Person of Interest - 'The Devil You Know' and 'The Cold War'

All perfume counters should include a P90.

We cold open from last week's cliffhanger with the Blonde Bombshell - whose name is Martine - closing in on Shaw. Given that Martine is the Samaritan's god-mode angel of death, Shaw acquits herself superbly in getting out of the building to meet up with Root on a motorbike. her cover blown, Root and Harold both insist that she come back to the base as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Reese is tracking the latest number, Carl Elias, as are the Brotherhood. After Elias meets with his accountant, Reese warns him that Dominic has his police files. Elias is confidant of his preparedness - ironically, given his earlier claims, underestimating Dominic's ruthless drive - but his own people flip on him and Reese has to step in to protect him. Elias and his right hand man Scarface - aka Anthony - go on the run with Reese, finding that much of his operation has been suborned and ultimately being cornered in a derelict building where he has a secret office and vault.

Team Elias.

Fusco is tapped to provide backup, but pinned when Martine shows up fronting as a DEA agent to ask after his involvement in Shaw's escape. Shaw tries to go to their aid as well, but given the risk of exposure for the entire team, Root sedates her to bring her back to the base. With Shaw off grid and Samaritan unable to detect the flaws in its own coding, it expands its human intelligence capacity by giving Martine a team.

Anthony is captured covering Elias' escape, and Dominic offers his life to an increasingly melancholic Elias, who admits to Reese that Anthony is like family to him, the two having met in the care system. Reese seemingly convinces Elias to get out and let him take care of Anthony, but at the last moment Elias returns to the building and locks Reese out. He gives himself up and Anthony, who has resisted all pressure to flip on his boss, suggests they give Dominic the vault code. A grief-stricken Elias agrees, and the vault explodes, taking out enough of the Brotherhood soldiers for Reese to rescue Elias.

Team Elias c. 1980

While Team Machine regroup at the base and try to work out how to keep Shaw on the chain, Elias and his accountant prepare to strike back, beginning with a list of everyone who turned on them for an offer of money or power. Elias shows the one thing he retrieved from the office, a photograph of himself, Anthony and Bruce the accountant as children in the group home that he bought and more recently blew up. Elias is down, but definitely not out, as we close on a shot of him walking away along the beachfront, alone; a melancholy parallel both to his meeting with Bruce and Anthony at the start of the episode and to his gang's triumphant badass walk way back in Season 1.

And then the bears invaded...

'The Cold War' kicks off a mid-season event trilogy in which Samaritan escalates its campaign against the Machine. First, it deploys its vast resources and open process to roundly thrash Team Machine at their own game, protecting the irrelevant numbers with smooth efficiency and no messy kneecappings. Then it make an approach, asking the Machine for a meeting - avatar to avatar - and as incentive doxxing like a motherfucker, releasing a Witness Protection register and other sensitive data onto the internet. From a day virtually without crime, New York descends into virtual anarchy. As Harold, Reese and Fusco race to save as many numbers as they can, the Machine consents to the meeting. Shaw ultimately takes the risk of leaving the base to help.

Creepy.

The Machine's avatar is a creepy kid named Gabriel (although given its derivation I'm not convinced that's his real name any more than Root is Root's,) who draws like a dot matrix printer and has hacked multiple secure systems in his short life. The meeting between the two god-machines is eerie, with Root and Gabriel acting as impassive mouthpieces for the words of their masters, and the young boy delivering a cold ultimatum to the Machine: Samaritan's actions of the past two days have been to prove that its control is beneficial, but more importantly that it is better than the Machine. Now it plans to destroy its rival, but if the Machine will surrender itself, the human agents don't have to die.

The Machine sees Samaritan as a monster; Samaritan sees the Machine as weak. Harold ultimately fears that no godlike AI can ever truly share a human moral code, and that with the best intentions in the world it can, therefore, never act truly in humanity's best interests. It will always be willing to make sacrifices that a human would consider monstrous.

Its ultimatum refused, Samaritan begins its end game by infiltrating a virus into Wall Street.

Also, this episode features an increasingly rare instance of flashbacks, as we see Greer's past as an MI6 operative, ultimately disillusioned by the realisation that his boss is a KGB mole and that all the bad things he has done for King and Country are therefore utterly meaningless; that states and borders are redundant. It's a nice bit of John le Carre-esque spook drama, but ultimately adds little to Greer's character.

The conga line of death.

Team Machine's position is increasingly desperate, and with half a season still to go I worry that it's all going to get too bleak to bear. The show still has enough of a sense of humour to not be a complete downer - a fun bit with a succession of agents getting the drop on each other during the first parley and the surreal sight of Root divesting herself of a bear costume keep this episode from being a total doomfest - but it looks like a long ride to the finale.