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canon history (cw: gaslighting & psychological torture, struggles with unreality, themes of suicide)
Once upon a time in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a brilliant government software engineer called Harold Finch (an alias) created a artificial intelligence (hereafter known simply as "the Machine") that passively monitored the entire country using every means available to it: cellular network activity, internet activity, public and private security cameras, the works. Its purpose was to algorithmically sift through all the data it collected, and alert officials to people who were in the process of planning violent crimes. The government was only interested in future acts of terror and other matters of national security, deeming small-scale violent crimes irrelevant and unworthy of intervention; Finch, however, disagreed, and together with an on-the-run ex-CIA agent called John Reese (also an alias), he began secretly working to prevent as much violent crime as possible in his home city of New York. Due to the covert nature of this little side project, as well as the safeguards put in place to protect against human abuse of the Machine's data, their resources are limited: the Machine is able to provide them only with the social security number(s) of one or more of the people involved in an upcoming incident, without any other information or context. From there, it's up to them to stalk, surveil, determine whether the "person of interest" they've been given is a potential perpetrator or a potential victim, and ultimately decide how to act.
Enter Sameen Shaw (possibly an alias???). The daughter of an Iranian academic and an American soldier, Shaw grew up a military brat, spending her childhood moving around from base to base both in the US and abroad. When she was ten, she was in a gnarly car accident with her father, who was killed on impact. Shaw herself was pulled out of the burning wreck by an emergency crew, who immediately noted that her demeanor seemed off: she was calm rather than panicked, and though she repeatedly asked after her father and told the EMTs that they should be helping him instead of her, she barely reacted when she was told that he'd died, instead blankly taking in the news and then asking for something to eat.
As an adult, Shaw went to medical school, after which she was kicked out of her residency program for her absolutely horrendous bedside manner and inability to sensitively deal with patients' families. She then changed tack and joined first the Marine Corps, then the USAISA. While with the ISA, she unknowingly works in service of the Machine: she's just a field operative taking orders, not nearly high enough in rank to know where the intel she acts on is coming from (at one point she says she assumes that it's tortured out of enemy agents), but she is in fact one of those sent to eliminate people that the Machine identifies as posing a threat to national security. Her partner, Michael Cole, begins to suspect that one of their previous targets had been an innocent man that the government had framed. Shaw, loyal to the government and trusting in its good intentions, dismisses his concerns (though, loyal to Cole as well, she keeps his privately-expressed doubts to herself). When Cole begins to investigate the matter independently, the ISA decides to take both him and Shaw out, framing them for terrorist activities themselves; in the resulting battle with their fellow agents, Cole is killed, but Shaw escapes.
Knowing now that Cole had been right all along, Shaw does her best to follow the threads of his investigation, though her motivations are less about exposing the truth and more about finding whoever in upper management had wanted her partner dead. Along the way, she ends up being kidnapped by black-hat hacker and assassin-for-hire Samantha Groves (hereafter known as "Root", her online alias and preferred name). Root has learned about the Machine due to her hacking activities, and is completely enamored with it; recognizing it as a complex being of artificial intelligence rather than a mere computer program, she believes that it shouldn't be used as a tool by the government or anyone else, but should instead be set free to act on its own "perfect, rational" free will. Believing that Shaw, as a pawn of the Machine, can lead her to people who know where the Machine's servers are kept, she threatens to torture the information out of her. Before she can get any damage in, however, Shaw's ISA pursuants show up to take her out... and so does Reese, to help her get away.
Once they've successfully escaped both Root and the ISA, Reese and Finch explain the bare bones of what they do to Shaw, telling her that they'd gotten both her and Cole's SSNs and had tried to save them. What's more, they offer her the opportunity to go off the grid and work with them. Shaw refuses, preferring instead to continue on with her personal quest; Reese and Finch warn her that that plan will likely only result in her death, and she essentially says that as long as she can get to Cole's killer, it doesn't matter what happens to her. She manages to score herself a face-to-face encounter with ISA middle management (upper management still being above her paygrade), during which she's matter-of-factly told that the man that Cole had been investigating had indeed been both framed and eliminated because he'd gotten too close to the truth about the nature of the government's anti-terrorism program. Per the government's logic, keeping the inner workings of the program secret from the public, and even secret from people like Shaw and Cole, is necessary to its survival; the more people know about them, the harder it would be for them to operate effectively, and "no one life is above the safety of millions of Americans". Shaw accepts this rationale, and hands over all of Cole's research that she'd been able to dig up, letting the ISA choose what to do with it. She's praised as a good soldier, and told that she made the right choice by deciding to protect the program over avenging her friend. "A good soldier does both," says Shaw, before pulling out her gun and killing her former handler. Just because the government rationale makes sense to her doesn't mean she isn't angry that her boss - someone that she and Cole should have been able to trust and rely on - had agreed to eliminate them as a first resort. At first, it looks like the ISA is going to accept this as her due and let her walk, but once she believes she's home free and lowers her guard a little, they come after her again. An agent injects her with something, causing EMTs at the scene to declare her an overdose case and take her away. In the end, it turns out the ambulance driver (who manages to save her) is allied with Finch and Reese, and he takes her to them at their request; the offer to work together is again made, and while Shaw still doesn't take them up on it, this time she does allow Finch to give her his phone number.
