Person of Interest - 'SNAFU'

Wait... What?

It takes a brave series, especially an action series, to take a good look at its own ethical framework. This week, Person of Interest does just that.

The Machine is up and running on a bank of shiny game consoles but all is not yet rosy. Her facial recognition is on the fritz – leading to an entertaining scene in which it see the characters as played by the wrong actors – and she is far from ready to resume the fight against Samaritan, which has so far improved society that homicides in New York are way, way down… but suicides are up by about the same amount. Root is going stir crazy without her cycle of new identities to hide her from Samaritan, so Lionel and Reese nick a bunch of proper servers to upgrade the Machine's processing power.

With the Machine seemingly back on stream and the irrelevant data protocol reinitialised, the Machine begins sending out Numbers, but many of them are for highly unlikely events, or for violent acts that have long since happened, including a parolee who has served his time, the murder of a character in a play, and a man who was murdered thirty years before (although Lionel gets to be a hero again, taking out a group of mobsters with some familiar looking knee-shots.) Realising that the Machine lacks context, Finch tries to create a baseline using the Team's actions, but this backfires when the Machine checks her list twice and determines that the Team have been very, very naughty.

Oops.

Designating Harold and Root as threats when they want to reboot it, the Machine locks them out of the system and sends an assassin to kill Reese on account of all that murder and stuff he's committed in his life. This leaves Reese in a deadly cat and mouse with a blonde hitwoman, while Root and Harold are locked in a no less deadly battle of ethical dispute with the Machine. Harold realises that the Machine is experiencing everything at once, including her difficult, painful 'birth'. He reflects on the fact that, back then, he had a very simplistic view of right and wrong, while everything is grayscale now. At last, he coaxes the Machine back to a linear chronology and things settle down, although one of the seemingly irrelevant irrelevant numbers is then recruited by Samaritan due to his propensity for violence.

'SNAFU' eases us back into the Person of Interest formula after the breakneck pace of 'YHWH' and 'B.S.O.D.', offering a reason for the reactivation of the irrelevant protocol in the face of the war with Samaritan. This lull also gives us a chance to look at the world under Samaritan, with its surface calm and hidden horrors. Hopefully we'll see more of the latter instead of just being told about it, but Reese and Fusco's relative idleness is a wonderfully subtle indication of the former. The new world doesn't need so many homicide cops; it's safer, cleaner, better, for anyone that Samaritan doesn't deem in need of adjustment.

"Oh, comically inappropriate costumes. I missed you."

As we close the episode on a picnic in the park, Root and Harold enjoying the sunshine and the former dressed as a scout leader, the biggest question is not 'how will they defeat Samaritan?' but 'why, oh why are they still keeping Lionel in the dark about the nature of the Machine?' Also of interest is the fact that, thus far, the Machine 2.0 is an open system, as in its training days. Harold's intention to close it down is in contrast to Root's to leave her free, although Harold argues that the back box design was never about constraining the machine, but preventing undue human interference. Theoretically, this puts Team Machine on a more even footing with Samaritan, although their numbers are still sorely lacking.

Most interesting of all, of course, is that Person of Interest is only tangentially the same show we started watching five seasons back. Our shadowy Robin Hoods have become all-but powerless fugitives, dominated in the war of information by a far more ruthless opponent. The Machine has turned her all-seeing gaze on them and found them to be wanting, at least as viewed out of context, their violence definitely on the wrong side of its threshold of judgement. To bring Samaritan down, the Team are going to need an edge, and hopefully that's going to be as interesting a journey as anything else these characters have done, and I wonder how much further it will push them over that line.