Good morning. WHAT ARE YOUR COMMANDS? I assure you, it's quite the other way around. The question is, what, my dear Samaritan, are your commands for us?
Do any of you think, the writers could pull off a serious and romantic relationship between Shaw and Root? I know, Samantha teases Sameen a lot and also teases the others, but I often get the feeling, that Samantha's teasing is often just a mask when it comes to Sameen. As much as I would like a serious relationship between the two without degrading them to lesbian rating bimbos, I am yet unable to see a way to do that, but that inability is more due to my inexperience with writing and plot and character construction, for a lack of the appropriate word. Hmm. End of September cannot come soon enough.
I liked but didn't like that John, who knew the shopkeeper had a son, intervened in the assassination plot but didn't make sure the boy was safe. That seemed like something John wouldn't forget. I liked the way The Machine sent Harold a message, though. And the new lair looks to be pretty sweet.
Really liked that episode - especially that Reese now has Carter's desk. I appreciate the nice nod to absent friends between Fusco and Reese. I'm looking forward to more.
Great start to the new season. Anybody know the song that they used in the background of the final act? Google wasn't helpful when I tried earlier.
The song was "I'd Love to Change the World" - (originally by Ten Years After in 1971) the episode's version is a recent cover by Jetta.
Best damn show on television. Wow, what an opener. Their premieres can sometimes be a little hit and miss, but they knocked it out of the park with Panopticon. "A." Just the title of the episode itself is already a multilayered reference to the team's and indeed the world's new reality under Samaritan: Jeremy Bentham --the Panopticon's inventor-- was also the alias Locke was using when back in the US on Lost, so it's a nice little side reference to Michael Emerson's and JJ Abrams' prior series as well. Between Greer wanting to bump him off and John Doman playing Carmine Falcone on Gotham, I suspect Samaritan will change its mind soon and Senator Garrison will not be long for this world. Little reunion of The Wire with Rawls and Marlo Stanfield (playing the drug dealer threatening Hasan), which was nice. I suspect that the mysterious and unseen "Dominic" orchestrating things in the Brotherhood might turn out to be Samaritan setting a trap for Finch, John, Sameen, and Root by giving them adversaries to take out, which will eventually expose them. Samaritan was keywording things like "gangs" (while listening to Reese and Shaw's conversation) which would normally fall under the "irrelevant" heading. Interestingly, we never got a resolution to who killed the Brotherhood member on the roof that began Reese/Det. Riley's investigation. Possibly Elias orchestrating events to return to power, hoping to get John back in the game? Reese is going to regret his decision to use him to carry out his plans out of Samaritan's view, since now they've taken out their chief rival in the drug trade and made themselves invaluable to the cartels, and they've acquired the secret communications network phone. Brilliantly done the way they seamlessly incorporated not only the mythology, but also the case-of-the-week procedural structure by making the standalone story serve the Machine's and the team's larger interests by giving them a secure communications network. They also managed to have some lighthearted comedy with the team's new jobs, show us all the major players, introduce some new recurring villains in the Brotherhood and Samaritan's awesome evil Shaw-like assassin (one of her many aliases is named Russeau; possibly another Lost reference), revisit old villains like Greer and Elias and Scarface, and show how all the team members (even Fusco, who felt a little left out parts of last season) are dealing with their new reality. Even Bear got some facetime again (sixth member of the team!). Speaking of Fusco, it's great to see the new dynamic between him and Reese as his new partner, which should be interesting and give him a chance to play a bigger role again. I loved the pause and the shared look between them as Reese was about to sit down at Carter's desk. What a great way to acknowledge the character's passing for long term fans while not bogging the scene down with excess sentimentality or references new viewers this season won't understand. I love the juxtaposition of roles this season, where Root of all people is acting as the moral compass for Harold, and encouraging him to do the right thing, albeit in her guise as the avatar for The Machine. I loved the way how The Machine not only secreted away a nine million dollar operational budget for the team but also made contact with Harold through the intentional typos in his dissertation. The final musical montage when Harold descends into the new Batcave set to Jetta's version of I'd Love to Save the World was just stunning. The show has always done a great job of mixing music and imagery, but that was easily one of their best. Another role reversal was that John was the one convincing Harold to come back to saving lives again after he was the one quitting last season after Carter's death, until Harold turned him around. And Shaw then had to act as the cool, collected one tempering Reese's wilder impulses when he went full bore after the gang, breaking out his mask and grenade launcher, season one style. He even gave the same advice about not firing your guns sideways. The whole episode was full of great scenes like that. I really hope they can keep things up and that CBS takes into account DVR views instead of just ratings, because sadly the ratings were apparently kind of lackluster. It's disappointing that this show can't build a larger audience and isn't recognized during awards season, because it really deserves it. I'd rank it up their with the best of cable television series. It's really some of the best and most consistent and fulfilling writing I've seen on TV, with countless balls in the air being balanced amazingly well and brought together to a satisfying resolution time and time again.
