Person of Interest - 'Prophets' and 'Pretenders'

Epic badasses.

For whatever reason, the double bills of PoI make me want to review it less; perhaps because of the heightened awareness that I'm way behind; perhaps because I got spoiled for the end of this season, which is a kicker.

Nonetheless, 'Prophets' continues to evolve the PoI of the week's integration with the Samaritan arc, as the team's new number points them to one of Samaritan's machinations. A pollster who believes that an election has been rigged is targeted by Samaritan agents - since the election was, indeed, rigged in order to get a particular candidate in and then terminally swap them out for their charming but ineffectual deputy - including the British blonde from the season opener, and Team Machine must counter with limited Reese, as our favourite stonewall undergoes mandatory psych evaluation with a hot* IA therapist.

I mean, I'm not saying that there are no hot shrinks in real life, just that Reese
never seems to be assigned assessors with beards or wedding rings.

Dr Iris Campbell is hip to his attempts to blase his way through the process, instead insisting on drilling into his problems, eventually getting him to admit that he lost someone; the best cop he ever knew. This is pretty much the first time he's opened up at all about Carter in the almost season since her death. He even starts to consider that his shrink will be unhappy when he has to shoot someone in the knees (again.)

The pollster is protected, but once again Team Machine are forced into at best a Pyrrhic victory as Samaritan places another node in its web of international influence. Root warns Harold that without him, without the entire team, the Machine will lose. He is skeptical of the difference - this week's flashbacks show early iterations of the Machine trying to escape control, lying to Harold, and fighting alternative versions of itself to the death - but she tells him that the difference is him, and after she is almost killed in a shootout with Samaritan's own God-Mode combat machine, he is moved enough to reach out to his creation.

Root herself has taken a level in vulnerability this season. Her contact with the machine is curtailed by Samaritan's ability to track her, despite a cycling series of identities, and more remote contact has left her feeling isolated and frustrated. In an extraordinary turn of events, Harold reaches out to the woman he once swore he would never work with, calling her a valued colleague and a friend, and the show hints again at something still closer between Root and Shaw.

Having way too much fun with this.

In 'Pretenders' we revisit the season's second arc, as Dominic and the Brotherhood try to move a shipment of high-tech weapons into the system. The simple fact that Samaritan hasn't stopped them already suggests that the Brotherhood somehow serve its purposes, perhaps in a similar vein to Vigilance, although the fact that it doesn't know about the VHF network shows that they are not direct agents.

The PoI of the week is Walter Dang, a mild-mannered insurance adjuster who has started looking into the death of a colleague's brother. Inspired by the stories of the Man in the Suit, he has created the persona of Detective Jack Forge, a tough, maverick cop. Unfortunately for him, the brother was killed after he stumbled on the smuggling plot while unknowingly transporting several dozen prototype anti-materiel rifles for the Brotherhood.

"Forge; homicide."

This episode also brings the Brotherhood into increasing conflict with the old guard, erstwhile mysterious new player Elias. As a master of deception himself, Elias is quick to recognise the real Dominic and claims not to underestimate him. If that is true, he has to know he has a fight on his hands. We've been told that the Brotherhood doesn't respect the old ideas of territories, and a full-scale gang war is surely on the cards.

My only niggling problem with PoI season 4 is that as we see Samaritan building an international network, the Machine is largely countering in New York only. 'Pretenders' gives us a slight change of pace on this, as Harold travels to a conference in Hong Kong for a little academic espionage, planting surveillance software in the laptop of a woman whose computational intelligence firm is about to get a new angel investor.

From early seasons when Team Machine seemed almost godlike, our heroes have been forced hard onto the back foot by the rise of Samaritan's unchecked power. Flashbacks to the Machine's teething troubles - rewriting code, deleting its own shutdown sequence, aggressively attacking rival systems and even trying to kill its own admin - and Samaritan's own atavistic tendencies put to rest any lingering doubts that Samaritan might be an altruistic system although created by a corrupt group. Samamritan is an aggressive, expansionist intelligence, recruiting agents and patsies for a scheme with global implications. What we get from this is the story of an increasingly desperate resistance against an angry god, and I can't entirely think it a coincidence that Samaritan's primary avatars are a silver-haired patriarch/prophet and an angelic blonde killer.

* Maybe it's just an artefact of television casting, but seriously she is way too hot for me not to suspect a romance subplot in the offing.