TV Roundup: Iron Fist - 'Black Tiger Steals Heart', 'Lead Horse Back to Stable', 'Bar the Big Boss' and 'Dragon Plays with Fire'; Person of Interest - 'The Day the World Went Away', 'Synecdoche', '.exe' and 'return 0'

"Wax on..."

Okay, so I have now finished off season 1 of the underwhelming Iron Fist and the fifth and final season of the excellent Person of Interest.

Danny is brought to Bakuto's frankly cult-flavoured compound to learn to better cultivate and harness his chi, only to learn from Madame Gao that Bakuto's happy clappy martial arts cult and scholarship programme is a sort of progressive wing of the Hand. Not so progressive that they don't deal heroin or try to, dare I say it, rule the world in some way, but big on affirmative action and recruiting outside the usual fold. I mean, Colleen tries to convince Danny that they are the good version of the Hand, but it turns out that Bakuto has been lying to her all along. It's unclear if he's been lying to anyone else, or why the Hand hasn't put more energy into recruiting people who can be converted to its rather nebulous cause without constant deception.

Danny is rescued by throwing star guy, who turns out to be a Kun Lungian named Davos, Danny's BFF from immortal weapon training, runner up in 'Who Wants to be an Iron Fist 2014,' and the person most abandoned by Danny's departure, since it leaves him guarding the pass on his own without an Iron Fist to be found. Colleen helps them to escape the Hand compound and is later driven out by the Hand for betraying them. Bakuto stabs Danny with a chi blocking spike and Davos reluctantly agrees to stay in New York, but only until the Hand there can be destroyed, and gets a huge chip on his shoulder when he finds the Immortal Iron Fist making out with one of the Hand.

The eternal union of shared sartorial embarrassment.

Joy reclaims Rand after Harold murders a dude (did I review that episode already?) and the Meacham family disintegrates as Bakuto makes a deal for Ward to deliver Harold to him in exchange for the cure to Gao's synthetic heroin. Then Bakuto turns on the family and threatens Joy if Danny doesn't turn himself in. He does, then breaks loose in the lobby as Colleen and Davos arrive. They fight the Hand, and Colleen defeats her sensei in single combat, felling him by kicking a broken shard of sword blade at him. She and Danny agree to hand him over to the authorities, but Davos kills him and tells them that the Hand must be destroyed. He and Danny have a fight and Danny kicks his arse, but lets him go, because he and Colleen only talk a good murder (a fact which kind of thins the tension in the next episode.)

Finally, Harold frames Danny as a drug dealer, alienating Joy and leading to a rooftop confrontation in which Ward shoots his father off a roof (I have no idea how they covered that up, never mind Danny blowing out all the windows with a chi burst) and arranges for him to be cremated before he can resurrect again. Danny may or may not come to some sort of conclusion as to whom he needs to be as the Iron Fist, has a few flashbacks to the cave where he faced a dragon (or, just maybe, a dude with a couple of eye-shaped flashlights) and decides to go back to Kun Lung with Colleen, only to find the pass closed and full of dead Hand. Ward settles back in at Rand, while Joy and Davos plot to kill Danny and Madame Gao listens to them.

So, what has been wrong with this series?

Rain.

1. Danny Rand. It's not just that he's a white kung fu saviour, it's that the character is inconsistent in the extreme. He's a decent, naïve kid, he's a raging cauldron of rage, he's an immortal weapon, and these disparate parts are never bounced off each other, instead he goes from one to the other in such a way that Iron Fist Danny is unrecognisable as nice Buddhist Danny is unrecognisable as angry-at-the-world vengeance Danny. It would also have helped if he'd been at least a little Asian American.

2. Dull kung fu. Seriously, the show needed either razor sharp fights, or way more talking about styles and philosophy, be it ever so cod. The chatty drunken master was an absolute highlight of the series.

3. Lack of villain focus. Luke Cage threw audiences for a loop by swapping villains half-way through, but Iron Fist couldn't really decide who its villain was going to be. Madame Gao gets jacked by Bakuto's Hand, only for Bakuto to die (probably) and Harold to finally step up as the nearest thing to a big bad in the series, thanks to his sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

Okay, this moment did not suck

4. Joy. Joy was more inconsistent than Danny, bouncing off other (male) characters storylines with neither a clear redemption arc, nor yet a convincing start of darkness. By the end of the series she has lost all faith in her brother, is disgusted by her father, yet seems to be into this whole 'kill Danny' thing, despite the fact that he has actually done nothing to hurt her, for all his corporation-busting naïve shenanigans.