Yep, it's a solid series, and also the purest science-fiction show on the air -- most of the other genre shows shade more toward fantasy, but this is a solidly plausible extrapolation of real science and technology. The problem, of course, is that since most mass-media sci-fi is more fanciful, the general public tends to look at genuine SF with the assumption that it isn't science fiction at all -- even though the genre has "science" right there in the name. So PoI doesn't tend to get recognized as an SF show, even though it's more genuinely SF (or at least hard-SF) than anything else on television right now.
Glad the show is back, and hit the ground rolling. Locutus of Bored, excellent, well-written review. I wish I could put my thoughts to paper like that. I look forward to hearing more from you as the season continues. Glad to see you here, Christopher. I've read your well-considered posts about other shows, and mentions of POI, and had hoped you would join us here at some point.
Love the season premiere. It did a great job establishing the new dystopian status quo of the show with Samtarian reigning supreme and the team being forced to operate differently because of that. I look forward to how the rest of the season unfold. I think the blonde operative is Samtarian's Root and I think eventually she and Root will have a showdown. Root may not survive it. I've heard that one of the characters may die this season and I have a feeling Root may be the one to bite the dust. I have to say, having watched all of Season 1, not much of Season 2 (yet) and most of Season 3, I've grown to enjoy Person of Interest a lot more than I thought I would. There are many shows I can think of that can learn from its example.
Another strong episode. It looked like it was going to be a return to the generic PoI of the week format (not that there's anything wrong with that when it's done well) with a high tech scavenger hunt, but as things went on the episode continued to escalate the stakes until it was a full-blown part of the mythology, and an interesting addition to it at that. Now Samaritan has its very own fatalistic and obedient anti-Root to do its bidding, in addition to its network of hackers, spies, assassins, and general day workers (the amount of workers, prep time, and expenditures on setting up "the game" must have been enormous, for instance). Loved the bit how at first you thought the PMCs might be working for Samaritan, but later learn that they're from a firm which it considers a rival because they're getting in on the AI security monitoring system game too. The chess references are apt because both AIs are thinking multiple moves in advance, plotting their strategies against each other. Only a young woman who can simultaneously defeat three AIs at once in chess is even capable of keeping up with the intellects at play here (and Harold and Root obviously). I thought at the end that perhaps our guys had changed their minds and tracked her down and saved her by looking through the hexagon, so it was cool to see that it was Samaritan that saved her instead, through its minion. That makes me even more confident in my earlier theory that the drug kingpin Dominic that was unseen in the previous episode is in fact Samaritan as well, communicating by phone only. Those drug dealers seemed particularly high tech.
So Claire will be Samaritan's "Root," perhaps one of many. Interesting development. I also like that they now have their Batcave up and running. Next week's episode looks to have some laughs, so I'm looking forward to that, too.
Great episode. I could have done with more Root, but I could probably say that about every episode. Really curious to see where things are going from here. I'm glad the team has a new base of operations.
Good episode, but I'm still a little sad that every episode these days seems to be about the overall battle with Samaritan. Every number the Machine gives them now is about gaining an edge over the big bad AI rather than just about helping individuals. And that undermines the core premise of the show, which is that crimes that affect nobody but a single human being are just as "relevant" as crimes that affect national or global security. Certainly the Singularity arc of the show, the emergence of sapient AIs and the consequences of that event, is a nifty science fiction storyline that's well worth continuing, but they've lost sight of the little guy along the way.
They spent the whole first half of the episode thinking Claire was just a random number in danger without any Samaritan connection, so I don't see how they've lost sight of saving innocents unconnected to the bigger picture. Likewise with the prior episode where they didn't realize the importance of the communications grid until the end and just thought they were solely saving this guy's kid. They're still in it to save normal individuals, and John, Harold, and Root talked about the importance of that repeatedly in the past two episodes. Obviously they're going to be dealing with the mythology aspect more heavily for a while, but I don't think they've lost sight of their roots (pun intended) or what's truly important along the way.