Person of Interest - 'Guilty' and 'Q&A'

It's Nina!

Having to live with a 'real' identity has its burdens, as Harold discovers when Professor Harold Whistler is called on to serve jury duty. As he is slow to realise, despite his failure to hack the system and compel his release and a malfunctioning phone getting a selected juror dismissed in order to bump him up the order despite his professed fear of an all-powerful supercomputer, this is no mere chance call: He has been placed on the jury by the Machine to monitor Emma, an ex-teacher who might be out to murder someone, or to pervert the course of justice. As the trial continues, they determine that she is a catspaw for a ruthless fixer, but luckily Reese bumps into an old friend.

Zoe Morgan, just in case we thought she'd been forgotten.

With help from Zoe Morgan, Reese tracks the fixer and coaches Harold to block Emma's attempt to force a not guilty verdict. The fact that she's been put in place to make sure that the defendant is found guilty is predictable, but allows Harold to be his own kind of hero as he Twelve Angry Mens the jury, talks Emma down from the literal ledge and wrestles with the fixer before Reese shows up to save him.

In personal subplotsville, Reese blows off his usual no-strings hookup with Zoe because he's sweet on his therapist, even if he doesn't realise it. This episode sees him signed off mandatory counselling and choosing to continue to see Dr Iris to help him open up.

The title of the episode, 'Guilty', also refers to Reese and Harold's shared guilt over Shaw and consequent attempt to sideline Fusco, who tells them in no uncertain terms that he chooses who and what he dies for.

Such a trap.

In 'Q&A' Reese is left to work a case in a tech company on his own when Harold is called away by a distress call from Claire, the young hacker who won the Nautilus challenge in 'Nautilus'. She claims that she has seen the truth of the organisation and wants out. It's obviously a trap, but her injury by a sniper and the fate of the other winner in 'Ctrl-Alt-Del' lend just enough credence that it's not completely cut and dried as she offers a fragment of source code that could be used to attack Samaritan, and to its credit the episode doesn't hang it out too long before revealing that she is indeed an agent of Samaritan and the 'source code' is a worm intended to do to Team Machine's network what Harold did to Samaritan's.

In an attempt to recruit him, Claire takes Harold to a charter school, created by Samaritan to improve standards of human life, but he rejects her offer. The school is good, but 'If Samaritan was willing to shoot you to convince me, what will it be willing to do to convince these chidren?' Regardless of the pleasant trappings of its master plan, Harold sees Samaritan's disregard for individual life as an unacceptable methodology. Harold is taken into custody, but saved by Root (who sort of combines the functions of Martine, Claire and creepy kid,) making a brief but welcome return before swanning off again. Although still with Samaritan, Claire is clearly rattled.

In the plot of the week, Reese roots out a tech executive using a virtual PA programme to manipulate emotions to the benefit of advertisers. It's Number of the week by numbers, but links back to the arc as Greer meets with the company's other executive to arrange the buy-up of an algorithm of inestimable use to Samaritan.

While the weekly numbers are somewhat falling by the wayside, the arc plotting of Person of Interest has become razor-sharp as it drives towards what - given the gap between this and Season 5 - was probably seen during production as a likely series finale. It's a shift that has been coming for a while, and the linking of PoI stories to Samaritan as the machine war escalates keeps everything involved, even when the case in hand is routine. This is good stuff, although the ramping pace gives me some pause for the chances of the forthcoming Season 5.