penultimate.exe

The End Is Nigh

Yesterday I consciously admitted something I had known for a long time: that Person of Interest had years ago dethroned ER as my favourite TV show. It's with a bittersweet feeling, then, that I tackle analysing the series' penultimate episode, ".exe", as the race to kill Samaritan reaches a critical point.

THE POI

I suppose technically you could say today's POI was Greer: the Machine did give Reese and Shaw the Social Security Number of one of his aliases and we all knew that Finch was a perp. But I think the Machine's choice to give them Greer's number was purely to get them to Fort Meade, an NSA base Finch had infiltrated.

But let's rewind.

FINCH

We pick up shortly after Finch has collected a weaponised computer virus, Ice-9, powerful enough to destroy the entire Internet, including Samaritan and his own Machine. To execute it, he has to get into Fort Meade and infiltrate the NSA - but the decision is no easy one. Along the way, Finch is questioning what the world would have been like if he never built the Machine, and the Machine calculates probable scenarios and reveals them.

WHAT PROBABLY HAPPENED TO OUR CHARACTERS IF FINCH NEVER BUILT THE MACHINE

The Machine's probability tree

• FINCH
• Finch and Nathan are both alive and multi-billionaires. Finch is still your average workaholic tech mogul and has no love life because he's never met Grace, whereas Nathan's marriage seems not to have crumbled and he's quite happy with the faceless Olivia.
• REESE
• Dead. Without the Machine he never went to China with Stanton, and so he was able to save his love Jessica from her abusive husband, Peter. Except she didn't like that violent side of him and he couldn't hack life without her, so he killed himself.
• CARTER
• We don't actually see Carter, but her desk appears in Fusco's alternate future: she is now the captain of the 8th Precinct. There's a happy ending if ever I saw one, because -
• FUSCO
• When HR was taken down, Fusco flipped on them to get immunity. Now he's just sort of hanging around, scrounging for work.
• SHAW
• Still a government assassin, only this time Research providing relevant numbers isn't the Machine, it's Samaritan. Henry Peck ("1x22, No Good Deed") repeats the speech he made to Fusco about the government having built an ASI illegally - but he repeats it to Shaw, who promptly kills him. Bad luck mate.
• ROOT
• She seems to have an employer now - Samaritan. I actually cheered when I heard her voice as she spoke to Greer in this scene, because A) it was nice to see Amy Acker in the flesh again and B) it's just the most fitting alternate outcome for her character.

Reese's grave in the non-Machine alternate timeline

The moral of the story is: the Machine did some good and it did some bad. It caused the deaths of Root and Carter, broke up Nathan's marriage and was the root cause of his death in the ferry bombing which injured Finch, who was forced to go into hiding and leave Grace. But it also saved Reese who helped Fusco redeem himself, it gave Shaw and Finch a better purpose and turned Root from crazy hacker-cum-killer to crazy good person. And it also saved a lot of lives in the process through Nathan's irrelevant number backdoor. AND its creation means it is now around to stop Samaritan, whereas in the alternate timeline Samaritan runs unopposed. But good and bad things also occur in a timeline devoid of the Machine's influence. The clear message, though, is that a lot less good was done with Samaritan as the frontrunning ASI.

And that comfort allows Harold to do what he needs to do.

BACK TO FINCH

So breaking into the NSA and executing the virus was never going to be that easy. Samaritan agents capture Finch before he can submit the voice-activated password, and he is brought to Greer, who makes several attempts to convince Finch of Samaritan's good intentions before realising the endeavour is futile. Instead, knowing the only way to stop Finch is to kill him, since only he knows the password, Greer sacrifices himself by trapping himself and Finch in an airlocked room as Samaritan removes the oxygen. Greer suffocates to death, but Finch is saved for only two reasons - 1: he is younger than Greer and could resist a little longer, and 2: Reese and Shaw had broken into Fort Meade after Finch and managed to open the airgapped Intranet, allowing the Machine to enter and save Finch.

After that, it's a few little skirmishes along the way (Zachary gets stabbed to death by Reese, after an unfair match-up height-wise reminiscent of Titus in the season 2 premiere), before Finch manages to get in and, after seeing Root's alternative future working for Samaritan, enter the password.

The virus uploads and the huge Samaritan monitors start to crackle as the virus begins to take hold.

FUSCO

In Fusco's sideplot, we see the return of SAC Leroux, the creepy FBI guy who actually works for Samaritan, and had cleared Fusco in the premiere of killing Dominic and Elias. Today, the bodies of the missing persons in the demolition site have been uncovered by police, drawing Samaritan's attention. And Samaritan, already monitoring Fusco, quickly discovers he had been conducting an off-the-books investigation into the missing persons. So when Fusco leaves the precinct to call Reese, Leroux kidnaps him, takes him to the waterfront and double-taps him.

But in the chest. Without checking if Fusco was wearing body armour. That enables Fusco to turn the tables when Leroux goes to dispose of his body, leaving him holding a gun to his would-be murderer.

Fusco asks the important question: do I go back to my corrupt ways and kill you to save myself or do I let you live and leave you the chance to try again?

Fusco holding a gun to SAC Leroux

Importantly, this episode never answers that question and I wonder whether we'll actually find out. I think the ambiguous nature of this plot allows us to ask the question of whether killing for the greater good is a just thing, through the lens of a corrupt cop who's done everything he could to turn his life around. We know Fusco should kill Leroux. Samaritan guy - got to die. But can his conscience allow him to go through with murdering Leroux? Can he let himself kill a man to save himself, after all the hard work he's put in to resurrecting his damaged reputation?

I think the writers will let us answer this for ourselves. Me personally, I say shoot Leroux. If Fusco doesn't, Leroux's coming back to haunt him, with Samaritan's backing or not. It's every man for himself now and I think Fusco knows that, he just struggles to accept that as a justification. And that epitomises the best attributes of Fusco's character: the Machine helped him redeem himself, but can he do a bad thing in the name of the Machine and the greater good? And if he does kill Leroux, will it be pointless if Finch kills Samaritan? Oh I love this show.

THE FINALE

Next week's finale is going to be an absolute stonker. If it isn't the best hour of TV I'll ever see then I don't know what will be. Blackwell AND Senator Garrison return and we see flashbacks of Reese as a child. So with that in mind here's my prediction:

Clearly, there is more work to be done to dismantle Samaritan, including relieving it of the government feeds. That'll be where Garrison fits in.

   Before the 100th episode where Blackwell went Terminator and killed Root, I would have wagered he would help Team Machine stop his current employer. Now, I think he'll be the main antagonist following Greer's sacrifice.

   Finch and Fusco sustaining gunshots to the chest are some of the only clips from the season 5 trailer to not yet feature in the show so far this season. I want to say simulation, but I don't think the writers would do that in the finale. So ... one of them dead? Finch, maybe? What if it happens right after Grace realises he's alive? Intriguing.

   Speaking of death, we're getting Reese childhood flashbacks, so he's definitely going to croak. This is no surprise: Nolan said ages ago that Reese would definitely die (I can't find the article again, darn it), but take my word for it. The quote is out there somewhere.

FINAL THOUGHTS

".exe" was a tremendous penultimate episode. Words cannot describe how intelligent the writing was or how brilliant the action turned out or how epic the finale is set up to be. This is an amazing show and this time next week, while overjoyed at an astounding ending, I'll still be crying that it's gone.

Thank you all for reading, see you for the next roundup!

Sam