Person of Interest Review: A More Pefect Union (Season 5 Episode 6)

One of Person of Interest’s many strengths is its ability to mislead its audience.

Where many shows become predictable with their twists and turns in regards to their whodunnits and cases of the week, Person of Interest often manages to keep you guessing until the very end.

Much like the show itself, ‘A More Perfect Union’ seems relatively formulaic: Finch and Reese must crash a wedding to stop a nefarious plot from unfolding amongst a horse-racing family. It’s a simple, easy plot that clips along at steady pace.

However, much as Person of Interest was once thought of as another cop show on CBS’ roster, ‘A More Perfect Union’ reveals itself to have a maze of dimensions that represents the kind of storytelling the show has secretly been doing all along.

SHAW: That’s, what, 7,053 times you’ve tried to get me to murder my friends?

Be honest — when did you figure out Shaw was in a simulation? Unlike my early suspicions in ‘6,741’, I didn’t catch the slight unbelievability of Greer’s latest attempt to brainwash Shaw until the two were sitting outside a card game watching Samaritan agents thwart a threat of war between the US and Russia.

The plan was too easy, and the bombs too obvious — but even then, I believed that the circumstances that brought Shaw back out into the world were real, and that only the threat that Greer was using to try and bring her to Samaritan’s side was a ruse. It only becomes clear that we’re actually inside Samaritan’s 7,054th attempt to turn Shaw when the ASI blows up all of New York.

It’s getting harder and harder to tell the simulations apart from reality for Shaw, and for us.

Samaritan’s logic for getting Shaw on its side is thin. It (through Greer) posits that the Machine would not catch the threats against humanity as early as Samaritan does, which doesn’t make much sense to anyone who knows how the Machine works.

Samaritan is proposing catching the threat before the threat becomes a threat, and not before the threat commits an action. It acts as judge and jury — which we know is the core of why the Machine has her team in the first place at all. It’s a fitting reminder of how heartless Samaritan is, and how crucial the human element is to saving everything from the whole world, to one single life.

While Shaw may be tempted by the kind of world-saving that Samaritan provides, it’s clear that she knows exactly what kind of team she wants to be on. Shaw’s biggest defining characteristic is that she is the protector, and while Samaritan may allow her to protect the world, it’s on Samaritan’s terms only.

SHAW: You’re trying to convince me that I’m playing for the wrong team. It’s not working.

With the Machine, Shaw gets to make her own decisions and her own judgements on smaller (but no less important) cases. And she gets to protect her friends, too, which is the real heart of the whole matter — Shaw has been protecting her friends from Samaritan during the whole nine months of her imprisonment, so why give up that pillar of her strength to throw her lot in with Samaritan? Greer is appealing to the right part of Shaw, but neither he or Samaritan have considered that Shaw’s love for her friends matters, too.

FUSCO: I always get a partner that’s a dud.

Surprisingly, I found myself extremely drawn to Fusco’s story this week. His arc over the last six episodes has been the definition of a slow burn, and thus has ranked lower for me on my priority list while I waited for his story to unfold.

Fusco has always been on the outside of Team Machine, but now it looks like he’s going to be right in the epicentre of an explosion he had no idea was coming for him — and that’s all down to Team Machine. His investigation into the numerous missing persons cases leads him to Bruce Moran, Elias’ left hand man (his right was Anthony, rest his dramatic soul), and a strange mix-up that left the five families without the proper leverage over tunnel demolition in Brooklyn.

It took me a minute to grasp the actual story of why Bruce and the others even wanted the tunnel, but that seems irrelevant in the face of the truth of why the New York mobs missed out on the tunnel: Samaritan got there first.

Fusco not only uncovers the tunnel’s location, but the fate of ‘Shotseeker’s’ missing Krupa, as well as the current whereabouts of Bruce: roughly six feet under, along with all the other missing persons on Fusco’s radar. RIP Bruce, you and your slick hair won’t be as missed as Scarface, but Elias will surely mourn you and your hair gel.

We leave Fusco in the middle of an actual explosion. I certainly don’t believe this is the end of the stubborn detective, but I do believe this may be the last straw that breaks Team Machine’s back.

If they don’t tell him about Samaritan soon, Fusco could wind up dead — for real, this time.

Stray thoughts:

• Finch’s Irish accent was just…a horrible thing of beauty. Smart ass John claims to have heard his best friend’s singing voice before, which gives me far more questions than answers. Just how bored do those two get on stakeouts?
• Root! On a horse! Root on a horse! Root on a horse, kneecapping people! Did the writers make a list of things people had been tweeting them as badass Root ideas and then write them into the show? If so, bravo. If not, also bravo.
• Finch and Root’s dance and confessional was truly touching. Now that Root knows the Machine keeps losing to Samaritan, what will she do to help?

What did you think of this episode of Person of Interest? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Person of Interest airs Mondays and Tuesdays at 10/9c on CBS.

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