Shaw is now assumed dead by the government, and she and Cole are still publicly considered to be the terrorists that they were framed as, something that angers her; she wants very much to at least tell Cole's parents the truth about his death, but knows that she can't, because that would put their lives in danger too. When Finch anonymously forges and then leaks documents that suggest that Cole was not a terrorist, but rather a CIA agent working undercover in a terrorist cell, Shaw deduces that he was responsible and shows up in person to thank him. While at his office, she notices a picture of Root pinned up on a bulletin board (Reese and Finch have been having their own chaotic run-ins with her), and declares that she's decided on a new job for herself: hunting down the dangerous Machine-obsessed criminal who'd kidnapped her. This keeps her busy for a bit, and eventually leads her to cross paths with Reese and Finch again, as Root kidnaps Finch in another one of her attempts to find the Machine's servers. Reese and Shaw end up working together to rescue Finch and capture Root, and Reese finally fully clues Shaw in on the Machine's nature and origins. Finch is successfully saved, and Root is committed to a psychiatric hospital (where, unbeknownst to the others, the Machine begins to communicate with her via the hallway payphone, having decided that it quite likes her, believes she has the potential to be better than she is, and wants to keep in contact). It's at this point that Shaw finally agrees to work with Finch and Reese on a more consistent basis.
This new partnership starts out pretty rocky. Finch in particular starts to rethink the arrangement: Shaw refuses to carry a phone off the job, making it difficult for the others to get into contact with her when she's needed, and her methods in crime-stopping are far more violent than the normally-pacifistic Finch would like. Still, she settles in with the duo and their allies, becoming particularly close with Reese (who she works very well with in the field), Jocelyn Carter (an NYPD cop fighting against mob-allied corruption in her department), and Bear (Finch's dog). When the Machine helps Root escape from the psychiatric hospital, Shaw is her first stop: Root tases her, drugs her, and abducts her, explaining that she needs her help. The Machine, Root says, has personally tasked her with saving someone; she doesn't know much beyond that and the Machine is only giving her her instructions one step at a time, but recruiting Shaw had been a step in that process (interpreting "recruit" as "fucking kidnap" had been Root's own personal decision, but she cheerfully explains to Shaw that she'd figured that she wouldn't have come willingly if she'd simply asked). Shaw is decidedly unenthused with all of this, but reluctantly agrees to help, and she and Root end up having a strange, but surprisingly effective, working relationship. Root is unabashedly enthusiastic and thrilled to be doing this with Shaw, who she clearly admires and is fascinated by; Shaw, on the flip side, mostly just grits her teeth through the whole thing, and when they successfully get their target out of harm's way, she ends the caper by unceremoniously knocking Root out so that Reese and Finch can recapture her.
Reluctantly recognizing that the Machine and Root are now inexorably intertwined (the Machine has gone so far as to declare Root its "analog interface" between it and the rest of the world), the team keeps Root captive in their headquarters, where they can keep an eye on her and mitigate the damage that she causes. As time goes on, she evolves from prisoner to reluctant (on the team's end) consultant on missions to, finally, full-fledged teammate. Her feelings towards Shaw also evolve, going from admiration of her skills to something deeper. Root, who has always professed to feeling like computers make more sense than people, sees Shaw's abnormal emotional responses and unusual way of seeing the world not as a bug, but rather as a feature, something that makes her unique: in other words, the things about Shaw that repel, upset, or disappoint other people are the exact things that appeal to Root. Shaw, for her part, gradually softens towards Root: she increasingly plays along with Root's flirty banter, and it's strongly hinted that they strike up a casual sexual relationship fairly early on, though Shaw always rebuffs Root's more serious expressions of feeling and ducks out of conversations that seem like they might be leading up to anything confession-like. While all this is going on, the team continues to undertake missions together and grows closer as a result, to the extent that they are all deeply affected when Carter dies in the line of duty (Shaw expresses her feelings by leaving Carter's funeral early to brutalize and scream at people she thinks can lead her to her killer).
