The premise seems to be that Mr. Finch built a massive surveillance system for the government. The government is only interested in terrorist activities, not in random people being involved - as victim or perpetrator - in day-to-day crimes. So he, as creator of the system with access to the information, has it spit out the SS numbers of those who will be involved.

But how does it know from the SS numbers who will be involved in crimes?

It sees all, knows all. Perhaps there's a lot of handwavium involved.

Finch wrote a program that predicts crimes. It makes two lists--relevant (big, terrorist) incidents and non-relevant (small, one person harmed) incidents. Finch made the system for his bosses, but he left himself a backdoor to the small incident list, since he knew they wouldn't pay attention to it. But it has to be a small backdoor, so they don't catch him. So all it tells him is the SSN of the person involved, and not whether they're victim or antagonist.

"My girlfriend died when I was saving lives halfway across the universe so I became a homeless man with the world's worst beard, woe is me, no one understands my pain..."

She died? I must have missed that. I thought she married someone else.

It was said in some episode that she died. And then in another episode it was said that she didn't wait for him. I have seen three out of order eps, so it's really possible I misread "lost" or something.

eta: Which makes him *way* more of a whiner

Wait, is he more of a whiner if she's dead?

When my girlfriend died, I got really close to becoming a scary homeless person, minus wacky beard and mad assassin skillz. I can see how the death of the only person one really cared about could make someone go a little nuts - especially if he was a little off-balance anyway - and emotionally healthy, totally sane and morally unimpeachable people make great friends, but boring television.

The Machine is just a computer. Even the man who built it doesn't know why it tosses out the numbers it does, or why a particular number comes out on top. It might even be random. All he knows is, it gives him a chance to save someone who otherwise wouldn't be saved. At least PoI provides a *handwavium* explanation for how they find the people they help, unlike, say, Leverage, which makes no attempt whatsoever to explain how people find the team. (Leverage is certainly the better show; I'm just saying.)

Wait, is he more of a whiner if she's dead?

I think ita was saying that he is more of a whiner if she is not dead.

AUGH, I hate the mangst born out of dead girlfriend / wife /mother cliche. Occasionally it's a dead father (H50) or son (Leverage) but most often it's some dead woman/girl solely existing to pad the manly hero's angst fodder and we hatesssss it! We hatesssss it so much! Of course in real life, the loss of a loved one is painful beyond imagining, but in fiction, especially in TV land, the whole trope is used with a laughable amount of abandon and is just a lazy shorthand in storytelling, IMO.

Handwavium ... would there be any TV without it?