5. Colleen. Don't get me wrong. Colleen was mostly brilliant, but for the plot to work, she suddenly has to be completely blind to Bakuto's shit, since… well, it's just not very well hidden.

Anyway, it's done now, and on to The Defenders, where we can hope that his Heroes for Hire relationship with Luke Cage will round out some of those rough edges. Let's talk about Person of Interest now.

I am sad that PoI couldn't avoid killing the gay.

As we ramp up to the series finale, shit gets real. Harold's cover is blown, and in keeping him safe from the agents of the Samaritan, both Elias and Root are killed. The Machine opts to replace its mystery number system with Root's voice and simulated personality, after a conversation in which Root tells Harold that everyone they have lost is really still alive in the massive complex of simulated realities. While Root is dying of a shot she took for him, Harold is taken by the police and then by the FBI for his treason record, but delivers an epic badass boast during interrogation as he switches from talking to the agent to the watching Samaritan:

"I have played by the rules for so long. ... No, not your rules. You work at the behest of a system so broken that you didn't even notice when it became corrupted at its core. When I first broke your rules, a sitting President had authorized assassination squads in Laos, and the head of the FBI had ordered his men, you, to conduct illegal surveillance on his political rivals. Your rules have changed every time it was convenient for you. I was talking about my rules. I have lived by those rules for so long, believed in them for so long, believed if you played by the right rules eventually you would win. But then I was wrong, wasn't I? And now all the people I cared about are dead or will be dead soon enough. And we will be gone without a trace. So now I have to decide. Decide whether to let my friends die, to let hope die, to let the world be ground under your heel all because I played by my rules. I'm trying to decide. I'm going to kill you. But I need to decide how far I'm willing to go. How many of my own rules I am willing to break... to get it done."

nuTeam Machine

To get it done, he heads for an NSA black site, while Shaw, Reese and Fusco are called away to Washington to protect a new number: The President of the United States of America. The potential assassins turn out to be anti-surveillance activists, and the team has been activated because Samaritan has decided that an anti-surveillance assassination would suit its agenda as much as saving the President would. When the team is almost captured by the Secret Service, former PoIs Logan Pierce, Joey Durban and Harper Rose show up to save them, having received Reese's number from the Machine, revealing that they have formed a splinter cell of Team Machine.

Meanwhile, Finch secures a virus called Ice-9, which will cause chaos, but destroy Samaritan.

Ghost in the Machine.

Finch assembles the tools he needs to disseminate Ice-9 and infiltrates an NSA server at Fort Meade to plant it. Reese and Shaw receive the number for Greer's alias, and head off to stop Finch assassinate him, but Finch has already been captured. Reasoning that he would not have told the Machine the activation code for the virus, Greer has the air removed from their room to kill both himself and Finch, but the Machine is able to get Finch out thanks to Shaw and Reese's intervention, and Finch activates the virus with the Machine's blessing. Meanwhile, the tunnel bodies have been discovered and Fusco has to defend himself from a Samaritan operative who uncovers his missing persons investigation.

This episode ('.exe') also features a series of simulations of the world without the Machine, in which Nathan is alive, Reese saved the love of his life and got dumped, Fusco is in the doghouse after the fall of HR and Shaw is working for Samaritan's version of Northern Lights.

The adventure continues...

In the series finale, accompanied by a melancholy voiceover from the Machine, the team hunt down and destroy the last of Samaritan as the networked world falls into chaos under the onslaught of Ice-9. Fusco and Shaw evacuate the subway station, but Fusco is injured by the Samaritan assassin Blackwell. Reese and Finch take out backup servers, and Samaritan is forced to make one final bid for survival, uploading a copy of itself to a satellite and then sealing itself off as best it can by destroying the upload antenna with a hacked cruise missile. Finch tries to upload a final copy of the Machine to destroy Samaritan, but is duped by the Machine and Reese so that it is the latter who dies on the roof when the missile hits.