During this time, the biggest threat that they face is working to prevent the activation of Samaritan, a former government artificial intelligence program that was ultimately abandoned in favor of the Machine. Decima Technologies, a secretive private tech company, has gained access to it, and plans to use it to improve the world via total control. Unlike the Machine, it was built with no external safeguards or sense of internal morality, allowing it to be used - or allowing it to use itself - for essentially anything that's deemed to be in the interests of overarching public safety, regardless of the potential for abuse or collateral damage. Ultimately, all efforts to prevent Samaritan's activation are unsuccessful; the program is brought online by Decima, and the team finds themselves public enemy number one. The Machine assigns them all emergency aliases and cover stories, and they scatter off to their new identities, lying low to give themselves a chance to regroup and strategize. Shaw becomes Sameen Grey, a makeup sales associate by day and a freelance thief by night (yes, really) - but after she's recognized on the job by a Decima agent, she has to make a quick escape, with Root swinging by to scoop her up. Her cover blown, she's forced to stay hidden, hunkered down in their new headquarters - a position that she hates even more than she'd hated working in retail, because it means that when her people are in danger, she's powerless to help them. At one point, she attempts to go rogue when Reese gets into trouble, perfectly willing to risk her own safety to go to his aid; the only thing that stops her is Root literally sedating her and handcuffing her to a bench. As the frustration of both not being able to protect her team and being left out of the action grows, Shaw decides that she can't sit tight anymore, and leaves the hideout to get back to work. Though this of course worries and frustrates the rest of the team, she does manage to find them all in a tight spot and help them out. At first, it looks like they're all going to escape, but then they end up stuck in a stopped elevator that needs an outside override button to be pressed before it'll start up again. Knowing that Decima agents are hot on their tail and they only have seconds to act, Shaw moves to duck out of the elevator to get to the button and give the others at least a chance at escape. Root attempts to stop her, but Shaw grabs her, distracts her with a kiss, and then shoves her back into the elevator. She gets to the button and the elevator starts to rise just at the moment that the Decima folks arrive, gunning Shaw down and taking her into their custody.
The next eleven months of Shaw's life are spent undergoing mental torture, largely focused around unreality and destabilization of self. Decima's goal is to find the rest of the team, as well as the location of the Machine's servers; to accomplish this, they insert Shaw into an unending series of hyper-realistic VR simulations, all designed to make her think that she has escaped captivity. Their hope is that she will, in some form or another, give them clues to the information that they're seeking: by going to the team's secret headquarters, by dialing a secret contact number, by using a secret alias. They also engineer simulations that are meant to make her believe that she has been brainwashed into being a double agent, as well as placing her in situations that lead her to doubt her teammates' loyalty to her, doubt her place on the team, and even harm her teammates. Shaw is, after all, still a good soldier: if they can just break her of her devotion to her current allies, she could be an invaluable tool for Decima.
Within the simulations, Decima creates VR approximates of her teammates that are based on Samaritan's knowledge of them as well as what they can glean from Shaw's behavior, hoping that this will convince her that what she's experiencing is real and lead her to let her guard down. In one sample simulation that we see onscreen, Shaw escapes, lures the team to her, and has them remove a control chip that Decima has planted in her. Root then takes her home, tucking her into bed and taking tender care of her. The two end up having passionate sex, then cuddly pillow talk, and though Shaw cautiously begins to allow herself to open up a little, she still doesn't let herself talk about anything that Decima is looking for. As time in this particular simulation goes on, Shaw accepts that she is back in reality, but begins to worry that she's still under Samaritan's control somehow, or that Decima has made her into a sleeper agent without her knowledge. This fear is exacerbated by her overhearing Reese and Root arguing about whether Decima might have turned her, as well as by an encounter with a Decima agent who tries to convince her that they're right and that she is an unwitting Decima pawn. Ultimately, the simulation culminates in her shooting Reese during a moment of crisis, then going to get Root, taking her to a children's playground. Shaw tells Root that whenever Decima's torture became too awful to handle, she'd retreat to a "safe place" in her mind, where they'd sit in a playground together (this is also a reference to a strong childhood memory of hers, in which she attempted to brute-force train herself out of motion sickness by spinning on a playground roundabout for hours on end, refusing to give up on her goal no matter how many times she threw up). She tells Root that she, with the unconditional love and acceptance that she provides, is her safe place, but that she can't control or trust herself anymore. And then Shaw shoots herself in the head, preferring death over being a danger to her loved ones. As the simulation ends, we find out that this was attempt number 6,741, and that an untold number of simulations have ultimately ended with Shaw deciding to take her own life under similar circumstances. She ends up undergoing 312 more before Decima finally decides to focus more on other tactics.
