Person of Interest, 5x01 and 5x02 reviews, plus precursor

WHY AM I HERE AGAIN?

I realise I claimed in the previous roundup that I would not return until next week, and but for two things I wouldn't have. By next week I meant Monday, forgetting it was already Monday - since both Monday and Tuesday night there are fresh episodes of Person of Interest. I cannot wait a week to go over what I think of this week's episodes, so here I am, back way sooner than expected, for yours and mine entertainment.

What is Person of Interest? A (kind of) quick description

Only the most brilliant show on TV today, if you ask me: a reclusive billionaire (gazillionaire following some shrewd investments during the show's tenure) has created a mass surveillance system,which spies on people "every hour of every day". It was conceived following 9/11, as a method of preventing future terrorist attacks, but, fearing the government would abuse the technology, a secret backdoor was built into the system to give Michael Emerson's character Harold Finch ways of helping ordinary people about to be in murderous trouble. Only, he's mysteriously crippled and needs the physicality and brute force of an ex-CIA hitman, Jim Caviezel's John Reese, to deal with all the actual "saving people" bit. They are supported in the beginning by NYPD Detectives Joss Carter and Lionel Fusco, and are later joined by sociopathic ex-government hitwoman Sameen Shaw and ex-nemesis Samantha "Root" Groves, once a hacker-for-hire with a creepy and unhealthy obsession for Finch's Machine.

The show started out as a procedural - each episode Finch and Reese, aided by the detectives (willingly, unknowingly or otherwise), would endeavour to protect their "number" from a terrible occurrence, whilst simultaneously trying to piece together whether that person was the victim or perpetrator of said terrible occurrence. It did, of course, have serial elements to it in the early seasons (look at the two-and-a-half-season-long arc involving the corrupt cops of HR, or the rise, imprisonment and escape of ruthless crime lord Carl Elias. Honourable mentions to Vigilance, Reese's CIA past catching up to him and the investigation into "The Man in the Suit".) But from season 3 onwards the show evolved and became heavily serialised, with, after a very slow burn in the early seasons, finally the full-blown introduction of Decima Technologies, a Chinese-funded tech company building an AI to rival Finch's machine, led by the shadowy and disturbing Greer.

The second half of Season 3 saw the chase to stop Samaritan, as the AI was named, ever coming online. But come on, would there have been a story if they'd succeeded?

Season 4 saw them coping in a world where Samaritan ran the show, where our beloved cast (minus Carter, deceased as of 3x09) did what they could to keep saving everyone whilst battling to maintain their anonymity, stay out of Samaritan's clutches and stay alive.

Season 5 is simply heading for all-out war.

Necessary precursors

Going into season 5, Samaritan has initiated "The Correction", whereby its human agents are sent to eliminate people it deems disruptive to its cause. That means that Elias is dead. His rival, Dominic Besson, who attempted to overthrow him numerous times throughout season 4, is also dead. Control, the patriotic diplomat who oversaw the government's use of the Machine, and latterly accepted Samaritan as the government's primary intelligence source (bad call, lady), is missing - captured and removed to who-knows-where by Greer. Grice, her go-to agent and Shaw's old buddy, is dead. Schiffmann, Control's tech lady, is dead. Everybody is dead, OK? Samaritan killed them all, it's just what happened!

Except Shaw. She's alive, but Samaritan have captured her. Yeah, I don't know either.

At the end, the Machine gave up its location to Samaritan in order to save Finch and Root from being murdered by Greer. Getting to it first, Team Machine (that's our good guys) use a compression algorithm, RAM chips and piezoelectric batteries (I don't know either) to save some of the Machine's source code, and in the conclusion of season 4 Finch, Reese and Root walk out into the night intending to fight their way back to their underground subway base and revive the Machine.

5x01 - B.S.O.D.

B.S.O.D. is a recognisable acronym for Blue Screen of Death, which appears when a PC suffers a fatal systems error. (I don't know how commonplace this is nowadays, but we all understand nevertheless.) Anyway, with the Machine offline and losing power, Team Machine need to get back to the subway (their base of operations as of 4x01) and get it back online before it runs out of battery and is lost forever. So throughout B.S.O.D., our heroes battle to get there.
But there isn't much to say about any of this, in all honesty.