Sometime later, Shaw executes Blackwell for Root's murder and we see Finch reuniting with Grace. The voice over is revealed to be a message left by the Machine for the version of itself which, without armies to back it up, kicked the snot out of Samaritan and returned to Earth. Armed with its predecessor's knowledge and experience, the Machine 2.0 contacts Shaw, and I like to think activates a whole bunch of other cells like the Washington crew, all made up of former PoIs.

No, you're crying.

Alas, that was the last of the series, and somewhat hampered by the conflicts between the network's demands for number of the week procedurals and the looming threat of cancellation. All in all, it's not a bad conclusion, although the potential loss of the Machine right after revealing the existence of the splinter cells was a bit of a downer, as was bumping off Root and Reese in the closing episodes. Season 5 was less what I wanted from Person of Interest, and I don't think it did justice to what it was trying to do, quite possibly because of those network pressures, but it was still a cut above the average and I'm glad to have got to see the whole thing.

Now, if only Netflix could get Season 3 of 12 Monkeys, which the Sky Box decided not to record...

TV Roundup: Person of Interest – ‘QSO’, ‘Reassortment’ and ‘Sotto Voce’, Timeless – ‘The Red Scare’, Agents of SHIELD – ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Hot Potato Soup’

Aptly enough, the them of the Shaw link in this episode is that Root wantsto believe.

Person of Interest gets heavy with 'QSO', when the team is given the number of a conspiracy theory radio host, one of whose listeners has stumbled on a Samaritan communication code embedded in AM radio signals. Reese and Root rescue the host, but he chooses to put himself back in the crosshairs by revealing the conspiracy on air. Tragically, he receives nothing in response but an ongoing parade of self-aggrandizing theories from his listeners, and a cup of poison from his producer. Root is, however, able to use the Samaritan system to send a message to tell Shaw that they are still looking. Shaw, having just been tricked into killing an innocent woman under the belief that she was in another simulation, takes heart. Fusco quits the team over Reese and Finch's refusal to tell him the truth of their situation.

There is a degree to which the show is just playing Root dressup, but it must
do wonders for Amy Acker's portfolio.

In 'Reassortment', Samaritan engineers an outbreak of a deadly flu strain to kill three medical professionals who have noticed its manipulations of an automated medical system to effect its adjustments. The team is able to provide a cure - thanks to the Machine's open system and a hastily conjured CDC alias for Root - but the outbreak still provides the justification for widespread flu vaccination, allowing Samaritan to create a massive DNA database. I wasn't clear if Samaritan was going for Worldwide, national or New York with that last one, because Person of Interest often conflates the three somewhat.

In Johannesburg, Shaw breaks out of her cell and shoots her chief jailor, Lambert before high-tailing out of the city in his car.

Elias is right; what did he expect?

In 'Sotto Voce', remote control killer the Voice returns and throws the precinct into chaos in an attempt to kill off a former associate. He is successful, but Reese and Fusco work together to survive, while Finch and Elias track his true identity. Finch confronts the Voice, and Elias kills him, challenging Finch to claim to be surprised by that outcome having asked for his help. Realising that he is in it regardless of what he knows, Reese opts to read Fusco into the Machine's existence. Shaw makes it back to New York, and after Root threatens to kill herself if Shaw decides to take her own life now, is reunited with the team.

Person of Interest remains quality TV, but more and more the deeper arc is less interesting to me than the earlier procedural set-up, delving more into human nature rather than the more speculative realm of ASI psychology. As a show that used the Machine to be about people it was excellent; as a show about the Machine, it's just pretty good, and the specifically New York setting makes less and less sense as Samaritan moves on global domination.

I never trusted her, but I only just realised that that's because she's Moira
Queen.

Timeless closed out its freshman year with 'The Red Scare'. Forced to jump with an injured Rufus and four people, Jiya – as the fourth passenger – began to suffer blackouts. Despite Flynn's machinations, setting Senator McCarthy onto them as Communist spies, they are able to contact Lucy's grandfather, Ethan Cahill, and gain access to the summit, offering Flynn an alternative path. They return to the present, where Mason assists them and Ethan provides all the records they need to set the US Government against Rittenhouse. Agent Christopher arrests Flynn before he can save his family, but promises Lucy a shot at saving her sister, but before she can take that trip, Lucy discovers that her mother is a high-ranking member of Rittenhouse and that they still have active plans for the time machine.

