Root awakening.
Warning: Full spoilers for Person of Interest: Season 5 below.
With only 13 episodes to play with instead of its normal 22, Person of Interest drove home its endgame this year with a spectacular run featuring our heroes' tragic, yet victorious, battle against the invisible hand of an ASI named Samaritan. A force that, with a bit of cold herd thinning, could have actually helped humanity survive future turmoil, but at the cost of our already spare freedoms and privacy. An intriguing and frightening debate that put an excellent exclamation point on a series that had already dove deep into the pool of questioning surveillance, the rights of citizens, and the true dangers of an artificial intelligence that could out-think us and out-maneuver us in every way.
And it was all done with so much heart. The series finale, "return 0," was one of the most satisfying and poignant show enders in recent memory, while also being a testament to how POI had evolved over five seasons. Because if you'd only somehow watched the first season, there'd be no way you could have predicted the events and the raw emotion of "return 0." It was the culmination of a careful and thoughtful build on a "more complex than usual" case of the week series that had believably morphed into straight sci-fi.
The final season wasn't able to bring back everyone among the show's many, myriad peripheral players, but enough squeaked through to make everything feel earned and paid off. From long dead faces appearing in flashbacks or Machine-imagined realities, to a new "Team Machine B" comprised of former numbers, efforts were made to tie everything up in a way that felt organic and solid. There was even time to bring back a dangling villain from the past - The Voice - and snip that particular thread in a way that helped bring Reese and Fusco closer together, which in turn led to Fusco finally being brought into the inner circle.
This season was almost fully serialized, though the numbers aspect still remained, at least up through the first two-thirds. Whether the Machine was spitting out wrong numbers ("SNAFU") or giving Reese a taste of his dark past ("Truth Be Told") or giving the team Finch ("The Day the World Went Away") or Greer's (".exe") number, there was always a bigger picture reason for the "case." Except, perhaps, for a "A More Perfect Union," which featured Team Machine's one true stand alone case at a wedding, but even that in itself served as a "farewell to the numbers" mission and featured Finch and Root dancing and enjoying a nice moment before the subsequent episodes hurled them into chaos and death.
Standout episodes included the aforementioned finale, along with "The Day the World Went Away," ".exe," and the mind-bending "6,741" - the latter acting as sort of a demented companion piece to Season 4's superb "If-Then-Else." Shaw may have been locked up under Greer's guard for a bit too long following that episode, but the damage done was still really driven home well. Shaw, unable to fully grasp what was real or if she was a ticking time bomb, came back broken. Too broken too fully enjoy her brief time with Root, though, admittedly, she was rather emotionally unavailable to begin with.
Which is what made "6,741" so fascinating, because it was only within the simulation that Shaw, even as a double agent, was more free to explore her feelings. In the real world though, Shaw probably wound up with the relationships she could handle the most: Bear, some payphone missions, and Root's flirting voice in her ear. All in all, the perfect combination for Team Machine's "arrow."
Root's death, and quick ascension into the Machine - which is able to copy/predict/anticipate her to almost a hundred percent - may have felt like a cruel trade off at the time, but in the end, when we watched Amy Acker, now as the Machine, metaphorically place her hand on Reese's shoulder right before his death, it all felt right. And, ultimately, if you were to break down Root's journey from the beginning, this is a place she would have been honored to be in considering her total reverence for the Machine.
Michael Emerson continued to amaze as Finch and his dark turn in the final three episodes, following Root's sacrificial death, gave the show the gravity it needed to give us a sinister Samaritan showdown. By the end, you totally bought into Samaritan breaking out into the public, into Times Square, to try and speak to Finch directly, even though it felt like a moment ripped from a movie taking place in the future. So much groundwork had been done story-wise that all the "five minutes ahead" sci-fi stuff felt totally ingrained and possible.
The Verdict
Person of Interest's final season was a magnificent display of heart and smarts. It was a thrilling, intelligent action adventure that stabbed wickedly at the heart of of the artificial intelligence debate, and provided one of the best series finales of all time.
For more on the end of Person of Interest, check out our two post-mort interviews with executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman: The first about the series finale specifically, and the second looking back on the entire series.
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