Person of Interest - 'If-Then-Else'

Well... bummer.

Just one episode of Person of Interest this week. Still, it's not like it's the kind of compulsive binge viewing that leaves you on a nerve-shredding cliffhanger. Right?

Team Machine swing into action to enact a countermeasure against Samaritan's economic sabotage, but this means getting into the central exchange on Wall Street to upload a stabilising program. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a trap designed to lure them in and hold them as Samaritan's operatives move in en masse to finish them off, and even Shaw, tasked with retrieving a vital code, finds herself caught up in worse as a ruined investor decides to take out his frustration against the system with a suicide vest on a city commuter train. With everything going to hell, the team look to the Machine for options. It presents a course of action which they follow through, only for Reese and Fusco to be trapped by a dozen Samaritan shooters, Harold shot dead and Shaw arrested for shooting the bomber.

And then the Machine's simulation rewinds and it tries another way.

Yes, this is a conceptual episode, with the bulk of the action taking place through a series of Machine-generated simulations as it evaluates its options in the seconds before its assets are gunned down. It first tries splitting them into two teams, before deciding it needs to keep them together, managing events so that only Fusco is available to advise Shaw, and even saving a Degas sketch that Harold admires. Each option is assessed against flashbacks to Harold teaching the Machine chess, and finally explaining that he doesn't like the game, because it is predicated on the need for war and the idea that some people are worth more than others. Life, he teaches her, is not a game, and people are not pieces.

"Never tell me the odds!"

Despite the best efforts of the Machine, things look grim until Shaw turns up like the cavalry to turn the tide. Then, just as it looks like we'll end on an up for once, it turns out that there's an override switch for the elevator that someone needs to press and protect, forcing Shaw to finally kiss Root and then make the big play. It's a move as organic to the character now as it would have been alien to her when first introduced, and we end with Martine standing over the injured Shaw with the Machine's evaluation of Shaw's chances declining fast.

And now I have to wait a week. Damnit.

'If-Then-Else' is top drawer Person if Interest, making the most of its concept and playing with the audience expectations, as well as featuring the wonderful 'simplified simulation' scene, in which the Machine, running short of time, replaces its full simulation with a version in which character dialogue is replaced with descriptive phrases of the kind of dialogue they would use. You know what...

This scene is wonderful relief after watching our heroes die a lot (especially the first time, before you know it's a simulation) as is Shaw's sudden and heroic appearance, and to top that off with the threat of losing another member of the Team... Damn this season is brutal.