The Class of ’09 was considered to be one of the best in history, and back at the training center itself, Drew and Gabriel knew that this bunch of individuals were going to do something big. Tayo brought about some radical changes in the way things were being done at the FBI, and his only intention was to make the entire system a little less prejudiced. He didn’t want personal biases to affect the outcome of an investigation, and that is why, around 2023, he contacted a tech-genius named Amos Garcia to change how things were done in the FBI.
Hour, Tayo’s colleague, had also built a similar system earlier, but Tayo had noticed that it had a lot of fallacies and loopholes that needed to be corrected. The system did bring down the crime rate in the beginning, but it slowly started making predictive arrests and convicting people based on mere speculations, and that is when the problem started arising. There came a time when it felt like the agents had no use in the FBI, as the entire work was being done by the AI itself. Poet, Hour, Lennix, and Murphy were a few people who were vehemently against it, but even their hands were tied, and they didn’t have the power to stop what was happening. But still, they kept up their fight, and though it did take Tayo a little bit of time in the end, he accepted that he had been wrong all along. Maybe his intention would have been right, but he had committed a grave mistake. So, let’s find out what happened in the season finale of Class of ’09 and if Tayo, Poet, and others were able to turn off the AI for good.
Spoilers Alert
Why Did Tayo Vouch For Ai?
Since the time in Class of ’09 when Tayo Michaels had come to know about Amos Garcia, he had wanted to make use of the AI even when most of his colleagues had told him that the consequences of it were not going to be nice. But Tayo didn’t listen because he somewhere didn’t want anybody else to meet a similar fate like his father. In the Class of ’09 season finale, he said that back in the day, there were two white suspects who were stopped by policemen at a checkpoint. Those two men were carrying guns, and when asked by the police officers why they were carrying them, they said that it was for their protection as they felt scared in a black neighborhood.
The police officers, who themselves were white, let them go, and a few days later, those same suspects killed Tayo’s father with the same gun that the police officers didn’t confiscate. From then on, there was a desire inside Tayo to build a system free from exceptions, bias, prejudices, and any other vices. He wanted the investigations to be fair. But in his quest to create that perfect system, he committed a huge blunder. He hated the way black people were considered suspects before they were even considered humans, but he had now done pretty much the same thing but at a much larger level. Now each and every person in the country was a suspect, and the basic rule of the criminal justice system, i.e., innocent until proven guilty, ceased to exist. Tayo was blinded by his grief, but many years later, when things got out of hand, he realized that the system was stopping people from exercising their basic fundamental rights and was destroying the very fabric of a democratic society.
Who Had Attacked Tayo?
We had seen in the earlier episode of Class of ’09 that Tayo had been attacked at his house. This was happening in the present timeline, around the year 2023, when Tayo was just about to introduce the system and use it in the day-to-day operations of the FBI. Tayo tried to find out who it was, and he came to know that there were certain powerful people who didn’t want the AI to be introduced as they were scared that their illegitimate activities would come out to light. Tayo’s boss told him that if he agreed to have certain exceptions, i.e., kept certain people like covert agents, the president, senators, etc., out of the scope of detection, he could not only use the AI and take its aid in the investigation, but he would also be promoted to the position of the director of the FBI. Tayo knew that the entire idea of a fair investigation would be ruined the moment he gave immunity to certain people, but he didn’t have a lot of options at that point in time. Either he provided immunity to those powerful people, or his entire system would shut down. Tayo knew what he wanted to do, and he went to Amos Garcia to inform him about the same. Amos told him the same thing: that the entire purpose of having such a system would be destroyed if it left out such a huge chunk of people. As much as Tayo agreed with Amos, he knew that one has to make certain compromises sometimes, and it is very rare that you get things exactly the way you want. Tayo knew that it was a victory in itself that they were getting to use the AI, as his bosses, in the beginning, were not even ready to entertain such an idea.
We saw in Class of ’09 season episode 8 that Hour was completely against the incorporation of the AI as she knew the long-term consequences it was capable of having. She tried telling Poet about it but Poet at that time, was of the opinion that the system would help them reduce the crime rate, and that was probably the biggest error of judgment that she made. Agents were reduced to being data collectors, and the AI started convicting people just for thinking about the crime. The predictive arrests wreaked havoc on the entire country, and people didn’t know what kind of dictatorial setup they were a part of. Vivienne also left Tayo around this time as she was not aligned with Tayo’s ideologies, and secondly, she felt that Tayo was unnecessarily risking his and his family’s lives because of the past baggage that he couldn’t get rid of. The inclusion of AI in the proceedings fundamentally changed everything, and things turned out the way Hour had thought they would.
‘Class Of ’09’ Ending Explained: Did They Shut Down The System?
Vivienne McMann was arrested in the end by the FBI because the AI had come to the conclusion that her actions could trigger violence and cause an uprising against the system. She had written a book on the history of protest, and she was debating on the same topic with her students. The AI found that out, and the FBI agents reached her place to make a predictive arrest. Tayo and Vivienne both tried reasoning with the officers that she hadn’t done anything wrong up until then but to no avail. Vivienne knew very well what was going to happen with her in court as well. The presence of the judge, the jury, and the lawyers was merely a formality, as all the decisions were taken by the AI itself. Tayo realized that they had to do something about it before it was too late and he lost his wife forever. He didn’t want others to suffer because of the damage his actions had done. Tayo considered himself accountable, as he was the one who had fought his superiors to make use of the AI.
Tayo met Poet, Lennix, and Hour, and together they hatched a plan to break into the main control center and alter the AI so that it had to be inevitably closed. Hour and Poet told Tayo that Amos Garcia had left a card with them because he knew that in the future, there could come a time when someone tried to alter the system. Through that card, the system could be reprogrammed, and now, Hour and Poet wanted to use it to shut down the system completely. They decided that if they removed the exceptions and everybody came under the ambit of scrutiny, then the president would have given the order to shut down the system. These four batchmates from the Class of ’09 wanted to make things right and they wanted to give the charge back to the people once again. They wanted justice and equality to prevail. They wanted the citizens to have their fundamental rights, and for wanting to do all that, they were ready to pay whatever price they had to. At the end of Class of ’09, Hour, Poet, Tayo, and Lennix successfully altered the system, and eventually it was decided that it would be shut down.
The court nullified all the predictive arrests and cases that were based solely on deductions. The judges said that nobody should be put behind bars just for thinking of a crime and that every individual had the right to be treated as an innocent until proven otherwise. Poet went back to teach at Quantico, and with all the experience she had acquired over such an eventful period of time, she believed that she would be able to help the young generation learn from the mistakes that she and her colleagues had made and teach them how to be exceptional agents and uphold the rule of law.
