Flying Through POI

Person of Interest 5x05 - ShotSeeker

Apologies to continue with the Person of Interest entries, but the episodes are being aired at a rapid pace and there's very little else on the network off-season that has yet begun - meanwhile all if not must of my September-May sweeps are concluded, leaving me with little else to talk about here for the moment (not that I mind for a single second). So let's just get straight into it.

What is ShotSeeker?

The POI of this episode is Ethan Garvin, an analyst instrumental in the resurrection and improvement of a nearly-dissolved system at the Real Time Crime Centre (RTCC) called "ShotSeeker", which uses microphones around New York City to differentiate between gunshots and say a backfiring car or firecrackers.

The POI

Garvin is an absolute mess. He spends the whole episode sleep-deprived and determined to root out the conspiracy behind a missing person, Krupa Naik, who disappeared two days ago after ShotSeeker mistakenly determined the gunshots which sounded in her apartment were firecrackers. Garvin shows Reese the proof and they follow the investigation, but Fusco is used interchangeably as Garvin's protector when Reese's sideplot develops more steam further into the episode.

Ostensibly, there is only one cause of the conspiracy - Samaritan - and the question of its motivation, though left ambiguous, offers some truly terrifying outcomes.

Krupa Naik was developing a technology that increased the shelf life of fresh produce by up to two years, essentially immortalising saleable foodstuffs worldwide, a technology with the potential to eradicate world hunger if implemented correctly. She wants to do business with a moral company (the name of whom I forget), but a very amoral company, Harvesta (didn't forget their names, did I?), wants it for themselves and its CEO is a little douchey. You know, comments like - and I'm paraphrasing here - "Why should we bother to help hungry Africans when it's their own fault for insisting upon living where they cannot grow enough food to survive comfortably?" aren't generally the feelings of the majority.

But, despite his arsehole beliefs, the CEO of Harvesta, J.D. Carrick, is innocent. Samaritan took out Naik and presumably disposed of her body, it framed Carrick for the murder and targeted our POI Garvin because he had recognised the ShotSeeker technology had been manipulated. Of course, he didn't know it was the work of an artificial super-intelligence, but he knew something was more than a tad hinky about the whole situation.

So Samaritan wants to control the global food market? Thaaaaaat's not good. Our team are gonna have to stop that - once they get past their dead ends.

Eventually, Root talks the Machine, which is now an open system, into giving them a hint, and it duly reveals audio from Naik's murder, where the Samaritan agent demands to know the location of an incriminating hard drive before killing her. Armed with that information - and a gun, of course (this is a deadly AI-versus-AI war she's in the middle of) - Root makes a rare forage topside of the subway base to find the hard drive herself.

The Samaritan agent she runs into, its newest recruit in Jeff Blackwell (5x02's dismissed ex-con), isn't particularly proficient at searching for top-secret information, or even recognising there is someone else in the house undertaking an identical search. Root, obviously well-versed in espionage, finds the hard drive immediately, and her confrontation with Blackwell serves to disillusion him from his calling, for apparently he was unaware of his employer's nefarious motives.

With the hard drive now in Team Machine's hands, the safest way to protect Garvin is to themselves expose what Samaritan so keenly hunted. Root obliges, uploading the information to a number of websites and causing Samaritan to react, for once, predictably, as it alters its assessment of Garvin to "minimal threat" and settles simply to "monitor" him. (I can't help but feel with all Samaritan's power it could just have, you know, removed the info from the internet continuum, but this was only a slight niggle in the plot and without this one troublesome point being overlooked, there could be no positive resolution to the storyline.)

Airtime

Fusco's responsibilities interchange with Reese's here, as at different times he takes over Reese's job as guardian of the latest POI. But it's not really his focus: Fusco is already certain something is up that his friends know about, and on numerous occasions during the course of this episode he demands to be looped in to what is really going on, at one point even outright accusing Finch (correctly) of deliberately leaving him in the dark.

Obviously, it's not that simple, and Finch would prefer to keep Fusco out of the loop for as long as possible. But Samaritan, who was monitoring Fusco before, now ups its assessment of the determined detective from "potential disruptor" to "potential obstructionist". A bigger word to denote the fact that Fusco's persistence is leading him closer to the truth, and I can't help but feel sometime very soon Finch is going to have to accede and admit all to Fusco in order, paradoxically, to keep him safe.

Fusco's airtime in this episode is likely more than any episode prior, and as a huge Fusco fan I'm glad of this.

Finch, meanwhile, suffers from a lack of airtime.

Don't worry, that's just my little joke, he's locked himself in the subway so long he hasn't had any air in a while! He's had ample screen time, nobody panic.

Root and Finch

Following on from Root's airgapping of stolen Samaritan code, Finch builds a Faraday cage in one corner of the subway, as he had in one room of the library, to make doubly certain no Samaritan code can escape from the laptop and damage the Machine. Finch then creates a small amount of Machine code onto a new laptop, which he plugs into the Samaritan laptop, subsequently trapping them both inside the Faraday cage so he can run simulations and scenarios - how many will Samaritan win against Finch's Machine. At the end of this scene, it's Samaritan 6, Machine 0. Not great, but not overly problematic. Samaritan was always likely to maintain some degree of superiority.