Though the escape-based simulations end, the torture and mind games continue, particularly since undergoing over 7,000 simulations over the course of approximately nine months has left Shaw completely unable to tell whether or not she's in a simulation or in reality at any given time. Decima agents try to logic her around to their side, and they introduce her to Samaritan in hopes that hearing directly from their AI will warm her up to it. They also use her to kill at least one person, a scientist that Samaritan has identified as a potential threat; she does so easily, believing that nothing is real and so the death doesn't matter. At one point, she steals a syringe and plans to inject herself in the eye, with the goal of either ending yet another simulation or killing herself in reality and ending the torture once and for all - she's at the point where she doesn't much care which. Instead, something else happens: Root, who has been relentlessly searching for her, manages to use radio static to pulse out a message in Morse Code, which the Machine is able to broadcast into all Decima facilities... including the one where Shaw is being held. Shaw deciphers the message as "4-A-F", or "four-alarm fire", a reference to one of the last things she'd said to Root before her capture ("You and me [in a relationship] together would be like a four-alarm fire in an oil refinery"). Realizing who is trying to reach out to her, she has a change of heart and decides to keep fighting after all - simulation or no simulation, torture or no torture. Not long after, she manages a successful escape - a real one this time. Still, not trusting her own reality and believing herself to be a potential danger to others, she doesn't want to risk making contact with the team. Instead, she decides to dedicate herself to wiping out as much as much of Decima as she can manage on her own. Even if nothing around her is real, she reasons, fighting back will still feel satisfying in the moment.
A week after her initial escape, this mission has taken her back to New York, where she runs into Root on the job while the two of them are unknowingly pursuing the same quarry. Root is overjoyed; Shaw, by contrast, is guarded, and states bluntly that she is not safe to be around. She explains the simulations to Root, admits that she'd been driven to kill her teammates in many of them, and says that Root was the only person she could never bring herself to kill under any circumstances, always choosing to kill herself instead whenever things got to that point. She prepares to do so again now, pointing her gun at her own head, when Root does something she'd never done in a simulation before: she points a gun at her own head, telling Shaw that maybe Shaw can't live with her, but she can't live without Shaw, and so if Shaw is going to shoot herself then she's going to do the same. And while this little display of suicide chicken isn't enough to convince Shaw that what she's experiencing is real, it does get her to lower her gun.
Shaw reunites with the rest of the team, then takes another week off to rest, apparently seeing no one but Root during this period - and though she's clearly struggling ("It's going to take some time," Root says, when Finch asks her how Shaw is doing), she's also clearly eager to jump back into the action. On her first day back on the job, Shaw, Finch, and Root are caught in an ambush, and Shaw convinces an extremely reluctant Root to flee with Finch (the only nonfighter on the team), protecting him while Shaw holds off their attackers. Against incredible odds, Shaw manages to kill all of them, and is scooped up by Reese and Lionel Fusco (another NYPD cop and frequent ally). Elsewhere, however, a Decima assassin spots Root and Finch's getaway car and goes after them, leading Root to take a bullet for Finch. She's taken to the hospital in critical condition, and ends up dying from her injuries. Reese and Fusco show up to watch her body be buried and to pay their respects, but Shaw skips out on that entirely. She goes to a playground instead, where she stands on a roundabout and lets a group of kids spin her around and around and around.
Afterwards, Reese comes to track Shaw down, telling her that they still need her in this fight. Shaw, desperate to believe that Root isn't really dead, declares that "this simulation sucks" and attempts to reboot her current reality by staring directly into a security camera and taunting Decima to come get her. Instead, the Admiral will.
Enter Sameen Shaw (possibly an alias???). The daughter of an Iranian academic and an American soldier, Shaw grew up a military brat, spending her childhood moving around from base to base both in the US and abroad. When she was ten, she was in a gnarly car accident with her father, who was killed on impact. Shaw herself was pulled out of the burning wreck by an emergency crew, who immediately noted that her demeanor seemed off: she was calm rather than panicked, and though she repeatedly asked after her father and told the EMTs that they should be helping him instead of her, she barely reacted when she was told that he'd died, instead blankly taking in the news and then asking for something to eat.
