Person of Interest Season 5: The Inconsistencies

Did A Shortened Season Order Prevent The Writers Telling A Full Cohesive Story?

That's what I want to examine here.

   For anyone unfamiliar with where Person of Interest ended in the season 4 finale, a brief recap.

• Firstly, the Machine had been compressed into RAM chips placed in an indestructible briefcase, whilst Finch, Reese and Root began their escape from the surrounding Samaritan agents.
• Secondly, Samaritan's infamous "Correction", an operation to quietly eliminate threats to its survival or plans, caused the death of drug lord Dominic Besson and left Carl Elias's fate unknown. Detective Fusco was privy to this.
• And thirdly, Team Machine's fifth member, Sameen Shaw, had earlier in the season been taken captive by Samaritan agents, and was being kept alive for some unknown but probably nefarious purpose.

Following underwhelming ratings in the Thursday at 10pm spot Person of Interest had occupied for its third and fourth seasons, a shortened, 13-episode fifth and final season was A) eventually ordered and B) eventually aired as a near-summer burn-off.

   Thirteen episodes to get Shaw back to the team, carry out an investigation into The Correction and find a way to stop Samaritan permanently, along with whatever plot strands the writers wanted to add on top of that (there was only really one: the genesis of Jeff Blackwell as a reluctant Samaritan agent), and keep CBS happy by maintaining the number-of-the-week format as well.

   At the time I was just so overwhelmed by what the series was doing and wondering how Team Machine would emerge victorious from this crazy ASI war that I didn't really consider the writing of the season as a whole. Especially since the season was so substance-heavy (not a minute was wasted given everything the writers needed to condense into the 13 episodes); it made it very difficult to look objectively at first.

   But now I want to consider how condensing everything into 13 episodes created problems that, when I look back now, lead me to both lament the shortened order and praise the writers for doing the best they could with what they got. Which was a little under what would have sufficed.

These inconsistencies will range from tiny flaws in the acting to significant plot holes that throw off the writing.

1. Jeff Blackwell's transformation

I've mentioned this before, many times, in previous analyses, but it's one of the most glaring issues with season 5 and can't be excluded from this list. Blackwell makes his first appearance in episode 5x02 as an ex-con getting by on day labour jobs; when this fails to satisfy him he comes to a recruitment office that turns out to be a Samaritan front, and is instantly put to work. In episode 5x05, he is tasked with retrieving a hard drive containing details about a food supply NGO that Samaritan didn't want leaking; Root got there first and told Blackwell that he should pay more attention to his shadowy employer's intentions. Blackwell resurfaced again in 5x08, blackmailed by his handler into infecting a doctor and a nurse at ground zero of a superflu outbreak.

   Suddenly, in 5x10 he was a fully capable (and almost completely willing) sniper, whose sudden skills as an assassin made him perfect to snipe Finch fleeing with Root in a moving car. It's between episodes 5x08 and 5x10 that the transformation takes place, and it's just very jarring. There's no previous suggestion that Blackwell can handle long-range weapons and it's unlikely he could have become that adept at sniping in the short timeframe between his first appearance in 5x02 and the unintended death of Root at his hand in 5x10.

   Now, I understand why having Blackwell able to snipe so proficiently was important to the plot - it provided a revenge and closure for Shaw after the death of Root at Blackwell's hands, a death which was so integral to the final three episodes - but the transition from blackmailed ex-con without any sniping capabilities to someone who can hit a target in a moving car from (I can't remember the exact figure so let's say) fifty yards away, accounting also for wind, was impossible to slow-burn in the 13 episode timeframe.

   Ultimately, Shaw murders Blackwell in the finale as revenge for murdering Root. It's a fitting death - and one no doubt pre-planned by the writers - but they were unable to reach that endgame smoothly enough.

The below clip is Shaw murdering Blackwell.

2. The rescue of Carl Elias

The problem with Person of Interest revealing Elias was in fact alive is that I'm not sure how this was physically possible the way the show explained it.

   Dominic and Elias were both supposedly assassinated at the end of season 4 in Samaritan's "Correction" by a long-range sniper. Dominic was standing in the open and took the unexpected shot to the head. Elias was inside a police car, and the sniper's best attempt was a bullet just above his heart.

   Season 5 begins by announcing that Fusco is under investigation by Internal Affairs after being suspected of murdering Dominic and Elias. Reese and Finch, stuck all night downtown trying to escape Samaritan agents, were unable to be involved in Fusco's lone rescue: Fusco took Elias to the Team Machine safehouse and apparently prevented his death, leaving him there to recover in between irregular visits.

