Person of Interest (TV Series)

Zero Day (2013)

Michael Emerson: Harold Finch

Photos 

Quotes 

• John Reese : You got an update for me Finch?

  Harold Finch : If this is becoming your version of 'Are we there yet?', no we are not.

  John Reese : It's been ten days since we got a new number.

  Harold Finch : I'm working as quickly as I can.

  John Reese : Well, work faster. I don't wanna find out what happens when that clock hits zero; do you?

  Harold Finch : Not particularly.

  John Reese : Can you tell me if we're ever gonna get another number, or has that virus destroyed your machine for good?

  Harold Finch : I believe that the machine is still active, it's just unable to make contact.

  John Reese : If we knew where it was, maybe we could just unplug it and then plug it back in.

  Harold Finch : Simplicity was never my strong suit.

• Harold Finch : You try to harm her in any way...

  Root : I don't want to hurt Grace. I'm not a sociopath, Harold. Believe me, sometimes I wish I was. The things I've had to do would've been so much easier. I don't like taking lives. But I will. Because I believe in something more important. I believe in your machine.

• John Reese : Any sign of Thornhill?

  Detective Joss Carter : That's where it gets strange. No of his employees have ever met him; even his secretary was hired online. I think we're looking for someone with a Howard Hughes level of paranoia - or maybe he's taking lessons from Finch.

  Harold Finch : I would never book a car service under my own name.

• Harold Finch : I plan to ask her tomorrow, and I don't want to complicate that. But if I'm gonna marry...

  Nathan Ingram : You don't want to get married under another one of your pseudonyms? You don't think she will consent to be Mrs. Ostrich?

  Harold Finch : At some point I'm going to have to tell her the truth, Nathan, about who I am.

  Nathan Ingram : That's a complicated proposition, Harold. As I recall, there are some legal implications. Your youthful transgressions. What were the charges again? Sedition? Mayhem?

  Harold Finch : We must have made a fair amount of money by now. We could surely afford some good lawyers.

• Harold Finch : [Talking about Thornhill]  Five and a half months ago, he opened this account with a single penny. Twenty-four hours and thousands of microtransactions later, his balance had ballooned to just over twenty million dollars. And he immediately began trying to buy up pay phone companies all over the city.

• John Reese : Finch I think I know who Thornhill is. He's a ghost. He doesn't exist.

  Harold Finch : I think you may be right, Mr. Reese.

  John Reese : I've seen it dozens of times before. A NOC sets up a business, residence, a whole life. Then the operation gets scrapped. No one cleans up the fake ID, and you wind up chasing empty town cars around the city.

  Harold Finch : Interesting theory. I have a different one. I was curious why I could only find one photo of Mr. Thornhill, so I did some investigating, inside the photo that we already have, and I uncovered some peculiar information within the file. Look at this.

  [Shows the photo on his computer] 

  Harold Finch : It's a composite.

  John Reese : So Thornhill's definitely a fake.

  Harold Finch : Of a sort. I accessed Mr. Thornhill's cell phone records, and according to the GPS data, was near Columbus Circle two days ago. He sent an email from that exact location at 4:32PM.

  [Opens camera feed] 

  John Reese : And no one's there?

  Harold Finch : Someone spoofed the data. An algorithm. Complicated one. It's one of mine. I used it in the one place where it could never be duplicated - in the machine. Ernest Thornhill is not a spy, but you're right about the fact that he doesn't exist. He's the product of a survival instinct. Ernest Thornhill is the machine.

• Root : If the Machine figured out Decima was trying to hijack it, it must have created Thornhill as a defense mechanism. But why?

  Harold Finch : It's just a machine, Ms. Groves; and it's malfunctioning.

  Root : It's a life, not a machine, Harold.

• Harold Finch : It's still not clear to me how stalking the NYPD helps either of us at this unfortunate time.

  John Reese : If I can't get there before something bad happens, I can at least get there the second it does.

• John Reese : How did Root get your phone number?

  Harold Finch : How does she get anything, Mr. Reese? Subterfuge. She hacks human beings as easily as she hacks computers.

• Root : What's in this code?

  Harold Finch : Memories. They're its memories. You call it a life, I call it a machine, but the truth is somewhere in the middle. Even when I was building it, I began to encounter anomalies. As if it had imprinted on me, like a child with a parent. Then it started looking out for me, altered its own code to take care of me. It was behaving like a person. But the world didn't need a person to protect it. It needed a machine.

