From the beginning Finch was always leery about building a "back door" into the Machine which could have allowed any committed hacker to ultimately control it. Finch doesn't even trust himself with that much power.

Reese isn't a programmer and he never realized he could customize his interactions with the Machine. The first thing Root did, OTOH, was specify how the Machine would communicate with her. It's just possible that by now Root and the Machine are talking to each other in complete sentences, when time allows.

I'd have expected Root to complain about being locked in the cage one last time after Finch acknowledged that he didn't know "when or if" he'd be back.

I'm not sure what Finch could have done, even if he'd answered the phone. The Machine isn't talking directly to Finch yet (or at least Finch has no reason to expect it to), so Finch wouldn't have been able to decode the Machine's Dewey Decimal message when he was away from the library anyway.

That, and the cop she interrogated by hand grenade told her that the family of any cop who crosses HR is in as much danger as the cop himself/herself. (Shaw wasn't around when HR faced off with Elias, she didn't have that info before). Shaw made the best choice she could with the limited resources she had

From the beginning, I'd say. In the first season the entire chase of the Man in the Suit was like a flirtation.

They also had Reese's picture, so changing Reese into plain clothes has limited usefulness. And any time Reese spent disguising himself (late at night when he'd have to find a store to break into) would just add to the time it would have taken to get the federal building.

Shaw figured out that "research" was AI in the second half of last year's season finale.

These next two episodes could be game changers for the entire series. Right now HR only knows that Carter is working with The Man in the Suit while they merely suspect Fusco's involvement. But HR doesn't have a clue about Shaw or Finch.

You bring the KC ribs and I'll bring the Anchor Steam Beer.

And in the middle of the confrontation, an English Lit lecture breaks out…

"I'll leave out the Shakespeare quote." And just as I was thinking it.

And I was struck by how much Carter even *seemed* to be a younger version of herself in the flashbacks. A little less jaded than she has become in the past two seasons, in any case.

Then again the Xavier Academy was a front organization which actually conducted education and skills training.

So I'm guessing that "Mans" is the last name of the guy whose phone was found in the first episode.

And you got that from "Hey, you"? And here I was wasting my time playing Sinatra records.

Spike's "band of buggered" has to be an English's schoolboy jibe passed down through the generations.

Which made sense back in Storybrooke. But now even though he's on somebody else's turf, Henry's the "Accidental Tourist" without even a modicum of William Hurt's awareness of his surroundings.

Would it have been mean to ask Max what a metaphor sounds like?

You're going to have to help with this one. The "T" and the "F" are clear enough, but what does the "D" stand for?