death with the polio contraption. Oracle is working on a virus that can take down Jericho, but with significant collateral damage.
S05E12
The POI is actually the head of CIA Inc, Jericho’s minder. He is irrelevant, not sure how the peak of efficiency AI employs some bureaucrat like him. I’m afraid the gang will not work very hard to save him.
This is a lore episode, the main job of The Machine is showing Oracle simulations of how life would be for the gang if The Machine would not exist.
- Oracle would still be a CTO of a filthy rich corporation, and his partner would be alive. But Grace would still be painting in the park and would never meet her ex-future husband.
- Batman would save her ex from her abusive husband, but it would be a bad fit, they would separate and his body would be found floating on the river, buried as a John Doe.
- Batgirl would still be murdering people for the spooks. His partner would be curious about how the intel would work. No relationship with Root, but that’s almost the status quo too.
- Fusco would remain a dirty cop, until Carter took down the Dirty Cop Network, and would be disgraced, a drunk idiot. No redemption path for him.
- Jericho would still be up and running, and Root would work for it! Murdering senators would be something she was able to accomplish easily.
Oracle weighs all this, and goes ahead with his plan: releasing a virus called ICE-9 to kill all Artificial Intelligences. The Machine and Jericho would perish, a worthy resolution. It’s still just code, it could still be recreated. But this is not Oppenheimer, they can refuse to implement the doomsday device. The password for the virus is Oracle’s real surname: Dashwood.
Batman and Batgirl received coordinates that led them to DC, which then led them to Fort Meade, the NSA HQ. There, they sneak it by the paper dumpster, then by the garbage chute (Willy Wonka-style!), until they steal a big history artefact: Edward Snowden’s home router. It belongs in a museum!
Fusco is busy dealing with the FBI agent which is an agent of Jericho. He is too busy quipping to worry about getting shot like an animal.
Without AI, the world reverts to a previous state: No Gods Nor Kings, Only Men. The gang can still help people, but without an omniscient Voice over IP, it’s just insane.
S05E13
It all comes down to this. The Machine and Jericho are dying, as is most of the gang. Jericho is uploading a backup of itself to an air-gapped server on the Federal Reserve of New York, so Batman and Oracle will have to get there and kill it. Unfortunately, after that, it uploaded itself into a Russian satellite and plans on blowing up all satellite downlinks to avoid being infected.
It’s the final stand, Batman tricks Oracle into following The Machine’s commands and he lives, while Batman uploads the virus then gets blown up in the missile explosion. No more of his gruff voice, sleep tight, silver fox.
Fusco and Batgirl escape the Batcave in the subway car, fight off the last Jericho operative, and Fusco gets knifed by that dude. Batgirl tracks him down and shoots him, he’s the one that killed Root, she won’t let that go.
Oracle makes sure Batman’s sacrifice is not in vain: he goes straight to Florence, where Grace is painting a nice Duomo vista. How wholesome.
The final roll call is as follows:
- Fusco is back at work on the backlog, without artificial help.
- Batgirl will stroll around with the dog.
But apparently, there was a satellite downlink somewhere. The Machine lives, and calls Batgirl about a number…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.