I had had no idea that what I needed in my life was Finch/Emerson stammering Twisted Sister in a badish Irish accent, basically acapella.

Interesting. Caviezel has talked before about POI needing newer, younger hitters as John Reese is aging out of being plausibly able to deal and take the punishment. IIRC he said something like a Bond-movie type approach where men in their 50s beat up men in their 20s ALL the time would take a lot of the realism out.

OTOH, populational control of resources & wide-spread semi-starvation are frequently cited as keys to N. Korea's totalitarian government. The army/paramilitay police/government functionaries are all loyal because they and their families are the only ones with 3 squares and nice digs.

My guess is that just like Harold wrote code that had The Machine dump memories every night, Root planted code that erases/dumps that part of Sam's memory every time it starts putting together the Team Machine bits. There is a hint that something like this is going on in Ep01; when Reese walks into the police station,…

Importantly, it's not just hits masked as suicides. Sam ALSO deliberately creates situations in which people commit suicide, or otherwise "self-terminiate" - to use the hated Human Resources lingo, when you create terrible working conditions for an employee you want gone, but cannot fire for one reason or another.

In retrospect, doesn't that Finch reaction reveal a LOT about what Samaritan assumes about Finch?

How I took it, was he was trying to make a go of it, until he was outed with Beale and the CIA.

Actually, it was not out of no where - there is subtext in previous episodes. S303 "LadyKiller" in particular.

Maybe he's concerned for or an ally of Control? At least, you'd expect someone in the CIA hierarchy to be extremely wary of the implications of what has happened to Control. Even or maybe especially if there are no details or the Samaritan cover story doesn't really align with who Control was and why she did what she…

Kneecapping has also been used as punishment for people suspected of snitching or otherwise failing "assignments" in paramilitary/organized crime groups, and even as punishment for welshing on street debts to bookies and loan sharks. It goes in an out of fashion, so to speak.

This gives details:
http://zap2it.com/2016/05/p…

Nope, same origin!

I read that as an improv on Root's part once she'd found out about the malware. Root would certainly know the PS3 history. The improbably part was wiring 300ish up in a tolerably short amount of time, I think.