Person of Interest Season 4
- Thread starter Bob Morton
- Start date
I'm fine with a 13-episode season in that it means they can hopefully weed out a lot of the filler episodes and focus on what's important. My only regret is that if this is indeed the final season, I don't think 13-episodes is going to be enough for Sarah Shahi to possibly make a return from her maternity leave and give Shaw a meaningful send-off. She might make a cameo, but it's not going to be any kind of significant presence. While I completely understand and respect her reasoning, I'm just a little bummed that we probably won't get a proper return and resolution to the character and her relationship with Root and the team, or see what Samaritan's goons have done to her with their brainwashing.
^That is disappointing, but we haven't seen when CBS is going to air the 13 episodes yet. Maybe they'll air them mid-season (like the final Mentalist episodes) and film them late '15 or early '16.
Maaaaybe that'll give Shahi enough time to return for a limited bit of screen time, but you're probably right when you wrote that it won't be enough time to square things away with her character.
Maaaaybe that'll give Shahi enough time to return for a limited bit of screen time, but you're probably right when you wrote that it won't be enough time to square things away with her character.
I can understand why they went that way with the highlight reel to try and attract new fans with the action, but it was a pretty misleading impression of the overall show. You'd barely know it's about AI at all (which is not surprising given that they've always downplayed the scifi aspects in promoting the show to CBS and the public), and you'd come away with the idea that Harold is some kind of gangland kingpin who says things like "Kill them all!" before sending Reese out to snuff out his enemies.
Best news all day! 
I'm happy but at the same time I'm getting more and more nervous/convinced this is going to be it for POI. Rushing her back from the "She's taking 2 years off and coming back in Season 6 for a major storyline" is a bit unsettling.
CBS is killing the show. They don't own it and it's not an episodic procedural. And throughout last season when they would air just one new episode, take a couple weeks off, then air another new episode, that kind of haphazard scheduling is the same thing they did to The Unit before they killed it.
Honestly i'd be ok if they ended the show after the 13 episodes of season 5.
It had a very good run with amazing storylines and characters and there is no need to ride the show to death to squeeze out the last buck they can.
It gives them 13 episodes which is more than enough to wrap everything if you leave out the single case episodes they have each season and concentrate only on the meta story.
It had a very good run with amazing storylines and characters and there is no need to ride the show to death to squeeze out the last buck they can.
It gives them 13 episodes which is more than enough to wrap everything if you leave out the single case episodes they have each season and concentrate only on the meta story.
Whereas I feel the show has gotten too far away from the standalones, or rather from the core premise that they represented: That individual lives are worth protecting, that a threat to an "irrelevant" individual is no less important than a threat to the freedom or survival of the nation. The whole ethical core of the show is that Finch rejected the government's idea that only the big picture mattered. Now that the good guys are just as focused on the big picture and the global threats, I feel that core message has been misplaced. Sure, they're still fighting for individual freedom over oppressive security, but the individuals have become more of an abstract idea than actual people getting hands-on protection.
But it was bound to happen, especially near the end of the show.
PoI has a story to tell that was 50/50 in the beginning between standalone shows and story arc episodes (and sometimes even the standalones turned out to be important later on).
As the overall story began to heat it it is inevitable that it takes up more time and that the characters won't have time to help single people anymore because they are under constant threat.
I don't mind this development and personally i like it because at this point it would feel like a break of the flow if they would stop and push in a standalone.
PoI has a story to tell that was 50/50 in the beginning between standalone shows and story arc episodes (and sometimes even the standalones turned out to be important later on).
As the overall story began to heat it it is inevitable that it takes up more time and that the characters won't have time to help single people anymore because they are under constant threat.
I don't mind this development and personally i like it because at this point it would feel like a break of the flow if they would stop and push in a standalone.
Maybe so, but maybe there's a way to structure that larger story so that it still includes a concern for helping the little guy. It just seems incongruous for a show whose original mission statement was "No single individual's peril is too small to ignore" to end up going "We're only doing arc stuff now, so we have to ignore the small perils of single individuals." If you have a story to tell about a larger global threat like Samaritan, fine, but don't lose sight of the street-level perspective of the ordinary citizens who are affected by that larger threat. Because they're the ones that Finch's mission is all about.
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