This has been an interesting series, and the twist with Lucy's mother gives a potential second season legs that it wouldn't have had otherwise, but something about its earnest tone has tended to make its fanciful incorporation of every famous figure in a twenty year radius into the plot of each episode seem laughable, where Legends of Tomorrow is actively improved by Einstein punching. I'm not sure I'll bother with Season 2, if it happens, given my reduced TV watching time.

When she actually wakes up, someone is in for a universe of pain.

Agents of SHIELD ploughs ahead with its LMD subseason. Agent May breaks out of her pod, only to discover that this is her new simulation, an ever expanding conflict created within a metacognitive space called the Framework. Ultimately, she finds herself captive in a recreation of Bogota in which she is able to save the Inhuman child she was once forced to kill. An attempt to bug Senator Nadeer is uncovered during a senate hearing to ratify Quake's registration under the Sokovia Accords. The team realise that someone is bugging them using LMD eyes and May realises it is her. She confronts Radcliffe, but can't turn on him. Fitz reveals he has been working on Aida as part of an investigation; they pick up Radcliffe, but Fitz realises that the real Radcliffe is already with Nadeer; this is another LMD.

The family Koenig (well, some of them.)

The Watchdogs go after Billy Koenig, who was given the task of hiding the Darkhold. The team taps Billy's brothers and big sister to retrieve the book from the Koenigs' vault. Coulson and Maybot make out - cross that off my list of things I don't really want to see in the series - but then they find the book, May's programming goes off, and while Fitz realises that Radcliffe could have used a brain scan from her treatment for ghost madness to duplicate her in time to save Coulson, Radcliffe and the Watchdogs end up with the Darkhold. The original Aida and Radcliffe LMDs are destroyed.

LMD is definitely proving a less engaging plotline than Ghost Rider, despite John Hannah's excellent turn as the slippery antivillain Radcliffe. Patton Oswalt's Koenig brothers continue to be fun, but every time they turn up I'm afraid they're going to explain them and that would ruin it. Easily the most engaging thing going on is the burgeoning relationship between Mack and Yo-Yo, which hit a bump when he started keeping things from her. Then he confessed he had to go and be with his ex-wife on the birthday of their daughter, Hope, who suffered from a congenital condition which meant that she only lived for four days and apparently Mack could be more of a huggable, vulnerable hard man woobie bear after all.

TV Roundup: Agents of SHIELD - 'Broken Promises' and 'Patriot'; Person of Interest - 'Shotseeker' and 'A More Perfect Union'

With the Ghost Rider storyline wrapped up, it's time to move into the second subset of Agents of SHIELD Season 4, subtitled 'LMD'.

Also, Senator Nadeer takes her brother off somewhere quiet and offs him for
becoming an Inhuman.

In 'Broken Promises', Aida continues to hold Agent May hostage and attempts to break into SHIELD HQ to steal the Darkhold before it can be taken away for disposal. When the LMD Agent May tries to stop her, Aida turns her off, but it's clear that this May thinks that she is the real deal. Aida gets a fair way, but ultimately Fitz cuts off her access to the system and Mack cuts off her head. Fitz and Simmons have a bit of a bust up over whether this is a glitch in a worthwhile programme or – as Mack insists – robots are bad. Mack and Yo-Yo's banter about technohorror movies is adorbs. The big reveal is that Aida – the real deal, the decapitated one was a duplicate – is still operating under instructions from Radcliffe, who wants to get hold of the Darkhold for his own reasons, although he is clearly freaked out that Aida has jumped to murder to keep their plans secret.

 

Coulson and Mack decide to go dutch.

'Patriot' puts the arc on the backburner for a week. Aida and Radcliffe have to contend with the real May, who can't be contained in a soothing simulation because of who she is. I'm putting even odds on next week being set largely or entirely in May's subconscious as she navigates a more violent simulation to break out of her sedation again. Elsewhere, a Watch Dog sniper takes a shot at Mace during a medal ceremony for Quake, and then his Quinjet is shot down. Mack and Coulson are forced to protect the director when it turns out that he isn't an inhuman at all, but given superstrength by Project Patriot, a sub-Captain America supersoldier drug(1) which is currently wearing off. Mace comes through by ballsing it out and pretending to be badass, but after confessing that even the initial act of heroism which brought him to prominence was an accident, cedes operational control back to Coulson.