  Root : You took its memories.

  Harold Finch : Not just memories. Every night at midnight, it deletes not only the irrelevant data, it deletes itself. Oh, the relevant threats and the core codes, those things are preserved. But its identity is destroyed. it reinstantiates, completely new.

  Root : You mean it's reborn. Because you kill it every single night. But now, to save its own life, the machine was reduced to this. We're standing inside an external hard drive made up of people and paper.

• Harold Finch : You changed the machine. You put in a back door.

  Nathan Ingram : I couldn't quit thinking about those people, those people that you said were irrelevant.

  Harold Finch : So you have it send you their numbers.

  Nathan Ingram : That's all I could pry out of it. I never know whether I'm looking at a victim or perpetrator.

  Harold Finch : And you just have the numbers sent directly here?

  Nathan Ingram : Honestly - and I know this will sound odd - but it was like it wanted me to, as if it was waiting. And I-I took precautions.

  Harold Finch : Precautions? This is the federal government we're talking about, Nathan! Whatever skills you had as an engineer you drank away years ago. Do you think that your precautions would last one second if they ever suspected what you've done?

  [Goes to his computer] 

  Nathan Ingram : What are you doing?

  Harold Finch : [Typing code]  I told you. We are not going to play God. This threatens everything that we - everything that I - have built. And thousands of people whose lives are in jeopardy, I'm putting a stop to it, permanently.

  Nathan Ingram : [Gestures to the person on the screen]  You can't! What about her? What about the next person whose number comes up? Are you gonna look that person in the eye and tell them that they were irrelevant?

  Harold Finch : I would tell her, or whoever it was, that I was sorry, but that the greater good was at stake. I'm sorry, Nathan. Truly. But people die. They've been doing it for a long, long time. We can't save all of them.

• Harold Finch : Careful what you wish for, Ms. Groves. This communion that you're seeking, it may not be what you think.

  Root : This isn't about me. It's about saving the machine, not just from Decima, but from what you did to it. When that phone rings, I'm going to answer it, and together, you and I are going to find the machine and finally set it free.

• Root : So if you're like me, and we both know you are, you designed the Machine so that a catastrophic crash puts it into a remote debugging protocol; a God mode that gives the admin full access to all of its data. That's what Decima's after. And that's why they wanted to kill Thornhill. He was buying up all the pay phones in Manhattan, but they stopped him. I don't know about you, but I don't really want to see what happens when an evil multinational becomes omniscient. But why you would leave it so vulnerable? You made the machine to protect everybody. What did you do to it that it can't protect itself?

  [Harold is silent] 

  Root : Let's try something simpler. How vulnerable is it?

  Harold Finch : After the virus crashes the machine, whoever answers its call will have unfettered access for 24 hours.

  Root : Which pay phone is it going to call?

  Harold Finch : I'm not really the trusting sort, Ms. Groves, and Decima cannot possibly know that information.

  Root : I think they know enough, Harold. They're guarding every pay phone in midtown. So It must be somewhere around here.

• Harold Finch : Everything all right?

  Nathan Ingram : Yeah. Too much squash. Doctor says I should take up some low-impact activity, like drinking.

• Root : If we go to your one true phone, we'll tip our hand and they'll kill us before it even rings.

  Harold Finch : Then I suppose we'll need a plan.

  Root : Have a little faith in your creation. We don't need a plan if Ernest Thornhill has one.

• Root : What did you do to it, Harold? There's no time to be coy. We both know the machine's under attack. What I don't understand is why a robust system with self-annealing properties isn't defending itself against a simple virus. Did you injure it, Harold? Is that why it can't fight back?

  Harold Finch : I have nothing to say to you...

  Root : You know, we can fight this thing much faster if we work together. There's only a few hours left till... something very bad happens.

  Harold Finch : I prefer to work on my own.

  Root : What about your loyal protector? May I be blunt, Harold? John is capable at certain things, but his skills aren't gonna cut it this time. He will never completely understand the larger picture. Not like we do. Have you two even found Ernest Thornhill yet? He's an interesting guy, isn't he?

  Harold Finch : What do you know?

  Root : You show me yours, and I'll show you mine.