   Elias's moneyman, Bruce Moran, doesn't realise Elias is alive, and emerges from the shadows to conduct his own investigation into who killed Elias. Eventually deciding it is too dangerous to allow Bruce's investigation to continue, Team Machine bring him to the safehouse and reveal Elias is alive. But when Bruce asks how, this is Elias's explanation (as you'll see in the clip): "Detective Fusco took a big risk that night. He got me here; John and Harold brought me back from the brink."

   But when would they have had the time to do that?

   The same night that Fusco rescued Elias and Finch and Reese supposedly rushed to help save him, Finch and Reese were across town fleeing from Samaritan agents. And when they managed to escape they headed straight to the Subway to bring the Machine back online - they didn't even know at this point that Elias had been reported dead, much less that he was actually alive!

   It's plausible that Fusco could have done enough to hold Elias over until the gap between episodes 5x01 and 5x02, after the Machine had been resuscitated, but by then at least a day or two had passed and I don't believe Fusco would have the medical know-how to keep Elias going that long.

   The problem with this inconsistency is that I don't think it was even a product of a condensed episode order: this is simply bad writing. Even if season 5 had been a full-length 22/23 episodes, the first two could not have been shuffled to create space for Elias's rescue to be shown as it unfolded; it's likely therefore that the way this was written would have been very similar in the ideal world. And while I enjoyed seeing Elias again (and am saddened the shortened episode order resulted in him having little opportunity to work with Team Machine against Samaritan), I feel justified in believing that the right way for Elias to bow out of the show should have been with The Correction.

   Because this was just terrible.

In the below clip, Reese and Finch reveal to Bruce that Elias is alive.

3. The altered emphasis on Greer's actions for Samaritan

John Greer was the face of Decima Technologies, the Chinese tech company who attempted to destroy the Machine and replace it with Samaritan; they achieved the second objective. He appeared in 8 episodes of season 3, nearly all of the back half of the season, as Decima pushed to retrieve the Samaritan drives and bring it online.

Greer implanted into Shaw's simulation (5x08)

   As Samaritan found its footing in season 4, Greer made 13 appearances in 22 episodes. His preliminary goal was to locate and destroy the Machine and the team supporting it, but, with Samaritan's backing, he also destroyed a tech company that was researching artificial intelligence, crashed the stock market, took control of New York City in order to draw out the Machine and dealt with threats from the furious US government as its handle on the burgeoning Samaritan gradually lessened - among other goals.

   But in season 5, Greer became a vessel through which to depict the torture of Sameen Shaw. The episodes in which Samaritan made plays for the global food supply and DNA gathering were completely devoid of him, as was the episode where Finch accidentally blew his cover, an episode you would think Greer would be a cert to appear in after all this time trying to find them.

   Now, there is a simple explanation for why Greer appeared in 13/22 episodes (60%) in season 4, but only 3/13 (23%) in season 5: perhaps this is indicative of Greer's lessened role in Samaritan's actions as the ASI became more independent. After all, 2 of his 3 appearances were related to the torture-by-simulation of Shaw, and one of those appearances was him in the simulations. So in effect, Greer actually only appeared in 2 episodes in the present (15%).

   His third and final appearance, in episode 5x12, was to make one final attempt to convince Finch not to destroy Samaritan, and to do whatever it took to kill Finch if he couldn't convince him (and alas, Greer ended up sacrificing himself to try and kill Finch, as you can see in the below clip). 

   While Greer's role being reduced as Samaritan relied less on human agents is a plausible explanation (and one that would have passed if the explanation could have been organically worked into the script), it was also a byproduct of too few episodes and demands from CBS higher-ups that the final season include a number of episodic POIs.

   And without Greer's focus on finding Team Machine, his raison d'être was void and his appearances didn't sit right.

4. The sudden genesis of the Ice-9 computer virus

There really, really wasn't any excuse for this mistake, not even a condensed episode order.

   In episode 4x12, the head of the Intelligence Support Activity, codenamed "Control", hunted four radicalised Muslims who were engineering a computer virus capable of destroying Samaritan (although they did not know of Samaritan's existence). The terrorists were of course not terrorists, but Samaritan had framed them to trick Control into retrieving the virus. This virus remained unnamed throughout the episode, and wasn't mentioned after this episode's conclusion.

   However, I imagine that it was supposed to be a plant: like Caleb Phipps and his compression algorithm was planted as an episodic POI in season 2 (in preparation for the need for a compression algorithm to save the Machine in season 4), I thought that his unnamed virus would be planted in season 4 ready for Team Machine to hunt it down and retrieve it in the (originally planned) sixth season.