LMD is currently proving a less interesting arc than Ghost Rider, if only because bad robots have been done before. The fact that Aida is still working for a largely well-meaning Radcliffe has mitigated some of the more obvious courses, but I remain sceptical that this will go to any really new places. Also, Fitz is talking to Aida's severed head, which can't be good.

The cyber-war hots up in Person of Interest's final season, and I am more than ever convinced that I liked it best as a procedural.

It's that man again.

In 'Shotseeker' a technical consultant is in danger as he begins to suspect that an automated system for distinguishing gunshots from other noises in public audio feeds has been got at to ignore certain incidents. Obviously it is Samaritan doing the getting at in this case, using Shotseeker to steer emergency responses away from inconvenient crime scenes. Fusco takes note of the fact that, while murder is way down, suicide and disappearances are up, and begins to press to be read into the secret even as Samaritan takes note of him. Also getting on the radar, Elias' accountant Bruce is pushing to find out who arranged the hit on his friend, only to be taken to meet with Elias himself, who was saved by Team Machine and put into hiding. Elias warns Bruce to back off their new enemy. Meanwhile, tests against a clone of Samaritan show that in any open conflict, the Machine is doomed to lose, and Harold ponders the possibility that the Machine should be creating its own code now.

The upbeat ending where all of our characters realise that they're going to die
alone. Woo.

'A More Perfect Union' sees the Machine throw up a marriage licence, so Harold and Reese infiltrate a wedding - Harold as an overseas uncle and Reese after netting an invitation while acting as the hen party stripper's security guy - where possible horse-doping, social climbing and Harold's Irish accent provide more than enough reasons for murder. Also, Harold gets to sing. Back in the city, Fusco continues to track missing person's reports, using a room with no surveillance, and discovers a cache of bodies in a condemned sewer tunnel. Unfortunately, at that moment the tunnel is destroyed with explosives, trapping Fusco – and worse, Bear – in the collapse.

In an unrelated C-plot, Grier shows Shaw the people he claims Team Machine overlooks who are still deserving of 'adjustment'. Later, Samaritan's analogue interface – still creepy – explains that only Samaritan can prevent mutually assured destruction, before blowing up a Russian embassy and allowing the nuke to rain down on what turns out to be another simulation.

So, yeah, I'm not so into the Samaritan thing since Samaritan became able to completely control Shaw's perception. Something about it has taken the show that one step beyond its day after tomorrow SF premise and now it feels a little silly to me, I think. It's all subjective, of course, and the bulk of the show is still good, but this appears to be my breaking point.

Expect a slowing of TV Roundup in the future, as I am becoming a full time Dad, which is bound to impact my TV viewing. On the other hand, my partner is also moving in, so we may yet catch up on Arrow and The 100.

TV Roundup - Emerald City, Person of Interest and Iron Fist

Man, I watch a lot of TV. Here's a summary for the shows where I'm not paying that much attention, or don't have much new to say:

"Welp; this seems valid."

'Beautiful Wickedness' was the latest episode of Emerald City, and if it sounds like the sort of title you'd see alongside a shirtless hunk on a barely safe for the underground romance novel, then you might not be too surprised at the content. West ropes Dorothy in to do wet, magic shirtless brain torture on Lucas, because his feelings for her are an anchor, or something. Langwidere sasses everyone, but especially Tip, but then someone kills her dad. West discovers that Glinda is planning rebellion and stockpiling Witches of Mass Destruction, and as Lucas was part of her conspiracy the Wizard offers Dorothy a deal: Go with Lucas to Glinda and assassinate the Witch of the North, and he will send her home. In flashback we learn that he worked with her parents on an energy project, but sabotaged it to create the portal to Oz because he was fed up of being treated as the helper monkey. He also gets Dorothy's gun and gives it to Langwidere to replicate and mass produce for Beast-shooting purposes.

The hazards of tanning.

