“Is Root smarter than Finch?”
It's a simple question about Person of Interest that unpacks a lot of thought. What do we mean by smarter? Encyclopedic recall? Perception and pattern recognition? The ability to make a lie detector out of coconuts?
Psychiatrists are still trying to figure out whether general intelligence (aka IQ) is a thing and if so how it should be measured. Typical eggheads. Fortunately pop-culture has all the answers, or at least the answers that reflect the way our society thinks it works.
I started out by doing a quick Kagi search to see if it was better than Google. It is, but I'm not sure it's $5/month better. Fortunately what I was looking for wasn't obscure and a half-dozen websites yielded up their lists of the smartest characters in popular fiction. Between the lists, comments from the peanut galleries and my own entries we wound up with 152 nominees which resolved to 77 unique characters dubbed geniuses..
From which we learn:
- Geniuses are overwhelmingly male. Only 17.1 percent of the characters dubbed genius were of the fairer sex.
- They fight crime! A first stab at professions had a detective of some sort as the most popular job with 30.7 percent of our geniuses working for The Man. The second most popular choice was, ironically, being a criminal at 18.7 percent.
- Being a genius is serious business. Only 22.7 of the nominated geniuses appeared in a comedy, the other 77.3 percent appeared in dramas.
- Things are less serious if you are in a comedy. Geniuses in comedies are ridiculously lacking in grace, humility or a non-sesquipedalian vocabulary a whopping 58 percent of the time, while those in dramas suffer from such stereotypes at half that rate.
- Child prodigies are the minority. Only one in five of our geniuses was under the age of 18. Interestingly if you are a child genius the chances of being a woman doubled to 35.7 percent.
- We like our geniuses credentialed. Almost one in three (29.3 percent) of our geniuses had some sort of PhD, MD or law degree, which compares favorably to the US total of 5.5 percent.
- PhDs are the way to go with 45.4 percent of our credentialed geniuses having one or more, with MDs coming in second at 36.4 percent.
- Lawyers and “professors” rounded out the roll call at 9.1 percent each.
- Only one of our geniuses, Michael Scofield of Prison Break, decided that a master's degree was the sweet spot for higher education.
- It was impossible to determine the educational attainment of four geniuses. Three of them were beings from another planet, but Walter White of Breaking Bad was a human enigma. His degree is never mentioned on the show, but it was revealed he did original research in chemistry at CalTech. That suggests some kind of post-graduate degree but we don't know what kind. Perhaps it's fitting that a man who chose the alias Heisenberg resists categorization.
- The most nominated genius was Sherlock Holmes whose adventures have been continuously retold since the character debuted in 1887. If nobody is doing a Holmes homage on Tik-Tok, the bit where he reveals everything about someone he just met should fit into a 30 second video pretty easily. Ironically Sherlock is canonically not the brightest person in his own stories. His brother Mycroft is unquestionably smarter, Irene Adler outwitted the Great Detective at his own game and Moriarity ran a criminal empire under Sherlock's nose for decades. Plus their final battle ended in a tie, until audience demand resurrected Sherlock from the grave.
- Pop culture has a short memory. With few exceptions most of the listed geniuses had a show that debuted or was still airing new episodes in the last ten years. In fact the only character that received more than one nomination that did not appear in TV or movies during the 21st century was... Urkel from Family Matters.
With a list of geniuses the logical next step is to set up a bracket, have them face off and determine the winner. But how? Sherlock Holmes would probably bomb an IQ test since he doesn't know or care about things that don't concern him, like the basic movement of the planets. Adrian Monk can't compete in a Jeopardy tournament because the buzzer would be too unsanitary to pick up. The Professor from Gilligan's Island would dominate any inventing contest as long as he had access to palm fronds, while any kind of murder mystery party with the likes of Rick Sanchez, Frasier Crane and Hannibal Lecter is going to end up in actual murder before the night is out.
Still, I'm not done playing around with this spreadsheet, which I'll have to post once I figure out the best format, so I may revisit this topic. It was a lot easier figuring out which cereal mascot would win back in the day.
Oh, and while Root is clearly more dangerous than Finch, she's only a menace as long as she's an unknown. Once aware that she and people like her exist he'll come up with a devious plan worthy of Harold Finch/Benjamin Linus/Michael Emerson. It's a pity he's American because if you were looking for a character to play Doctor Who's nemesis, The Master? He'd be perfect. Audiences love watching that guy scheme.
