immortalfrieza

That's the real problem I think. It doesn't matter if Stefan lied to Damon or not, Damon would still go off the rails either way, all it takes is the slightest provocation with Damon. In fact, from Stefan's perspective lying to Damon is the best option he really has, at least that might have a chance in hell of preventing or postponing the inevitable rampage that way. We the viewers all know that before long the lie will come crumbling down and psycho Damon will be that much harder to turn back from the dark side as a result, but Stefan has no way of knowing that, and even if he could he would probably do it anyway just because he's grasping at any slight chance of stopping psycho Damon he can find.

Probably the thing that stuck out with me the most this episode? Bonnie and the rest worrying about what was happening to the people on The Other Side. My thoughts after hearing this were: "Since when have any of you people ever given a damn what happens to the people on The Other Side?" Seriously, these are the same people that were so obsessed with getting one woman back that they kept The Other Side going just so they could. I mean, it's not as though untold numbers of people are trapped there forever in total solitude and misery or anything and continue to be and it's not as though this is the reason you are even in the situation you are in now because you guys did this. Then we find out that if The Other Side goes, Bonnie goes with it. Now it makes perfect sense! It actually affects one of them therefore the Mystic Falls team give a rat's ass, but that's a common thing on this show. Everybody else in their universe can be suffering more physical and emotional pain than anybody possibly deserves just as long the MF team isn't effected, even directly causing it themselves, but the moment one of them is even mildly inconvenienced they'll move heaven and earth to fix it. Otherwise? Decent enough of an episode I suppose. I knew Enzo was going to die sooner or later. After all, he gives Damon the perfect excuse to get the hell out of town and never look back, and we can't have that, so of course he's not going to stick around. I just wish he had at least a couple episodes raising hell running around as psycho emotions off Enzo instead of dying right then, that could have been fun. It's not as though his "revenge" or Stefan's lie will be meaningful and have any actual lasting impact, nothing does on this show. In fact, it probably will not be lasting more than a few episodes at most before they forget Enzo ever existed and everything is back to normal anyway.

The difference is a tiger only acts on their instincts and are incapable of doing otherwise. Human beings have basic instincts too, but since we are sentient beings we are able to defy those instincts via overriding them with rational thought. Since vampires are sentient beings they are perfectly capable of doing the same, and just like with us it may not be easy but they can manage it. I do like Damon better though. Out of the two brothers I find him to be significantly more believable both as a person and a vampire. Stefan has this whole holier than thou thing going on, trying way too hard to be a good little vampire while Damon accepts who and what he is and reacts accordingly. Stefan also tends to be a total hippocrate.

I'd say the problem with TOR is the MMO trappings. The Old Republic would have made an AMAZING single player experience, but because of the need to stick in MMO mechanics and MMO pacing to the whole thing it loses a great deal of the appeal it could have had. Personally, I played it for about 6 months, taking my time, doing everything I could do, and only got through 2 characters and a little way into the 3rd before I lost interest. I'll probably pick it up again just to blitz through and finish up the rest of the character storylines one of these days, but I doubt that I'll enjoy it as much as I could have otherwise.

I'd say it's highly unlikely that The Machine wanted McCourt dead. After all, wasn't it like 2 or so episodes ago that The Machine could have stopped Samaritan from even being possible at least for a while just by ordering Root to stop the bad guys instead of going to save this one innocent janitor guy? Why would The Machine do that and then make a complete about face and want to have another innocent person dead instead, especially since then it would have barely slowed Decima down? If the writers are trying to go that way, then they're forgetting the characterization they've given The Machine so far.

IMO, I doubt it's because the show has been on too long for there to be much room for new and interesting plots, think it's that they just don't bother to actually try to make the storylines good anymore since they know the fans will watch them anyway. The Originals is new so they have to put some actual effort to draw in and keep the audience since they don't already have a massive fanbase to fall back on, at least not one as large as TVD. Once they have that they'll probably start phoning it in. I've seen plenty of shows (i.e. Buffy, Angel, most of the Star Treks, NCIS, and I'm probably forgetting a few others, point is it's not as uncommon as one might think) that have actually gotten much better in their later years than they ever were in the early ones, so I don't think that it's a length issue. Hell, even TVD itself I thought got much better once Elena became a vampire and thus a much less useless and more interesting character, but even that's played out at this point. Most definitely this is the primary problem, they just cannot let go of that Damon-Elena-Stefan love triangle that should have been resolved ages ago, two seasons of that stuff were too much not to mention 5. They drop the triangles and the show can only improve from there, but I think the writers and Plec are too scared to leave their comfort zone and actually try to make their show better. I'm even seeing love triangles starting to creep into The Originals, but at least with that they aren't all "LOOK AT THESE THREE! THEY'RE FIGHTING OVER EACH OTHER! ISN'T THIS IS THE BEST STORY EVER!?! LET'S KEEP THIS GOING AS LONG AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!" In short, they aren't shoving it in the audience's faces every two minutes and building everything in the show around it like TVD does.

I'd say at this point that most of us fans are just watching the show specifically because we want to see just how much more stupid it could get. That, and a sense of nostalgia that misguidedly keeps us watching in the vain hope that it gets back to being good against all evidence to the contrary. I don't understand how the same writers that write The Originals also write Vampire Diaries and yet the former is greatly written while the latter is absolute dreck. I personally keep watching it because my father and I both watch it and get more enjoyment out of guessing what cliche they are going to do next and laughing at the characters' stupidity than anything else.