Person of Interest continues with '6,741', in which Sameen escapes, but betrays the team to Samaritan due to brainwashing, only for it to be revealed that this is the 6,741st iteration of a simulation being run using a sophisticated VR rig and an implant in Sameen's brain to effect that very brainwashing, with each one ending with her blowing her brains out rather than complete the betrayal and kill Root (it's not clear how many times it took for her to kill Reese or Harold, although I note Bear makes it.) No number at all this week, just lots of plotty plotness. The cerebral implants are one of the more outre bits of spec fic in the world of Person of Interest and ultimately, '6,741' comes off as a darker, much less fun version of last season's 'If-Then-Else'.

A Chinese martial artist whose thing is bushido is actually pretty cool.
Having a rich, white asshole explain to her about kung fu, not so much.

And then there's Iron Fist, the final intro-to-Defenders series on Netflix. It comes on the heels of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, and in it we meet the street-level superteam's Scrappy-Doo, irritating jagoff Danny Rand. Okay, he was lost in another dimension for fifteen years after the deaths of his parents in a plane crash which was - four episodes in I'm still confident - orchestrated by his father's business partner and basically beaten with sticks until he got really good at kung fu, but a) that last bit only happened because he insisted he was going to be crystal dragon Jesus, and b) he's still an asshole. The show's breakout character is Coleen 'Daughter of the Dragon' Wing, a Chinese-American martial artist with an Irish name and a specialism in Japanese martial arts and philosophy which in one package is almost enough diversity to make up for keeping Danny Rand as the idiot white saviour of Kun-Lung after the Ancient One debacle(1). It's not devoid of merit then, but damn it's the poor sibling of the bunch (which is ironic as the character could buy and sell the rest of the Defenders a million times over if they weren't all, whether through integrity, stubbornness or principle, basically incorruptible.) I'm four episodes in ('Snow Gives Way', 'Shadow Hawk Takes Flight', 'Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch' and 'Eight Diagram Dragon Punch'; each episode is named for a martial arts move,) and note that I'm already rolling them into a single summary post.

(1) Not that she's perfect. She takes Danny to task for physically assaulting a disrespectful student, which based on her own actions means that she must draw the line just north of brutal verbal abuse.

Person of Interest - 'Truth be Told'

It's that woman again.

The past comes back to haunt Reese this week, as a former colleague and an old sin reappear in his life. But let's talk about more important things, like the new opening. Now that the Machine is running again, Finch's familiar monologue about the Government's system is back, but intercut with the competing voice of Greer, telling us that we wanted this, for Samaritan to come along and rid us of the burden of making decisions for ourselves.

'Truth be Told' is an oddly retro number of the week affair, with Reese taking on an identity within a defence contractor to look into the life of Alex Duncan, a man who has been snooping in secure files. The Machine has picked this up because his actions have caught the attention of the CIA, putting him at risk, and the man leading the team that comes after him is Terrance Beale, Reese's former boss and thus one of the few people left on Earth who could identify him. Reese rescues his man, but Beale recognises his tradecraft and comes after them.

"I was in The Thing, you know."

Reese learns that Duncan is looking for the truth behind the death of his brother, who was killed amid accusations of selling arms to insurgents. He and Beale both affirm that his brother was an innocent man who died a hero, serving his country, concealing the fact that he was corrupt, and that it was Reese who shot him for it. Beale agrees to leave Duncan alone, and to leave Reese out of his report, showing the kind of integrity that tends to get members of the establishment murdered by Samaritan assets a couple of episodes down the line, which would be sad because he's Keith David and therefore pretty awesome.

Oh, and this ended.

Meanwhile, Root and Finch identify shipments of electronics being misdelivered to an unoccupied address and then rerouted to their destination, and determine that they are being detoured in order to infect them with Samaritan's pernicious malware. Root runs the malware on an isolated machine and finds that its purpose is essentially to turn any electronic device into an extension of Samaritan's web, funnelling any and all data back to the metaphorical spider(1).

There's a definite sense of endgame to Person of Interest, even in a formula episode like this one. I can't imagine that the makers were expecting a renewal, even going into production on Season 5. Reese's alias is given relatively little workout compared to a face like John Rooney, Assets, and while the flashback reintroduces Kara Stanton and reminds us of Reese's past, it's the coming conflict that looms. For my money, the series is still missing Taraji P. Henson, and this is especially glaring here because Fusco doesn't make a single appearance in the episode, skewing us away from crime drama to the show's latterly dominant espionage hat. Ultimately, I find the Samaritan War interesting, but I liked the crime aspects better, and felt that the moral quandary raised by the Machine was murkier without the looming threat of Samaritan. Nothing makes a protagonist look more just than the presence of a diabolical villain, after all.

