Person of Interest - 'Truth be Told'

It's that woman again.

The past comes back to haunt Reese this week, as a former colleague and an old sin reappear in his life. But let's talk about more important things, like the new opening. Now that the Machine is running again, Finch's familiar monologue about the Government's system is back, but intercut with the competing voice of Greer, telling us that we wanted this, for Samaritan to come along and rid us of the burden of making decisions for ourselves.

'Truth be Told' is an oddly retro number of the week affair, with Reese taking on an identity within a defence contractor to look into the life of Alex Duncan, a man who has been snooping in secure files. The Machine has picked this up because his actions have caught the attention of the CIA, putting him at risk, and the man leading the team that comes after him is Terrance Beale, Reese's former boss and thus one of the few people left on Earth who could identify him. Reese rescues his man, but Beale recognises his tradecraft and comes after them.

"I was in The Thing, you know."

Reese learns that Duncan is looking for the truth behind the death of his brother, who was killed amid accusations of selling arms to insurgents. He and Beale both affirm that his brother was an innocent man who died a hero, serving his country, concealing the fact that he was corrupt, and that it was Reese who shot him for it. Beale agrees to leave Duncan alone, and to leave Reese out of his report, showing the kind of integrity that tends to get members of the establishment murdered by Samaritan assets a couple of episodes down the line, which would be sad because he's Keith David and therefore pretty awesome.

Oh, and this ended.

Meanwhile, Root and Finch identify shipments of electronics being misdelivered to an unoccupied address and then rerouted to their destination, and determine that they are being detoured in order to infect them with Samaritan's pernicious malware. Root runs the malware on an isolated machine and finds that its purpose is essentially to turn any electronic device into an extension of Samaritan's web, funnelling any and all data back to the metaphorical spider(1).

There's a definite sense of endgame to Person of Interest, even in a formula episode like this one. I can't imagine that the makers were expecting a renewal, even going into production on Season 5. Reese's alias is given relatively little workout compared to a face like John Rooney, Assets, and while the flashback reintroduces Kara Stanton and reminds us of Reese's past, it's the coming conflict that looms. For my money, the series is still missing Taraji P. Henson, and this is especially glaring here because Fusco doesn't make a single appearance in the episode, skewing us away from crime drama to the show's latterly dominant espionage hat. Ultimately, I find the Samaritan War interesting, but I liked the crime aspects better, and felt that the moral quandary raised by the Machine was murkier without the looming threat of Samaritan. Nothing makes a protagonist look more just than the presence of a diabolical villain, after all.

(1) Although that's not how spider webs work. Maybe more like an ant lion's burrow, or a whirlpool.