Person of Interest’s Team Machine head to Washington DC when the ‘number’ turns out to be the President. But what’s the threat to him and what’s the wider threat to our heroes?
As the team mourn the loss of Root, there’s little time for grief. There’s a new number and Shaw immediately recognises the code as referring to… the President of the United States. Reese, Shaw and Fusco must take a break from finding Finch and instead head to Washington. But though they manage to defuse the immediate threat, it’s not clear who is behind the assassination attempt. With some familiar faces form the team’s past appearing in the capital, just what is going on?
And meanwhile… hwo far is Finch really willing to go to bring down Samaritan?
After weeks with two or three episodes being shown, there was only one episode of Person of interest this week…
Synedoche is a weird episode in that it’s an outing that tries to service a lot of things and in doing so doesn’t quite work as well as it should on any of them. It’s a decent enough episode for the superior show but it is one that is simultaneously closing in on the very end of the series and addressing that endgame, harking back to the past and saying ‘Hey, remember this obscure character and plot-point?‘, giving us a number-of-the-week plot and wanting to be epic because of who that number is (ie: the Commander-in-Chief).
The Presidential number is really nothing more than a maguffin, a character (interestingly white and middle-aged) glimpsed a few times from a distance and really proving less interesting or nuanced than the more street-level targets of previous episodes. For the most heavily-guarded man on the planet, Reese and Shaw really don’t have any proportionally difficult problem escaping the chaos than at any other time.
The revelation that the Machine has created a back-up team that is watching out for our main characters is both interesting and frustrating. There has long since been an idea amongst fandom that the ‘numbers’ that Team Machine had helped over the years might ultimately be important elements in a bigger tapestry rather than just altruistic acts of under-dog kindness. Here we see some of those POI’s return. Season 1’s army vet Joey Durban (played by James Carpinello, who is actually Amy Acker’s husband in real-life), Season 2’s tech-enfant-terrible Logan Pierce (Jimi Simpson) and Harper Rose (Annie Ilonzeh) are there to bring their respective talents to a similar victim/perpetrator mission to the our original heroes. In any other circumstance this could have played like a planted spin-off pilot Given the Machine’s recent problems, if there ARE other teams out there one would have to presume they are a recent addition but their on-screen appearance does feel like a fun addition to the mythology rather than one that actually holds a lot of internal logic to the wider mythology (however it does answer the problem of the Machine’s numbers to Reese and Co being so locally-relevant to New York… might we have seen POI: Washington if the series had stumbled into a franchise format?).
Shaw, still not entirely convinced this isn’t all a simulation, deals with the loss of Root and, thankfully for fans, that involves a very physical, pro-active response… though perhaps shooting in the vicinity of the leader of the free world might be too strong a reaction.
Amy Acker’s Root may have shuffled off the mortal coil, but as the Machine is now using her voice, the actress seems ever-present. Truthfully, the cadence revealed does seem far more flippant and ironic than the Machine has been to date, essentially becoming a disembodied Root personality rather than the creation we’ve seen to date. If we weren’t storming towards the series finale, one suspects this transition would have been given time to feel more… organic. But Michael Emerson still gives us an emotional performance to his unseen partner. Emerson’s Finch is also in transition, not always comfortably, into more direct-action… the stiff (literally) and stoic character appearing to step out from behind-the-scenes and be going off the reservation and into much darker and pragmatic territory. With two episodes left, one wonders what that will entail?
POI‘s imminent off-lining is currently both its strength and weakness… the stakes are higher with more chances and risks in story-telling to be had, the final outcome is far from certain and with some major themes to tackle the show is keeping some of its cards close to its chest… but that means some of the action feels less measured, almost a packed-in checklist of ideas the team behind the show want to include before it goes but less well connected to each other. In a show that prides itself on weaving a tight tapestry, those elements don’t always sit well together but they dare still being played out with earnest.
Two episodes to go. If it isn’t reaching the heights it did at its very best, it’s still interesting…
8/10