I'd say that except for Davina and maybe Bonnie, (though damning supernaturals to suffer possibly forever kinda puts that into question) the witches the audience has seen on both shows so far are probably the most evil people in the entire TVD universe. They blatantly abuse their powers for the tiniest of reasons at every turn, cause mass suffering in their wake, screw the entire balance of everything on a routine basis, ("servants of nature?" HA!) and punish others in ways nobody deserves for the most petty reasons possible. These people make every other supernatural we've seen combined look like saints in comparison. Witches like Monique only continue this trend. What I'd like to know is why the Originals and Marcel are so psychotically obsessed with controlling this ONE little corner of this ONE little town. It's not like New Orleans is just the French Quarter, I don't even need to have ever been there to know that. That, and Earth is an entire planet, planets are big. I'm sure there's somewhere else either of them could take control of instead of fighting of these few short miles.

Exactly, which is why I was against killing McCourt, but only for that reason. Sometimes innocent people have to die in order to stop tragedies, but if it won't stop it then there's not really any point. Hypothetically, if it would stop it though, I'd have no problems with it.

I'd say I wasn't in support of killing the Senator, but not for any moral reason, more like because it wouldn't have accomplished much. Decima would have pushed Samaritan through Congress eventually or just activated it and used it themselves anyway without approval even without the Senator's help in the end, so at most it was a delaying tactic. However, if killing the Senator would have ended the threat of Samaritan right then, I would say just kill him already. I've always hated heroes that refuse to kill innocent people or worse even guilty people despite the fact that it would save countless lives and they are perfectly aware of this. That's not being heroic or even naive, that's just being stupid.

The Machine probably could have just wired some money and hired an assassin to do it if it wanted the Senator dead. In fact, I can't see why Northern Lights going under would even slow it down with the electronic resources it has available.

My guess is it had Root doing some backup plan since it knew that Team Machine probably wasn't going to kill the senator.

I decided that the writers have shown enough about The Machine and it's taking action of it's own accord to call it a character in it's own right at this point, so I put this thread up to give fans a specific place to discuss what we know about it so far and speculate on it and it's motivations. As for myself, I like The Machine's premise, a belevolent all seeing A.I. that goes out of it's way to help people as much as it can. It's an interesting way of doing things, much better than the insane "KILL ALL HUMANS!!!" that other A.I. in fiction tends to end up as, and I wonder how Samaritan will compare to it. However, the one consistent problem I've been having with it is I have yet to understand why it doesn't communicate with anyone aside from Root, even if only on occasion in situations that really could use it or that The Machine has a personal stake in, like this whole Samaritan thing. As the episodes go by it's becoming harder and harder to justify this.

We were referring to HOW she found out about it, and I'm just pointing out that it doesn't seem to be that difficult.

With how many computer geeks, government agents, and even random people just able to put two and two together that seem to find out about the Machine, I'd be more surprised if somebody like Root didn't manage to discover it's existence. For a so called impenetrable supercomputer that nobody's supposed to know about to the Nth level, an awful lot of people on this show seem to know about it.

Well, it's what I feared. Wendel is reduced to being nothing more than a walking device for the writers to talk about the horrors of cancer while the other characters awkwardly walk on pins and needles whenever he's around. Characters can't just be characters anymore, they have to make some sort of statement or they have no worth. Not out of the norm for fiction in general really. Having contrived coincidences like this one all over the place is the bread and butter of fiction. I was disappointed by this episode's conclusion. was probably the most obvious out of all the potential suspects in the episode. I would have hoped the writers could have come up with someone better than the first one the audience is going to guess.

Basically this ^. I can't think of any good reason why The Machine would send Team Machine a number they can't save, especially if Team Machine's efforts to save said number actually cause said number to die as has been suggested. I also can't think of any in universe reason (out of universe, it would make the episodes trivial) that The Machine still does not communicate directly with Team Machine by this point, even if it's only in instances like this episode where there is a direct threat to The Machine itself and it's objectives. Even the "It uses numbers because it respects how Harold wants to interact with it" is a pretty flimsy justification at this point.

That's the thing with The Machine, we don't know what it knows, how it predicts the actions of people, just how accurate it's predictions are, and whether it's capable to determining what sending numbers to people will come to. The Machine is somehow able to predict acts of terror and other premeditated acts of violence, but is it able to account for the human factor? Is it able to know what the people it saves with it's numbers are going to do afterward? One thing though, the episode's first number. Why would The Machine send them a number that they couldn't possibly have saved? This is especially odd since Vigilance ended up getting the information they wanted anyway, so the team's effort ended up not amounting to anything.

I still don't understand how The Machine could actually do it's job if it couldn't predict how people are going to act when it doesn't have a direct view of them, that would happen all the time. The Machine should have told Root where Greer was going even with all the countermeasures he took. Root also should have shot the guy on sight, or earlier when he was in the park, but then we wouldn't have a plot I suppose. I hope Maria doesn't appear again. I've never cared for characters that do blindingly stupid things to make the plot work. How dumb do you have to be to break out of protective custody and go straight to the office of the same person who was behind the people who were trying to kill you, that you know is currently being raided?

I personally prefer it that way. With all the absolutely horrible things she's done on the show, especially recently, it would be incredibly hypocritical of Elena to give Damon grief over what he's done, and I for one would find it much worse than what we have now if she did that. Not that I'd say what we have now is good really, just the lesser of the 2 evils. This is the woman who had such massive loss and abandonment issues she decided to condemn who knows how many people to suffer on the Other Side possibly forever just to get one of her friends back. I think that Elena's character hasn't been particularly altered, just that aforementioned issues and the fact that the universe is out of screw her at every turn are driving her to do more and more horrific things to keep the people she cares about safe and alongside her.