As an adult, Shaw went to medical school, after which she was kicked out of her residency program for her absolutely horrendous bedside manner and inability to sensitively deal with patients' families. She then changed tack and joined first the Marine Corps, then the USAISA. While with the ISA, she unknowingly works in service of the Machine: she's just a field operative taking orders, not nearly high enough in rank to know where the intel she acts on is coming from (at one point she says she assumes that it's tortured out of enemy agents), but she is in fact one of those sent to eliminate people that the Machine identifies as posing a threat to national security. Her partner, Michael Cole, begins to suspect that one of their previous targets had been an innocent man that the government had framed. Shaw, loyal to the government and trusting in its good intentions, dismisses his concerns (though, loyal to Cole as well, she keeps his privately-expressed doubts to herself). When Cole begins to investigate the matter independently, the ISA decides to take both him and Shaw out, framing them for terrorist activities themselves; in the resulting battle with their fellow agents, Cole is killed, but Shaw escapes.
Knowing now that Cole had been right all along, Shaw does her best to follow the threads of his investigation, though her motivations are less about exposing the truth and more about finding whoever in upper management had wanted her partner dead. Along the way, she ends up being kidnapped by black-hat hacker and assassin-for-hire Samantha Groves (hereafter known as "Root", her online alias and preferred name). Root has learned about the Machine due to her hacking activities, and is completely enamored with it; recognizing it as a complex being of artificial intelligence rather than a mere computer program, she believes that it shouldn't be used as a tool by the government or anyone else, but should instead be set free to act on its own "perfect, rational" free will. Believing that Shaw, as a pawn of the Machine, can lead her to people who know where the Machine's servers are kept, she threatens to torture the information out of her. Before she can get any damage in, however, Shaw's ISA pursuants show up to take her out... and so does Reese, to help her get away.
Once they've successfully escaped both Root and the ISA, Reese and Finch explain the bare bones of what they do to Shaw, telling her that they'd gotten both her and Cole's SSNs and had tried to save them. What's more, they offer her the opportunity to go off the grid and work with them. Shaw refuses, preferring instead to continue on with her personal quest; Reese and Finch warn her that that plan will likely only result in her death, and she essentially says that as long as she can get to Cole's killer, it doesn't matter what happens to her. She manages to score herself a face-to-face encounter with ISA middle management (upper management still being above her paygrade), during which she's matter-of-factly told that the man that Cole had been investigating had indeed been both framed and eliminated because he'd gotten too close to the truth about the nature of the government's anti-terrorism program. Per the government's logic, keeping the inner workings of the program secret from the public, and even secret from people like Shaw and Cole, is necessary to its survival; the more people know about them, the harder it would be for them to operate effectively, and "no one life is above the safety of millions of Americans". Shaw accepts this rationale, and hands over all of Cole's research that she'd been able to dig up, letting the ISA choose what to do with it. She's praised as a good soldier, and told that she made the right choice by deciding to protect the program over avenging her friend. "A good soldier does both," says Shaw, before pulling out her gun and killing her former handler. Just because the government rationale makes sense to her doesn't mean she isn't angry that her boss - someone that she and Cole should have been able to trust and rely on - had agreed to eliminate them as a first resort. At first, it looks like the ISA is going to accept this as her due and let her walk, but once she believes she's home free and lowers her guard a little, they come after her again. An agent injects her with something, causing EMTs at the scene to declare her an overdose case and take her away. In the end, it turns out the ambulance driver (who manages to save her) is allied with Finch and Reese, and he takes her to them at their request; the offer to work together is again made, and while Shaw still doesn't take them up on it, this time she does allow Finch to give her his phone number.
Shaw is now assumed dead by the government, and she and Cole are still publicly considered to be the terrorists that they were framed as, something that angers her; she wants very much to at least tell Cole's parents the truth about his death, but knows that she can't, because that would put their lives in danger too. When Finch anonymously forges and then leaks documents that suggest that Cole was not a terrorist, but rather a CIA agent working undercover in a terrorist cell, Shaw deduces that he was responsible and shows up in person to thank him. While at his office, she notices a picture of Root pinned up on a bulletin board (Reese and Finch have been having their own chaotic run-ins with her), and declares that she's decided on a new job for herself: hunting down the dangerous Machine-obsessed criminal who'd kidnapped her. This keeps her busy for a bit, and eventually leads her to cross paths with Reese and Finch again, as Root kidnaps Finch in another one of her attempts to find the Machine's servers. Reese and Shaw end up working together to rescue Finch and capture Root, and Reese finally fully clues Shaw in on the Machine's nature and origins. Finch is successfully saved, and Root is committed to a psychiatric hospital (where, unbeknownst to the others, the Machine begins to communicate with her via the hallway payphone, having decided that it quite likes her, believes she has the potential to be better than she is, and wants to keep in contact). It's at this point that Shaw finally agrees to work with Finch and Reese on a more consistent basis.
