I’ve been not looking forward to this episode for weeks. When I was watching Deep Space Nine for three years, I had the advantage of ignorance, of not knowing, not remembering. I have been aware of this week’s episode for all the two years since I started watching Person of Interest again. Known it was coming, known what it brings. Known by how much we lose.
The sign is in the credits. If your Number’s up… The red box captures a known face, Harold Finch.
Harold is in fatalistic mood. He plans to close the Machine again but first he wants a talk, not that the Machine has a voice with which to respond. They are losing, they have lost, he will soon be dead. What pains Finch is that his helpers, John, Samantha, Sameen and Lionel, will all be dead too. Is there any path that can save them? No, almost certainly not. Harold is tired, tired of the fight. And he has, because he is human, because he has thoughts and feelings and a desire to give himself a momentary veneer of the life that once was, he has gone to a cafe that he knows. Where he took Grace ten years ago on their first ‘date’. Where the waitress recognises him and brings him the order they used to have. Harold has blown his own cover. From there it’s nothing but a countdown.
Root argues the case of the Machine, but Harold still resists. There are Rules, Rules he has imposed, and about which he has thought long and hard, and he will not bend. Nothing can make Harold Finch bend, nothing. He will allow the Machine a voice, and will let it choose the voice it wants. Against his will, Ms Groves has given the Machine the ability to defend itself but, in acknowledgement of Harold’s primary status, only if he asks it to do so.
John and Lionel are on the street. A phone rings. A Number is read out. It is Harold’s.
From this point the episode becomes an escalating battle. John and Root retrieve Harold from Professor Whistler’s office ahead of the goons, take him to the Safe House but that too has been blown. Carl Elias deals himself in. He will take Harold to a place of safety. Harold wants none of this, none of his friends to risk themselves helping him. Let him face his fate. Just doing the job you hired me for, John replies, saving a Number.
Elias takes Harold back to the Projects, where once John set out to save the life of teacher Charlie Burton. The gangs that war over it agree a truce out of respect for Elias and the man he respects: the goons won’t get past them.
Root and Sameen stay at the Safe House, fending off goons. John and Lionel visit Temporary Resolutions, the company employing the goons. The office is cleared in silence to create a trap for them but they blast their way out.
The goons get into the project. They don’t fare too well. The gangs act as a screen as Elias gets Harold out, to a waiting car, his driver William. But William is dead of a shot to the head. Carl Elias tells Harold to get in the car, he will drive himself. The door into the Project opens and Carl Elias turns to face it. He is shot through the forehead. Elias is dead. Harold is taken.
Taken to see John Greer. Harold refuses to give any information, demands he be killed now, his friends spared. But Greer’s certitude of his and only his rightness is swollen into fanaticism. Harold will be taken away. One day he will see, and will work for Samaritan, to develop and improve it, of his own free will.
Root and Shaw arrive in the street to start a pitched battle, guns and bullets everywhere in unfeasible numbers, one of the shows most impressive – and convincing though totally unrealistic – shoot-outs. Overlaid by one of Root’s most tangled philosophical arguments that, as they usually do when it’s Sameen, ends as a piece of outrageous flirting that brings a smile to our favourite lady assassin’s face.
Sameen stays behind to hold them off as Root drives away with Finch. But there’s another factor coming into play, Jeff Blackwell, under the robotic like directions of Samaritan, to travel down suburban streets, climb stairs to a vacant fifth floor apartment, assemble a high-powered rifle. He has a primary target, a passenger in a car that will shortly speed down this street near the river. At the last second, the driver sees him, swerves the car, fires a shot. He misses the passenger. But he hits the driver.
Though she pretends she’s alright, we know that Root has been hit, and hit bad. The Police stop the car. Harold is arrested and taken to Central. Samantha Groves is taken to hospital, in critical condition. Lionel follows her, John and Sameen head for Central, where Harold has fallen into the System. Reports of being seen at fifteen Homicide sites, fingerprints taken, attracting the FBI over a forty year old charge of Treason.
Can things get worse? Faced by an FBI Agent, Harold is silent. He’s at breaking point. As much as a warning to what may be listening as it is an admission to himself, he talks about playing by the Rules. All his life. He set Rules and he kept to them. They won’t tell him how Root is but Harold knows it’s bad. And so he will break his Rules. All that is left to decide is how many of them. But he will kill the ‘person’ listening. He is not talking to the FBI Agent but to ‘someone’ else.
We ave already gone through so much. We have lost one ally, one friend. Surely not… Surely not. But on his way to Holding, as Agencies argue over who is to have him, Finch is interrupted by a payphone ringing. “Hello Harold,” says a very familiar voice. Harold almost chokes with relief, asking with incredulity, “Ms Groves?” But this is the day the World went away. “No, Harold,” the Machine says, regretfully. “I chose a voice.” Samantha Groves, Root, is dead.
“Can you get me out of here?” Harold Finch asks. And it all goes black. To the quiet backdrop of the Nine Inch Nails song that gives this brutal, hope-slaying episode its name, John and Sameen arrive to a scene of chaos. Someone cut the powercable, six hundred prisoners are out of their cells. John reads it correctly when he says that Finch is no longer there. But in how many senses is that true?
This is not the end, but the beginning. At a very late hour, something new is beginning. We will watch it very carefully over the last three weeks.