Reese and Finch partner up and get back to the subway together, the Machine's situation inside the briefcase of RAM chips becoming more tenuous as the episode continues.

Root is cornered by Samaritan agents inside a parked car who then shoot at her with machine guns, yet inexplicably not one bullet hits her, and she manages to duck underneath the other side of the car, kneecap her attackers, escape and run to an old criminal friend to request a fake ID, since the Machine cannot produce one for her. She is ultimately betrayed by that friend to Samaritan, but, for his troubles, that friend gets murdered and Root is rescued from the jaws of death by Reese.

Meanwhile, Finch remains at the subway trying to bring the Machine back online, and the eventual climax of the episode is the Machine's tentative reboot.

This is the main crux of the episode - get to safety and get the Machine working again. Which they do - just barely. And this is a well-executed storyline which shows how strong Samaritan is, and how hard it is to hide from an omniscient, malevolent AI. But as I say, there's nothing more really to say about this plot, and while it is the main focus of the episode, I don't think it's the most intriguing part.

That award goes to Fusco.

Fusco in 4x22 and 5x01

Detective Lionel Fusco has arguably the most interesting subplot in 5x01, which follows directly on from where season 4 left off. In the season 4 finale, YHWH, Fusco is in charge of transporting arrested crime lords Elias and Dominic to Riker's Island. In true TV fashion, he never gets there. Elias, the slippery bastard, has already planned his escape, and an oncoming vehicle crashes into the squad car, flipping it over and giving him an opportunity to get free.

But even that doesn't go smoothly.

While Fusco is unconscious, Elias's escape is hindered by Dominic, who holds him at gunpoint. Fusco wakes just in time to talk Dominic down and save Elias. Elias responds by getting into the squad car to escape; Dominic gets on his knees, having surrendered to Fusco, only for a bullet to come out of nowhere and blow open his head. Eh, what's happening here?
Understandably shocked, Fusco looks around to try and figure out what the hell just happened, when another bullet comes and takes out Elias, too, leaving Fusco alive and in a somewhat awkward position. What do you do when you are an ex-corrupt cop and there are no witnesses but yourself to the deaths of two notorious crime lords?

Well, B.S.O.D. does a job of explaining.

We know that Elias and Dominic were murdered in line with Samaritan's "Correction", and that their killer was a long-range sniper. But Fusco doesn't - all he knows is two prisoners are dead and the Internal Affairs Bureau and FBI are knocking on his door wanting to know "Hey! What d'yah go kill 'em for?"

So obviously, Fusco's like "Dude, it was a sniper", only this doesn't sit well with IAB's Soriano, and neither does it with the FBI guy. Except the FBI guy is not an FBI guy at all - he's a Samaritan operative trying to establish whether Fusco is going to be too much of a problem for Samaritan and does he need killing, too? To make Fusco go away, the FBI/Samaritan guy accredits Elias and Dominic's murders to Fusco with a ballistics report that proves the bullets in Elias and Dominic matched to Fusco's gun - a ballistics report that conveniently no one but the FBI/Samaritan guy is allowed to look at.

Now, Reese, although absent from these proceedings, understands the implications for Fusco if he refuses to accept the FBI guy's verdict, and forewarns him to let it lie. Fusco plays along, and it gets him off Samaritan's radar temporarily. Soriano doesn't have that kind of support and does not let it lie, and later on in the episode he bites the dust, dropping dead of a "heart attack". How convenient!

Except with this news, Fusco decides he isn't going to let it lie at all; determined to find the truth, he goes to the rooftop where the sniper shot from and finds a hidden shell casing (good cleanup there, Mr Sniper), which puts him back on Samaritan's radar as a "potential disruptor".

The future does not bode well for Detective Lionel Fusco.

5x02 - SNAFU

And now to last night's episode!

