Person of Interest Review: Shotseeker (Season 5 Episode 5)

Has everyone recovered from those last five minutes of Person of Interest? Are we all good? Okay.

In a slightly lower key episode, Team Machine get caught between two very different worlds: Finch and Root deal with Samaritan, while Reese and Fusco take on Bruce and Elias’ old regime.

I found it to be a huge shame that Elias was seemingly killed in the Season 4 finale, so naturally I was absolutely thrilled when it was revealed that Elias was not only alive, but under the protection of Finch and Reese.

He seems to be shaping up to be a bigger asset to Team Machine than he ever was before, but his story with Bruce seems far from done. Does Elias now know about Samaritan? Does he know about the Machine?

From what he said to Bruce, he seems to indicate that he has some kind of knowledge that New York is under a much bigger threat than just a mob war that they were all accustomed to.

ELIAS: Hello, old friend.

On the Samaritan front, the ASI is slowly infiltrating areas of great human consequence — should Samaritan have gained control of the food supply information that Root and Finch made public knowledge, it would have been in a position to decide who is and isn’t given access to food.

This could be a method of population control, which is a new and horrifying aspect to Samaritan’s already compromised moral code.

The evolution of Samaritan has been a masterclass of writing from the Person of Interest team. The slow, ominous crawl of the ASI to power and how it is manipulated by its human agents has been handled with great care and deliberation, which gives the audience a real, true feeling of fear at what may come next for not only the characters, but the entire world.

ROOT: A child needs to learn to push back on the playground.

Even when compressed and made into a bite-sized version of itself to battle an equally small version of the Machine, Samaritan’s programming is so aggressive that it wins every single fight.

At this point in time, the Machine just does not have the tools she needs to save the world — and it could be that the re-addition of Shaw to Team Machine proves to be the final piece of the “fight back” puzzle.

It’s disheartening to see the Machine lose. We’ve come to love the benevolent ASI as much as we have the human (and canine) characters around her. Seeing her stumble is hard to watch, especially knowing that some kind of catastrophic event is around the corner that could result in losing she and Team Machine entirely.

The true triumph of Person of Interest is its ability to make us root for an all-seeing ASI to pick up her bootstraps and fight the good fight, which usually involves spying on all of humanity without their knowledge.

Whatever happens next, I hope the Machine is up for it — because I am so not ready to lose that nerdy little computer program.

Stray Thoughts:

• Root’s friendship with Reese is so unexpected and so heartwarming. She went to war for him, which would be an unthinkable idea if this was a season ago. The character development! The character development!
• Bear has apparently hung out with Elias enough to score himself his own doggy bed next to Elias’. They’re probably best friends by now.
• Harold stepping back and not trusting Root is a bummer, but even she can see his reasons. It’s a good reminder that Finch can only evolve so fast before he has to pause for a moment and collect his bearings.
• Now that we’ve seen Shaw again, the team feels especially empty without her.

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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