Person of Interest/WMG

Finch was driven to his current plan of action by the injury which crippled him.

• Probably in the same incident that killed his business partner, who was the first to ask What the Hell, Hero? re: the "irrelevant" list.
  • leading to...

Finch was romantically involved with his business partner

• After all it's never stated that his partner was a man. And even if it was...
  • Okay it was a man. Which still doesn't rule out the possibility of Finch being a Invisible to Gaydar.
  • Doubtful, given that Finch was engaged before he had to go into hiding to protect her.

The limp is a lie

• Finch just uses it so that any opponent will underestimate him just in time for Finch to kick his ass.
  • Absolutely my first thought when I saw him limping. Maybe I'm just overthinking it because it's Michael Emerson....
    • Jossed. Probably.

Did Reese meet Finch before the pilot?

• Finch walks with a limp. Reese likes to disable his targets by shooting them in the leg. Coincidence?
  • Apparently it's his spine injured, not his legs. Although this are not mutually exclusive.
    • They did meet, momentarily. But Reese doesn't know it. And it's not in the context expressed above either.

Finch will ultimately be the main villain.

• Finch will be revealed as a Magnificent Bastard and most likely a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and Reese and Carter will join forces to stop him.

Finch is Ben.

• At the end of Lost, Ben stayed behind in Purgatory (or whatever it was) because he "wasn't ready" to cross over. He has stayed behind to try and help other people as his atonement.

Sooner or later Finch or Reese's number will come out of the machine.

• By which point they will have so many enemies that they won't know where the threat is from.
  • The machine doesn't know Finch's number, but Reese's number could still come up.
    • The ending of "Many Happy Returns" implies that Reese's number already has turned up, as a perpetrator killing the murderer of a previous PoI that Finch failed to save when he was acting alone, Reese's ex-girlfriend Jessica.

The machine caused the death of Finch's partner.

• The machine is apparently very good in pinpointing threats to itself and it flagged Nathan as a possible threat.

The Machine itself will eventually be a (or the) Big Bad.

• The Machine analyses patterns and picks out threats to the citizenry and the infrastructure of the city, but as we saw in "Super" it can also detect threats to itself. There's an implication that Nathan Ingram's death was a result of the Machine, and at some point down the road, the Machine will decide Finch and Reese are threats and manipulate the information it spits out in order to try and kill them.

The Machine is really...

• Cordelia Chase, sitting in a room and having visions.

The Machine is or is in the Process of becoming sentient

• Confirmed

Root will be played by Summer Glau

Who else would you get?

• How about Annie Parisse?
  • That would mean that Root is Cara Staton.
• Jossed

Root is the woman Reese is supposed to have killed, and is part of some sort of plot to gain control of the Machine.

That's why we haven't seen her face. We've met her before.

• Could be true.
• Jossed

The Machine is Ziggy

Project Quantum Leap lost contact with Dr. Sam Beckett in 1999. After two years of fruitless searching, 9/11 happened. The government was unwilling to continue funding the Project as-is and brought in Finch to reappropriate what Ziggy was capable of. Where before she used records and historical data to postulate percentages about what was going to happen, Finch taught her to use real-time security footage and eavesdropping devices to come up with future possibilities. That's why the danger is always a percentage; Ziggy was never sure about the past once Sam started messing with things, but she could still come up with percentages.

The show is part of the Terminator-verse before the events of Judgement Day.

Finch's machine is the beginning of Cyberdyne Systems. We've already seen that it can detect threats to itself, and like the AI in Terminator, it might one day think that all humans are threats to be eliminated.

• John Reese is part of the Reese family, which includes Kyle Reese.
• The Terminators were modelled off John Reese.
• John Reese IS a Terminator.
• Ingram and Finch were attacked by a reprogrammed Terminator that was sent back in time by John Connor to eliminate them before they could create Cyberdyne Systems.

All recurring villains are working together

Root, CIA, Elias, cops from HR (They are not recurring yet, but were introduced in the end of episode). Season finale will feature all them.

• HR has taken jobs from Elias and Root, but that's the limit of the intentional overlaps of the various recurring villains so far.

Ingram is alive and operating the Machine

This is the threat Machine detected from him. All this boxes and labels is his admin interface.

Mark Snow killed Reese's female partner

He actually tried to set Reese up to do it. And appears to set her up to kill him. And then tries and fails to kill them both remotely. And boy does he pay for it later.

Finch has hiding from someone or something since long before he built the Machine

He's been living under a variety of assumed identities since entering college in 1976, possibly even earlier. One doesn't spend two thirds of one's life under an alias without a reason. There's something about his original identity he doesn't want finding its way back to him.

Will Ingram is actually Finch's kid

Relating to the previous,after Finch's wife/girlfriend was killed by whoever it was that got Finch hiding, Finch asked Nathan to adopt Will so that if Finch did get found, Will would be safe.

Root is a female NSA agent that appeared in flashbacks in "Super"

Prisoner from "Blue Code" flashbacks is ether Devon Weeks or detected terrorist from episode "Super"

• I need to verify timeline for Curtsfile (or how he was called) - when he was detected?

The Machine is a precursor to Multivac

Isaac Asimov posited the creation of Multivac (The name presumably being derived from the primitive computer Univac), a computer that controlled everything in the entire US. One story concerning it, "All the Troubles of the World", first published in 1957, had it gathering data about every person in the country and providing a daily analysis stating that a certain person had an X% chance of committing a premeditated crime on that day, which the government would use to try to prevent such crimes. Does this sound familiar?

The Prisoner from "Blue Code" tried to sell/sold The Machine to the Chinese

• Who then spent two years trying to replicate it before the flashback events of Matsya Nyaya

Grace's number will turn up eventually

At which point Harold will have some explaining to do...

Cara still has the laptop with the Machine's code on it

She had it in her backpack when Reese got away from the LZ at Ordos. No reason for her not to hang on to it when she made her own escape.