   But in 5x12, Finch got his hands on Ice-9, a computer virus capable of destroying the entire Internet and, with it, Samaritan. Ice-9 was never linked to the unnamed virus in season 4, and not enough time was available in season 5 to depict its recovery by Team Machine; instead, Finch had a few scenes where he broke casually into a government facility in Texas. This infers that Ice-9 and the virus recovered by Samaritan in season 4 aren't the same - but in inferring this the writers created a huge question: where did this second virus capable of destroying the entire Internet come from, and why did Samaritan not take action beforehand?

   This could have been solved by linking the unnamed virus in season 4 to Ice-9 with a couple of lines of dialogue or a short Machine recap, and in not making that link the sudden appearance of Ice-9 as a Hail Mary fell flat.

5. The Machine-Samaritan simulation battles

In episode 5x03, a very frustrating episode that wasted precious time by delving into Reese's past, Finch and Root took on a side mission for the Machine to retrieve a piece of software being transported across New York. In doing so, they recovered a small piece of Samaritan's code, and so began a short arc where Finch played off a piece of Samaritan code against a piece of his Machine's code in simulated battles to try and determine a method they could employ to destroy Samaritan.

   The Machine suffers continuous losses to Samaritan until, well, the simulation battles are forgotten. The arc never built to the conclusion it was intended for, which was the depressing realisation that the Machine, shackled as it was, could not hope to compete with the free-running Samaritan system. And when I say it never built to the conclusion, what I mean is that it was never explicitly expressed by any character that the battles (which were last seen at a score of Samaritan ten billion, Machine zero) were useless and the team therefore had to find an alternative method of eradicating Samaritan.

   That's a massively important conclusion, perhaps even a turning point after the wait-and-see game of "Will the Machine think up a way of stopping Samaritan" that the simulation battles depicted; to have no character express the hopelessness of the simulation battles (and latterly decide to end them to focus on identifying a new way of destroying Samaritan) meant this arc was left horribly unresolved. An implied conclusion in a matter as important as this was not enough.

   Had Person of Interest had enough time, then no doubt this could and would have been handled better. But that it wasn't meant what should have been a huge turning point which needed to be explored, especially for the character of Finch, was ignored.

6. The alternate reality where Root is a Samaritan operative

Compared to the rest of this list this is a very tiny issue, and it wasn't with the writing per se but Amy Acker's portrayal of Root.

   The character of Root grew exponentially from her questionable beginnings in seasons 1 and 2, but in those seasons (where Acker was only a small recurring character) she was able to portray beautifully the psychosis and obsession with ASIs that gripped hacker-murderer Root. In an alternate reality that the Machine shows to Finch in 5x12, had the Machine never been built by Finch then Root's projected path would have been to become a Samaritan operative (and don't think I missed the hairstyle to parallel Samaritan asset Martine in season 4 either).

   The fan pandering of Root's line about "bad code" was a gorgeous throwback to the psychotic belief system Root held in seasons 1 and 2, but Acker was just unable to replicate that with the limited dialogue she had. Instead, Acker's inclusion in the main cast from seasons 3-5, which diluted Root's psychosis heavily, also diluted Acker's ability to reconnect with the pre-season 3 Root and accurately portray that in this short scene, and that one simple issue turned acceptable fan pandering into unacceptable fan pandering and ruined what should have been a great scene.

The clip below contains the alternate reality scene: skip to around 35 seconds if you don't wish to see the Machine and Finch conversation prior (although I of course advise you watch it all!)

Final thoughts

Perhaps ironically, given Person of Interest's penchant for asking questions of humanity and artificial intelligence and leaving them to interpretation, I've not fully answered this question wholly. What I wanted to examine is whether the shortened episode order was at fault for the majority of inconsistencies in the final season, but what I've emerged with is that it was only partially responsible. Acting prowess and poor writing were the reasons for most problems with season 5: the shortened episode order can be definitively blamed only for Jeff Blackwell's character progression; in all other cases, the shortened order was usually (bar Amy Acker's acting) a side effect of poor writing choices made to accommodate the time constraints.

   So my conclusion is that, actually, the shortened episode order is not at fault for the inconsistencies in season 5.

   And here's the kicker. While I attribute Person of Interest's eventual demise to Warner Bros' penny-pinching, I'm a firm believer that the fault for Person of Interest's fall from grace lies with CBS. Thursday at 9pm was a good timeslot for it: back when season 1 aired its only competition was Grey's Anatomy and it was practically as successful; the extended comedy block CBS tried when it moved Person of Interest to Tuesday at 10pm quickly failed and hasn't really recovered, even after ABC moved Grey's Anatomy forward to 8pm. If Person of Interest was still around today it would be on its (probably final) sixth season - and CBS might still have that Thursday slot locked.

Thank you for reading everyone and I'll see you next time!

Sam