Person of Interest - 'Panopticon' and 'Nautilus'

Our hero moves his pawns (while the pawns play chess.)

Person of Interest Season 4 finally arrives on UK TV with the premiere episode 'Panopticon' (and so little fanfare that I nearly missed it!) We open with a recently sacked journalist explaining to a British blonde in a bar his theory that a sinister conspiracy masterminded by an artificial intelligence has begun moving towards some new world order. The blonde confirms that his theory is correct, and that the only two other people to know the truth will be killed in a car crash, before shooting him dead.

The friendly face of sales.

After the cataclysmic events of the Season 3 finale, our heroes are scattered and keeping under Samaritan's radar as best they can by inhabiting aliases created by the Machine specifically to be invisible to her adversary's doctor'ed servers. Harold is working as a college professor under the name Whistler, lecturing in Ethical Considerations of High Frequency Econometrics (loosely, are advanced learning machine-driven decisions bad.) Reese is a somewhat maverick narcotics detective. Root is Root (and with Harold pushed into an only tangentially bird-related alias, I wonder if she's been forced to take a name that doesn't belong to a pioneer of computing) and Shaw...

This one student is so into Harold's lecture on the ethics of
high-frequency econometrics that I can't help but tag her for a
Samaritan asset.

Shaw and Reese are both eager to get back to the numbers. It's intriguing to see how far the work had got under Shaw's skin in particular, especially compared to Harold's volte face. Ever since the Machine directed them to kill a Congressman, Harold has been on the outs with her (damn; I'm doing it now) and considers their work meaningless, although so far he's skipping over the fact that the Machine gave them half a dozen less brutal tasks to prevent the birth of Samaritan, they just stuffed those up at every step. Thus, when a new number comes in, Harold wants no part of it, advising Reese also to keep his head down and his nose clean.

The traditional Machine view scene dissolves have been
replaced - temporarily at least - with Samaritan views.

The PoI is a phone shop owner who has worked out a way to turn old TV aerials into an undetectable mobile network, and is being pressured by a gang into putting it at their disposal. When the man's son is kidnapped, Reese goes all Rambo to get him back, and in another reversal it is Shaw who steps in to force her partner to take a more softly-softly approach. Ultimately this pays off, and in more ways than one: The son is saved; Reese gets a big bust that allows him to move to homicide as Fusco's new partner (yay!); and Team Machine gain access to the invisible communication network.

Meanwhile, Harold follows a code given to him in the form of Harold Whistler's dissertation and locates a disused subway station that just screams crime-fighting lair, and the Machine uses a dating website to hook Shaw up with a gang of robbers as their wheelman.

Onwards then to 'Nautilus', in which Reese and Shaw seek to protect a young girl apparently seeking to solve a set of complex clues scattered around the city. Initially resistant, Harold becomes drawn in by the girl's genius and tragedy.

Up on the roof.

Claire Mahoney is a brilliant student mired in a complex game; a scavenger hunt with no apparent source, as part of which she hacked into the servers of a private military contractor and stole incriminating documents. She is also entirely resistant to the idea of being helped, focused only on winning the game. Harold finds further commonality when he realises that she is seeking for meaning in a universe which took away her parents in a pointless accident, but also sees that the 'game' is actually a complex recruiting tool deployed by Samaritan.

Ultimately, Claire rejects Harold's help and completes the game, being rewarded with a cellphone which transmits the promise: I WILL PROTECT YOU NOW, as she is reassigned from Candidate to Asset. I half expected her to become Samaritan's Analogue Interface, but then again I suppose the open nature of Samaritan's code makes that unnecessary. I would still be unsurprised to see her emerge as the anti-Root.

Perhaps more importantly, it is this failure, not Reese or Root's attempts at persuasion, that brings Harold back to the fight; back to his own purpose in the world. He reveals to Reese and Shaw the base of operations he has been creating - initially just for them - in the subway station, and Team Machine is back in business (yay!)

Oh, I have missed Person of Interest, and if these two episodes were mostly about rebuilding the team that we know and love, it's slickly done and the adjusted mission (the Machine providing numbers that both fit the usual criteria and serve the greater cause of defeating Samaritan) smoothly integrated without giving our heroes too steep a mission creep. They are still about helping people; the Machine is just playing a long game as well.