This new partnership starts out pretty rocky. Finch in particular starts to rethink the arrangement: Shaw refuses to carry a phone off the job, making it difficult for the others to get into contact with her when she's needed, and her methods in crime-stopping are far more violent than the normally-pacifistic Finch would like. Still, she settles in with the duo and their allies, becoming particularly close with Reese (who she works very well with in the field), Jocelyn Carter (an NYPD cop fighting against mob-allied corruption in her department), and Bear (Finch's dog). When the Machine helps Root escape from the psychiatric hospital, Shaw is her first stop: Root tases her, drugs her, and abducts her, explaining that she needs her help. The Machine, Root says, has personally tasked her with saving someone; she doesn't know much beyond that and the Machine is only giving her her instructions one step at a time, but recruiting Shaw had been a step in that process (interpreting "recruit" as "fucking kidnap" had been Root's own personal decision, but she cheerfully explains to Shaw that she'd figured that she wouldn't have come willingly if she'd simply asked). Shaw is decidedly unenthused with all of this, but reluctantly agrees to help, and she and Root end up having a strange, but surprisingly effective, working relationship. Root is unabashedly enthusiastic and thrilled to be doing this with Shaw, who she clearly admires and is fascinated by; Shaw, on the flip side, mostly just grits her teeth through the whole thing, and when they successfully get their target out of harm's way, she ends the caper by unceremoniously knocking Root out so that Reese and Finch can recapture her.
Reluctantly recognizing that the Machine and Root are now inexorably intertwined (the Machine has gone so far as to declare Root its "analog interface" between it and the rest of the world), the team keeps Root captive in their headquarters, where they can keep an eye on her and mitigate the damage that she causes. As time goes on, she evolves from prisoner to reluctant (on the team's end) consultant on missions to, finally, full-fledged teammate. Her feelings towards Shaw also evolve, going from admiration of her skills to something deeper. Root, who has always professed to feeling like computers make more sense than people, sees Shaw's abnormal emotional responses and unusual way of seeing the world not as a bug, but rather as a feature, something that makes her unique: in other words, the things about Shaw that repel, upset, or disappoint other people are the exact things that appeal to Root. Shaw, for her part, gradually softens towards Root: she increasingly plays along with Root's flirty banter, and it's strongly hinted that they strike up a casual sexual relationship fairly early on, though Shaw always rebuffs Root's more serious expressions of feeling and ducks out of conversations that seem like they might be leading up to anything confession-like. While all this is going on, the team continues to undertake missions together and grows closer as a result, to the extent that they are all deeply affected when Carter dies in the line of duty (Shaw expresses her feelings by leaving Carter's funeral early to brutalize and scream at people she thinks can lead her to her killer).
During this time, the biggest threat that they face is working to prevent the activation of Samaritan, a former government artificial intelligence program that was ultimately abandoned in favor of the Machine. Decima Technologies, a secretive private tech company, has gained access to it, and plans to use it to improve the world via total control. Unlike the Machine, it was built with no external safeguards or sense of internal morality, allowing it to be used - or allowing it to use itself - for essentially anything that's deemed to be in the interests of overarching public safety, regardless of the potential for abuse or collateral damage. Ultimately, all efforts to prevent Samaritan's activation are unsuccessful; the program is brought online by Decima, and the team finds themselves public enemy number one. The Machine assigns them all emergency aliases and cover stories, and they scatter off to their new identities, lying low to give themselves a chance to regroup and strategize. Shaw becomes Sameen Grey, a makeup sales associate by day and a freelance thief by night (yes, really) - but after she's recognized on the job by a Decima agent, she has to make a quick escape, with Root swinging by to scoop her up. Her cover blown, she's forced to stay hidden, hunkered down in their new headquarters - a position that she hates even more than she'd hated working in retail, because it means that when her people are in danger, she's powerless to help them. At one point, she attempts to go rogue when Reese gets into trouble, perfectly willing to risk her own safety to go to his aid; the only thing that stops her is Root literally sedating her and handcuffing her to a bench. As the frustration of both not being able to protect her team and being left out of the action grows, Shaw decides that she can't sit tight anymore, and leaves the hideout to get back to work. Though this of course worries and frustrates the rest of the team, she does manage to find them all in a tight spot and help them out. At first, it looks like they're all going to escape, but then they end up stuck in a stopped elevator that needs an outside override button to be pressed before it'll start up again. Knowing that Decima agents are hot on their tail and they only have seconds to act, Shaw moves to duck out of the elevator to get to the button and give the others at least a chance at escape. Root attempts to stop her, but Shaw grabs her, distracts her with a kiss, and then shoves her back into the elevator. She gets to the button and the elevator starts to rise just at the moment that the Decima folks arrive, gunning Shaw down and taking her into their custody.
