Nolan Fans

IGN: You have a really great, powerful moment there with Root appearing on the roof with Harold and with Reese, but going in, it could be seen as a risky move for a show like yours, because it's an unusual mixture of the metaphysical and the AI idea. But did it just seem like at that point, especially given that there's a lot of things happening, including Finch’s blood loss and whatnot, to see that actually happen, in some sense, this would be the right moment?

Plageman: When Jonah suggested it, I was like, "Wait a second, dude." You know, I wrote a lot of episodes of Cold Case, and that ghost appearing at the end was always a little fraught with peril. So I was a little dubious, I have to say. When it came to it, I was like, "Oh, that's perfect." I don't know, Jonah, how did you feel about it?

Nolan: Yeah, you know what it is? On the one hand, Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel and Amy Acker and the rest of our cast have all been magnificent at emoting with a character that does not exist. The sort of climax of that was in the Season 4 finale, in which we got more than a few tears out of our audience and potentially our executive producing ranks, out of a conversation between Finch and 34-point Geneva on a laptop, right? So amazing what these actors have been able to do in conjuring the spirit of the Machine. One of the things I loved about our show was that we didn't anthropomorphize the Machine. The Machine was allowed to be what AI probably will be, which is a f**king rack of servers somewhere and a notion, a whim. And God bless Warners and CBS for not forcing us to cast someone as the Machine from day one.

That said, if the journey of the whole series had been from the Machine as a notion to a thing, a person, an intelligence, you really wanted to crystalize that. You really wanted to bring that moment to the fore. So there's no better actor to present that and no better character on our show, potentially with the exception of Finch himself, which I guess is another way the narrative could have gone, than Amy Acker, to have someone to convey all that complexity and all those multitudes contained within the Machine. And to give Michael an acting partner for the most emotional moments at the end of that series… We talked about having Amy stand just off-camera, and then we just thought, "No, f**k it." Yeah, he's in extremis. He's been talking to this thing like it's his child for 15 years. At a certain point he's going to start personifying it to a point, and now it's elected to personify itself and adopt, in a slightly creepy, slightly protean, slippery, AI way, it's decided to adopt the full persona of one of his closest friends in death. It gives them an opportunity to really talk mano a mano, right? To really engage in a last, fleeting conversation before they have to part company. So for us, it was the most emotional… No, it was really just an excuse to continue working with the amazing Amy Acker. [Laughs] But also, those scenes, yeah, it's a little risky, but I'm so happy with those scenes and so proud to have been a part of them.