Wisdom of the Overdramatic

integral87:

Nathan: When were you going to tell me?

Harold: I wasn’t gonna tell you, I guess. I’d rather didn’t know myself.

Nathan: All these people… and this damn machine knew… you knew… That someone wanted to harm them, kill them and you did nothing?

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I bet nobody cares but I just wanted to talk about Nathan. I know that most of the people in PoI fandom here on Tumblr love John Reese and to a lesser extent Harold. I understand why - Reese is a badass and an attractive man (not to me though), while Harold is cute and geeky. To me even with Harold having a dark side we are yet to discover he has lost some of the air of mystery that used to surround him at the beginning. I still like him but not as much as I used because cute and attractive is not something that sells a TV show for me (with the exception of Anna Torv lol I still watch Fringe for the plot), though it is beside the point. I wanted to talk about a different man. 

It is funny how a character who only has as much as 15 minutes of total screen time and appears in just three episodes can become an absolute favorite.  The funnier is the fact that we can only assume that he is a good guy and a dead one on top of that unless proven otherwise. But it didn’t stop me from developing certain trust and admiration for this character. I realized that this man would always hold a special place in my heart after his confrontation with Harold in “Ghosts”.

I believe that Nathan had to live triple live: one as a CEO, the face of IFT; second as Harold’s collaborator on the Machine who was constantly questioning the moral implications of building something so powerful; and third as the Machine’s sole creator whose faith in it was obsolete, who sold it to the government for 1$.  All these lives, though not as separated from one another as Harold’s, still made him see things different. He started from perceiving the Machine as the only source of privacy violation, a soulless calculating ‘orwellian nightmare’ that is programmed to separate ‘relevant’ from ‘irrelevant’, make decisions about who’s going to live and to die based on pure mathematical calculation. But slowly he has grown to realize that even with the Machine being so powerful in itself it’s not going to hurt anyone, unless improperly used.

At this point Nathan seems to be more humane than Harold, it shows when they discuss the human factor in the interference with the machine’s programming. Harold believes that the Machine is self-sustainable and can protect itself from any attempts to tamper with the OS, while Nathan has other ideas. I believe that he is more familiar with motivations that are driving people to do what they do. Nathan owned a huge company, he had power and money and so he knew all about jealously, greed and envy, how people are willing to do crazy things (like hiring Root to break into the Machine using Week’s credentials) to gain advantage and power over others (there is a traitor in NSA – the guy on the phone in Washington D.C.) and not for a good cause (has the power ever made anyone a better person? Especially the kind of power that allows you to control almost every aspect of people’s lives), but mostly to satisfy their primal desire for domination over weaker specimen of the species. And Nathan understood it pretty well, so he needed to make sure that if there was someone out there who was stubborn enough to get inside there would always be the way out, the way to stop this someone from gaining the control over the Machine and to prevent any damage that could be done. Harold doesn’t see it until he loses Nathan to these same people…

Nathan was the one who voiced Harold’s concerns even if the other man hadn’t admitted it at the time, we’ve heard on multiple occasions Finch talking about how his friend’s actions changed him and his vision of the Machine and people to whom they gave it to. I love the fact that Nathan was and in some way still is Harold’s conscious, his moral compass that John has talked about. Without Nathan Ingram there wouldn’t be an irrelevant list, there wouldn’t be Harold Finch who is willing to risk it all to save these people, who would do anything to prove to his dead friend that he did learn his lesson.

And if Nathan is really dead then it is be for a good cause, if not… he might as well be a contingency that Harold was talking about, the one who was calling John on the phone…

So in a way this whole arrangement, this suicide pact has become possible because of one person – Nathan Ingram and it is unfair how very little attention he gets ;(