While the scenarios run in the background, Finch and Root engage in another of their morality debates regarding the Machine's capabilities. Root remains insistent the Machine should be altered to better equip itself both offensively and defensively, in order to cope with Samaritan's cunning prowess. Contrastingly, Finch continues to argue that making the Machine more like Samaritan would give it the potential to become another Samaritan, and personally I agree with him. Just because the Machine's played nicey-nice for four seasons doesn't mean it will forever (just look at 5x02's SNAFU for evidence). On the other hand, the Samaritan war is hard enough to fight already, and some point something will have to give. He'll hold out as long as possible, but that something will be Finch - and soon.

If you need any more proof, let's go back to the scenarios. At the start, it's Samaritan 6, Machine 0. By the end of the episode, Samaritan has been the victor in over TEN BILLION scenarios. And the Machine ... still zero.

Like I said, something's gotta give.

Reese, Bruce Moran and Elias

When the press release for ShotSeeker announced an "ally of Elias" would be returning, I was praying that ally would be Elias's moneyman and childhood friend, Bruce Moran. I wasn't disappointed. Bruce is a central figure in this episode - at first he simply threatens Fusco to know who killed Elias, so that he can avenge his friend's death. But then Reese and Fusco swap. Fusco takes Garvin, and Reese deals with Bruce by warning him to go back underground and stay there.

Bruce doesn't, and he doesn't take Reese's silence for an answer either, kidnapping him right after Reese fails to capture a Samaritan hitman sent to assassinate Garvin. This leads Finch to think Samaritan has Reese, and Fusco to call in a citywide police search for him.

In reality, Bruce has him in a barber shop somewhere off-grid. Bruce reiterates his desire to know the truth about his friend's demise, leading Reese to get in touch with Finch and suggest they tell Bruce the truth.

I was at this point convinced that meant Samaritan, but I knew Elias was bound to show up at some point this episode because he was listed as guest starring on the press release. What I didn't expect was the circumstances of that appearance: Fusco had saved Elias from the sniper and Team Machine had been keeping Elias in their safehouse all along! Stunning.

Some of the allure of seeing Elias was sadly missing, however. Elias's acceptance of the pointlessness of reviving his criminal empire, (it is implied he is now aware of Samaritan), made him morose and un-sarcastic - not the witty, man-with-a-plan, kill-you-soon-as-help-you mastermind he was in the previous 4 seasons. Also, seeing him lying in a bed recuperating from his bullet wound four months after being shot, when any other character is fine after two minutes, was a bit jarring.

I hate to mention time constraints again, but Elias being rescued and becoming privy to the fact that two warring AIs exist would have, had season 5 been given a full order, made for some incredible scenes. But, with no room to fit those scenes in we have to simply imagine them, and that's upsetting as there would be a satisfaction in seeing Team Machine finally subdue Elias after 4 seasons of his refusing to listen to them. (And that really cheapens the waste of an episode that 6,741 was. You have 13 episodes, guys, and not enough time to fit 44 episodes' worth of TV in. Sort your priorities.) But all the same, now that Elias understands the larger battle, and with Elias that close to Team Machine, he could play a pivotal role in the future and I see that being very, very exciting.

Names

All our characters have names, of course, but they all refer to each other in different ways. Nicknames mainly, especially in the case of Root and Fusco. Fusco always calls Finch "Glasses", so to hear him actually call Finch Finch was very interesting and highlighted the danger of the episode. Likewise, Root, who always refers to Reese as "helper monkey" or some other ape-related phrase, or simply his first name John, called Reese by his surname and it was very odd indeed. For her to show that level of respect again highlighted the danger of the episode. Also, it was lovely to hear the name Carrick spoken by Amy Acker, who plays Root. I'd be interested to hear her say names such as Rooney or De Gea next, though, perhaps unsurprisingly, I don't think van Gaal would sound any good.

Final words

Still not up to the level of the opening two episodes, but much better than either Truth Be Told or 6,741, ShotSeeker was an exciting episode. Mainly, what it did was something the last 2 episodes didn't do - mvoe the storytelling forward. Fusco's investigation is deepening, Finch and Root's war against Samaritan is properly beginning and unlikely allies are popping up from all angles who could prove crucial to the later fight (see Elias, Blackwell and perhaps even Bruce, eventually). The Finch/Greer opening credits returned, and I expect will continue given the return to a focus on weekly POIs from this point forth.

Shaw apparently returns for good in the next episode, so while I look forward to that, I look forward to seeing more of Bruce and Elias and how they will shape the course of the coming season. Also I will look forward to episode 11, the press release of which has just been released - with another inspired POI.

The President of the United States.

Thank you all for reading, see you next time!

Sam