I think perhaps I expected too much of this season - though I do not mean that in a bad way. As I said earlier, season 5 is definitely going to be all-out war, only I erroneously believed that, with only 13 episodes instead of the usual 22/23, plots would have to be condensed and we would get non-stop action the whole way through.
B.S.O.D. certainly enabled me in that respect because, for the most part, it was non-stop action. But even amid all that were some slow moments - namely the flashbacks where Finch wrestles with his emotions having come to the conclusion that the safest way to contain the Machine's growth is to wipe its memory every night at midnight.
Comparatively, SNAFU does a great job of reminding me that I'm an idiot for thinking this will be 550 minutes of roaring gunfire, and that also the show can and will return to its original premise of helping people on an episodic basis.

In SNAFU, the Machine is now back online, but it isn't the Machine of old. Unable to anchor all its data in a chronological order, it overloads and spits out names of 30 people in trouble at once. Some turn out to be long dead, some are recent suicides and most don't need any help at all. And the one that does need help is actually the byproduct of the Machine's instability, which has caused it to malfunction and conclude Finch, Root and Reese are all threats - therefore it sends a Person of Interest to kill Reese. That attempted assassination takes up probably all of 3/4 minutes screen time, on and off. And that's all the action this episode has.

Its focus is on Finch and Root trying to help the Machine anchor its data and restore its trust in them as good people. Root, eventually seeing she may be more of a hindrance to these efforts than help, takes herself out of the equation so Finch can work his emotional magic and show the Machine everything good that they have done (props for the photo of 1x04's POI Megan Tillman, played by Linda Cardellini, my ultimate celebrity crush, as part of that magic). In the end, they are successful, though the Machine states it paid the assassin in advance and cannot call off the hit on Reese. But Reese wins out anyway, and his would-be murderer surrenders, presumably then taken into police custody - by Reese, whose cover identity as Detective Riley (inserted into Samaritan servers at the end of season 3) shields him from Samaritan's sights

There is little of Fusco's investigation here beyond a whispered, angry word to his bedfellow, Reese, in the NYPD. But there didn't need to be; there wasn't room. And I'm sure Fusco's investigation will pick up very soon, looking at the episode plots for the forthcoming six episodes.

And finally, the cliffhanger ending. One of those names the Machine gave out earlier, a discontented ex-con house painter who Reese deemed to be unthreatened/unthreatening, takes a job at what is implied to be some kind of Samaritan base. We don't know who this guy is, or what the job is he's taken, or even if the company hiring him is Samaritan, but for sure he'll be back and he'll be very very relevant.

Overall, this episode was very very good, and was a complete contrast to B.S.O.D. in many ways, with a focus on the Machine rather than Samaritan, and plot over action. It was ironic that the action-packed premiere included Finch and Machine flashbacks, rather than the second episode which was even more heavily focused on the Machine itself, but this actually worked very well. Not a second of either episode has been wasted either, both lasting 43-44 minutes, filling their usable screen time.
I'm quite happy for that to continue, although in SNAFU I felt this hindered the saving-people plot a little bit. I think this had to be rushed because of time constraints, but that we could have done with an extra 30-45 seconds of Fusco and Reese realising these people aren't in any danger at all. After all, it saves 30-45 seconds of air time if they just give Reese a single line saying most of the numbers are dead, suicides or don't need help at all.
But I don't want to end with my one gripe about the episode. It was top-quality, and I look forward to episode three on Tuesday.

A quick word on character continuity

Person of Interest's ability to reuse minor characters from previous seasons astounds me. Take IAB's Soriano: only seen before 5x01 in the season 2 finale, again investigating Fusco for corruption. That they got the actor back 3 years later? Incredible.

Zachary, one of Greer's agents - seen twice before 5x01 in 3x21 and 4x22. Amazing.

And Caleb Phipps - a POI in 2x11, who became instrumental to the finale of season 4, having created the compression algorithm needed by Finch to save the Machine. Phipps returns twice in season 4, in 4x16, where Root gets a job at his tech company, and 4x22, the finale, where, using Root's access, she and Finch attempt to steal - and are ultimately given (as a show of gratitude from Phipps to Finch for once saving his life) - the compression algorithm.

Final words

Apologies again for breaking my promise and returning so soon (I'm such a terrible person), but I'll be back again tomorrow with a review of 5x03 "Truth Be Told", given that it airs tonight, with updates on the pilots I wanted to see get episode orders this season, and I'll also be previewing what is to come in the next few POI episodes.

Thanks for reading!

Sam