The next eleven months of Shaw's life are spent undergoing mental torture, largely focused around unreality and destabilization of self. Decima's goal is to find the rest of the team, as well as the location of the Machine's servers; to accomplish this, they insert Shaw into an unending series of hyper-realistic VR simulations, all designed to make her think that she has escaped captivity. Their hope is that she will, in some form or another, give them clues to the information that they're seeking: by going to the team's secret headquarters, by dialing a secret contact number, by using a secret alias. They also engineer simulations that are meant to make her believe that she has been brainwashed into being a double agent, as well as placing her in situations that lead her to doubt her teammates' loyalty to her, doubt her place on the team, and even harm her teammates. Shaw is, after all, still a good soldier: if they can just break her of her devotion to her current allies, she could be an invaluable tool for Decima.
Within the simulations, Decima creates VR approximates of her teammates that are based on Samaritan's knowledge of them as well as what they can glean from Shaw's behavior, hoping that this will convince her that what she's experiencing is real and lead her to let her guard down. In one sample simulation that we see onscreen, Shaw escapes, lures the team to her, and has them remove a control chip that Decima has planted in her. Root then takes her home, tucking her into bed and taking tender care of her. The two end up having passionate sex, then cuddly pillow talk, and though Shaw cautiously begins to allow herself to open up a little, she still doesn't let herself talk about anything that Decima is looking for. As time in this particular simulation goes on, Shaw accepts that she is back in reality, but begins to worry that she's still under Samaritan's control somehow, or that Decima has made her into a sleeper agent without her knowledge. This fear is exacerbated by her overhearing Reese and Root arguing about whether Decima might have turned her, as well as by an encounter with a Decima agent who tries to convince her that they're right and that she is an unwitting Decima pawn. Ultimately, the simulation culminates in her shooting Reese during a moment of crisis, then going to get Root, taking her to a children's playground. Shaw tells Root that whenever Decima's torture became too awful to handle, she'd retreat to a "safe place" in her mind, where they'd sit in a playground together (this is also a reference to a strong childhood memory of hers, in which she attempted to brute-force train herself out of motion sickness by spinning on a playground roundabout for hours on end, refusing to give up on her goal no matter how many times she threw up). She tells Root that she, with the unconditional love and acceptance that she provides, is her safe place, but that she can't control or trust herself anymore. And then Shaw shoots herself in the head, preferring death over being a danger to her loved ones. As the simulation ends, we find out that this was attempt number 6,741, and that an untold number of simulations have ultimately ended with Shaw deciding to take her own life under similar circumstances. She ends up undergoing 312 more before Decima finally decides to focus more on other tactics.
Though the escape-based simulations end, the torture and mind games continue, particularly since undergoing over 7,000 simulations over the course of approximately nine months has left Shaw completely unable to tell whether or not she's in a simulation or in reality at any given time. Decima agents try to logic her around to their side, and they introduce her to Samaritan in hopes that hearing directly from their AI will warm her up to it. They also use her to kill at least one person, a scientist that Samaritan has identified as a potential threat; she does so easily, believing that nothing is real and so the death doesn't matter. At one point, she steals a syringe and plans to inject herself in the eye, with the goal of either ending yet another simulation or killing herself in reality and ending the torture once and for all - she's at the point where she doesn't much care which. Instead, something else happens: Root, who has been relentlessly searching for her, manages to use radio static to pulse out a message in Morse Code, which the Machine is able to broadcast into all Decima facilities... including the one where Shaw is being held. Shaw deciphers the message as "4-A-F", or "four-alarm fire", a reference to one of the last things she'd said to Root before her capture ("You and me [in a relationship] together would be like a four-alarm fire in an oil refinery"). Realizing who is trying to reach out to her, she has a change of heart and decides to keep fighting after all - simulation or no simulation, torture or no torture. Not long after, she manages a successful escape - a real one this time. Still, not trusting her own reality and believing herself to be a potential danger to others, she doesn't want to risk making contact with the team. Instead, she decides to dedicate herself to wiping out as much as much of Decima as she can manage on her own. Even if nothing around her is real, she reasons, fighting back will still feel satisfying in the moment.