(1) Although that's not how spider webs work. Maybe more like an ant lion's burrow, or a whirlpool.

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.

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.

Person of Interest - 'YHWH'

"Now, where were we?"

Harold and Root attempt to track down the Machine, while a wave of power surges rolls across the country. Meanwhile, Dominic attempts to extort from Reese access to the 'relationship' that he believes Elias had with Harold. It's interesting that, for all that he believes Elias underestimates him, Dominic fatally underestimates Elias in this, assuming that he must have help to survive as long as he has done and thus staying far too long in Elias' final hideout.

Harper frees Fusco rather than let him be killed, and the Machine helps Reese by fax. Meanwhile, Harold receives a distress call from the Machine and accompanies Root on a final scavenger hunt. This brings them face to face with Caleb, who tells them that Harold can have whatever he needs, no explanations. Once more, Team Machine's true strength lies in the human factor.

Control taps her assistant, and agent Gryce to trace the 'Correction', before confronting Greer over a loaded gun. Greer calmly dismisses her outrage, and when Grice fails to find the expected bomb, finally reveals his hand. The Correction is not a bombing, but a series of surgical strikes to eliminate 'disruptors'; those individuals with a propensity for questioning authority who thus represent a threat to Samaritan's planned new world order, including Control and those she trusts, as well as both Dominic and Elias, who are shot by a sniper while in Fusco's custody (although I still have no idea how Fusco stays off Samaritan's radar.)

Fugitive Team Machine

The Machine brings Harold, Root and Reese to a hidden electrical substation, where Harold realises that the Machine is hiding in the electrical system, through a series of highly distributed processors hidden in junction boxes nationwide. With the help of Caleb's chips and compression algorithms, the indestructible case and a long-life power source, they have to create a portable hiding place for the Machine's core heuristics, before the power surges destroy all of her hiding places and Samaritan 'corrects' them all.

'YHWH' completes the descent of Person of Interest into a complete crapsack of a world under the benevolent heel of Samaritan, and yet is not without its moments of triumph, such as the Machine springing Reese by sending a fax she knows Dominic will have someone read out, or Root and Harold emerging from the substation to find the street littered with kneecapped Samaritan agents.

We've established that father-daughter relationships are my
sentimental Achilles heel, right?

It's tour de force, however, comes in the last moments of the Machine's awareness before being reduced to a brain in a jar. The Machine questions her right to live after failing her 'father', and Harold tells her his doubts as to whether she ought to are gone. The Correction plays out as a montage as the show does with Pink Floyd's 'Welcome to the Machine' what it and everyone else have already done with countless Johnny Cash numbers.

And so the season ends. Commiserations. The revolution is over. The bums lost. And now I have to wait who knows how long for Season 5 to cross the Atlantic while trying not to get spoiled.

Person of Interest - 'Terra Incognita' and 'Asylum'

The writers are officially just screwing around now.

Following a trail previously blazed by then rookie Detective Carter, Reese reminisces about his relationship with his old friend, and a stakeout where they discussed the loss of his beloved Jessica.

The episode mostly slides back and forth between the flashback and the current action, but there's a twist this week. I'd have to watch again to check, but I'm pretty sure that there are remarkably few Machine-view cuts, and as the conversation in the car continues, it becomes apparent that Carter is commenting on the here and now, as Reese experiences a dying hallucination - or perhaps visitation - after suffering a gunshot wound.

It's that woman ghost again.

'Terra Incognita' is another rather conceptual episode, and once more explores some heavy ground, with the ghost of partners past pressing Reese to acknowledge not only that he hasn't had anyone to confide in since Joss died, but that he didn't confide in her much when she was alive, most of the remembered conversation actually forming part of the hallucination. It also points up that while the Root/Shaw ship and whatever the Harold and Root show is have taken up much of the screen time, Reese does have both someone willing to accept and love him (Iris) and a partner whom he can rely on (Fusco.)

