Person of Interest - 'Reasonable Doubt'

"We'll proceed by a process of trial and error. First we'll have a trial, then we'll
make an error."

Season 3 of Person of Interest continues to mess with us vis a vis the perp/victim status of its numbers, as the Machine throws up Vanessa Watkins, a woman accused of killing her husband.

Watkins is a brilliant prosecutor with a dizzying array of secondary criminal skills from quick-change disguise to free-running, her husband was a slick defence attorney who died on their yacht in mysterious circumstances. Her actions seem guilty, but she insists that she is innocent. with police custody looking like a dicey prospect for her, Team Machine must decide whether to help or hinder Vanessa, and thus stage a trial themselves.

"What do you mean you haven't read the book?"

Although Root-free, 'Reasonable Doubt' otherwise plays a good ensemble hand, with Fusco as the police insider and Carter flexing her interrogator muscles for the trial. Shaw is on top piranha-out-of-water form infiltrating a snooty book club/gossip circle, and Finch, Reese and Bear are Finch, Reese and Bear. The continuing strand of increasingly borderline cases suggests to me that the Machine is becoming ever more nuanced and capable of handing its assets the tricky cases that might slip though a more conventional apparatus.

The case itself is very twisty, almost to the point of farce, but it eventually comes back to a pleasingly dark conclusion, as Reese comes closer than he ever has before to deciding that someone needs to judge if the Machine's numbers deserve to be protected.