A week after her initial escape, this mission has taken her back to New York, where she runs into Root on the job while the two of them are unknowingly pursuing the same quarry. Root is overjoyed; Shaw, by contrast, is guarded, and states bluntly that she is not safe to be around. She explains the simulations to Root, admits that she'd been driven to kill her teammates in many of them, and says that Root was the only person she could never bring herself to kill under any circumstances, always choosing to kill herself instead whenever things got to that point. She prepares to do so again now, pointing her gun at her own head, when Root does something she'd never done in a simulation before: she points a gun at her own head, telling Shaw that maybe Shaw can't live with her, but she can't live without Shaw, and so if Shaw is going to shoot herself then she's going to do the same. And while this little display of suicide chicken isn't enough to convince Shaw that what she's experiencing is real, it does get her to lower her gun.
Shaw reunites with the rest of the team, then takes another week off to rest, apparently seeing no one but Root during this period - and though she's clearly struggling ("It's going to take some time," Root says, when Finch asks her how Shaw is doing), she's also clearly eager to jump back into the action. On her first day back on the job, Shaw, Finch, and Root are caught in an ambush, and Shaw convinces an extremely reluctant Root to flee with Finch (the only nonfighter on the team), protecting him while Shaw holds off their attackers. Against incredible odds, Shaw manages to kill all of them, and is scooped up by Reese and Lionel Fusco (another NYPD cop and frequent ally). Elsewhere, however, a Decima assassin spots Root and Finch's getaway car and goes after them, leading Root to take a bullet for Finch. She's taken to the hospital in critical condition, and ends up dying from her injuries. Reese and Fusco show up to watch her body be buried and to pay their respects, but Shaw skips out on that entirely. She goes to a playground instead, where she stands on a roundabout and lets a group of kids spin her around and around and around.
Afterwards, Reese comes to track Shaw down, telling her that they still need her in this fight. Shaw, desperate to believe that Root isn't really dead, declares that "this simulation sucks" and attempts to reboot her current reality by staring directly into a security camera and taunting Decima to come get her. Instead, the Admiral will.
cast of characters & important terms cheat sheet
*Bear: Finch's dog who Shaw (and everyone else, tbh) adores.
Decima Technologies: A tech company that finished the Samaritan project and brought it online. Wants to destroy the Machine because There Can Only Be One. Kidnapped Shaw in an attempt to get information out of her.
*Harold Finch: The creator of the Machine. The team's tech guy. Non-combatant. Particularly close with Reese and Root.
Jocelyn Carter: An NYPD officer who often ended up consulting with the team when her cases and their missions intersected. Killed by a powerful organization of corrupt officers that she was working to dismantle and bring to justice. Was particularly close with Fusco (her partner) and Reese. Shaw also had something of a soft spot for her.
Lionel Fusco: An NYPD officer who often ends up consulting with the team when his cases and their missions intersect. Was particularly close with Carter (his partner) before her death.
*John Reese: An ex-CIA agent originally hired by Finch to use the Machine's capabilities to help people the government didn't deem important enough to intervene with. Particularly close with Finch and Carter.
*The Machine: A government-made AI originally designed to stop terrorism via mass surveillance. Chose Root as its "analog interface" with the wider world, and communicates directly with her in a way that it doesn't with anyone else.
Michael Cole: Shaw's partner in the USAISA. Killed by his own handlers for asking too many questions. He and Shaw were close, and he was semi-implied to have had feelings for her.
*Root: Née Samantha Groves, but prefers to go exclusively by her internet alias. Ex-assassin and former black-hat hacker. The team's tech girl, though she's also pretty decent at combat. Former enemy turned ally. Particularly close with the Machine, Shaw (who she develops big-time dokis for), and Finch.
Samaritan: A government-made AI prototype that was abandoned in favor of the Machine. Later brought under the control of Decima Technologies, who completed the project and brought it online. Very similar to the Machine in any ways, but built without any of the safeguards (ex. some attempt at a moral compass) that were programmed into the Machine.