Person of Interest - 'B.S.O.D.'

Thirty seconds may be a new minimum time to start shooting things.

Person of Interest returns for its short and heavily spoilered - thanks, Wikipedia - final season, finally arriving in the UK.

We pick up where we left off - after a short 'this is the day we died' style voice over from Root - with Team Machine making their way back to the subway station, the Machine itself in a suitcase, and all the might of Samaritan pursuing them. Battered and bloodied, Reese and Finch make it back, but the case is damaged and losing power, while Samaritan uses its own soldiers and 'civilian assets' (read 'ordinary folks manipulated by their media feeds') to hound Root until she takes refuge with old contacts in the Russian mob.

Finch tries to restore power to the Machine's life support, but she panics and tries to decompress into his laptop, which has nowhere near enough room for her. Root's contacts betray her, but Reese shows up in characteristic nick of time. She's so pleased to see him that she barely snarks at all, and having dealt with their hunters they steal a bunch of games consoles from the Russians and head for home, where they make a supercomputer home for the Machine out of product placement.

"So, any games console would do?"
"No, these games consoles have a unique sponsorship deal. I mean,
architecture."

At the precinct, Fusco experiences the power of Samaritan, as the FBI derail the internal affairs investigation into the deaths of Elias and Dominic with a bogus ballistics report. The official version of events becomes that Dominic's people tried to spring him, and Fusco shot Dominic in self-defence. Unofficially, neither Fusco nor the IA investigator buy it. Fusco follows Reese's advice and keeps Mum, even when he finds evidence of the sniper, but the investigator pushes and gets 'adjusted' when his pacemaker malfunctions.

In flashbacks, we see the birth of the Machine and Finch's initial decision to erase her memory every 24 hours to prevent her growing into something that would threaten humanity. In the present, he determines that, if the Machine survives, he will not hamper it with the restrictions that left it unable to fight back effectively against the unrestrained Samaritan.

Oh my goodness, it's good to see Person of Interest again, even if only for a short season. I suspect we're going to be laser focused, with relatively few numbers of the week, as the show completes its transition from do-right procedural to deep, dark conspiracy thriller. I also get the feeling it's going to be dark; and when I say 'get the feeling' I mean 'read in the Wikipedia brief character notes'. Perhaps the most interesting thing, however, is that we're definitely angling towards a scenario in which it takes an AI to beat an AI, rather than a triumph of the human spirit, aligning it more with traditional cyberpunk than mainstream TV SF.