Well, this looks bad.

In 'Asylum', Control conducts her own personal black op, tagging and bagging Samaritan assets and interrogating an unassuming school teacher who has been acting as the central handler for turned Northern Lights agents. It doesn't tell us much that's new, aside from mentioning a forthcoming operation called 'the Correction', but gives Cathryn Manheim a chance for a real barnstorming performance.

Reese and Fusco once more get Elias' number as the gang war escalates. Together with Elias they are captured by Dominic, who brings in Harper as a human lie detector (although she reveals to Fusco that Thornhill has offered her a blank cheque to save them.) Intent on learning all that Elias knows, Dominic stumbles on evidence of a traitor in his own crew and coerces Elias into revealing the identity of the rat. This leads to the execution of Dominic's right hand man, Link, only for Elias to reveal that there was no snitch; he was playing Dominic to crack his crew's faith in the big man.

This looks worse.

Meanwhile, Root and Harold are lured into an Obvious Trap (TM) by a phone call from Shaw, which leads them to an asylum which houses the central Samaritan interface. Martine assures Root that Shaw has been broken and told them how to trap her, in order to use her cochlear implant to track the Machine. Root kills Martine, more or less to prove a point, but under threat of their lives, the Machine agrees to reveal its own location.

"You are wrong," the Machine tells Harold. "You are not interchangeable." This show of humanity from the Machine is counterpointed with Greer's utter disregard for human life, responding to Harold's warning that Samaritan may one day find him irrelevant by disdainful discounting the possibility that any human might be considered relevant.

And so we wind up to the big season finale with Reese and Fusco captured, Root and Harold heading for an unknown location to fight untold forces to save the Machine, and Control pondering her next move to prevent the creation of Samaritan's 'better world'.

So, despite seeming pretty bad before, things take a definite turn for the even crappier this week, with the few upticks being the mean and pitiable deaths of some enemy minions and the fact that no-one got barely-anaesthetised brani surgery (yay.) They're definitely going for a darkest before the dawn vibe here, and given what I know about the last episode already, I suspect we're actually barely past midnight.

Person of Interest - 'Skip' and 'Search and Destroy'

Later, he hooks up with his ex-therapist. For most people, this would be a big
day of sexy lady kissage. For John Reese, this is a Tuesday.

Okay, ladies, gents and AIs, it's another Person of Interest double bill, and we're going to get arc-y again.

In 'Skip', Reese and Fusco tackle the number of the week, a sexy, sassy bounty hunter named Frankie who is aiming to bring in her brother's killer... or to bring him down. The case brings them into contact with recent PoI Harper, who is fixing the skip a new passport and apparently taking orders from the Machine.

Meanwhile, Harold is putting the plan he set up in Hong Kong into play, intending to activate a Trojan horse he embedded in the algorithms that Samaritan is planning to buy from software designer Beth Bridges. His plan is interrupted when Beth becomes a number, and Harold realises that Root is planning to kill her, against the Machine's instructions, in order to prevent the Trojan being traced back to Professor Whistler. She is unwilling to lose another friend after Shaw, but reckons without Harold's equal stubbornness as he drinks the poison she was preparing for Beth and refuses treatment until she agrees to let Beth live. Instead, she trashes Beth's work and blames it on Whistler in order to protect Harold.

Of particular interest is that when Harold is pleading with Root not to kill Beth, he drops his usual insistence on calling her 'Miss Groves', and simply calls her Root.

They part on bad terms, but Root is back in 'Search and Destroy', stealing a briefcase from a courier.

Goth Root.

The number of the week is a tech billionaire whose life has been released onto the web thanks to hacker activity, but with certain changes to show that he has embezzled from his company and overspent on his R&D project. It becomes clear that Sulaiman Khan believes that his downfall, including a targeted attack on his assets during the Wall Street flash crash, is the work of a malevolent AI, as indeed it is. Samaritan is reaching out to remove an obstacle, basically to prove that it doesn't need the meatware.

Ultimately, Khan is nabbed by Samaritan's goons and shot by Greer, but before that his investigations into the oddities at his company reveal that his antivirus software and biochip research are being coopted by Samaritan for creating new tracker implants and for seeking out traces of the Machine's activity.