Tonight’s episode is the bridging chapter in the three-part wrap-up
to the whole “bringing down Alonzo and Simmons” saga, and in the last
few minutes, somebody dies. This in itself should not be news to anyone
who keeps half an eye on the show; CBS has done everything in its power
to alert viewers to the terrible news, short of digging up Royal Dano,
dressing him in black, and sending him door to door to frighten people.
It would be premature and overly pessimistic to say that, in its
determination to get the country revved up for a big honking
tear-jerking game changer of an episode,
Person Of Interest
jumped the shark, and it would also amount to rank ingratitude for what
was often a riveting hour of television. But the show definitely
overplayed its hand. It’s always been very good at surprises that come
out of nowhere—but tonight, the show practically sat in your lap,
whispering, “
Ooh, something big’s gonna go down tonight, I want
to be extra sure that you can handle it.” There were indeed a couple of
things that I had trouble handling, but not in a good, sensory-overload
kind of way.
If you’ve really been paying attention to the ads,
you may have gotten the message, loud and clear, that people who do
their Christmas shopping early for fictional characters needn’t waste
their money on Fusco this year. For the practiced observer of TV series
trying too hard to shock the bejesus out the audience, this was the
first clear sign that Fusco would be just fine. The second clear sign
came when Fusco was given a tender scene with the son I didn’t know he
had, who apparently lives with him. Maybe it’s been mentioned before
that Fusco has a son, and maybe we’ve even seen the little tyke. If we
did, it didn’t stick with me, because this was the first time the kid
was used to signal that Fusco has someone in his life that bad guys can
use for leverage when he’s captured and tortured. That having been
established, Simmons and his HR goons wasted no time in capturing and
torturing Fusco, after hauling him off to a fortune cookie factory.
Scenes
in which people are beaten on and have their fingers broken, and cry in
despair and plead for the lives of their children with the camera an
inch from their faces, are not generally to my liking. I suppose the
producers would explain that these scenes establish that Fusco is a
noble fellow who would suffer the torments of Hell before letting his
friends down (and that the HR guys are no-good bastards), but as a
regular viewer of
Person Of Interest, I knew this already. I also
knew that Fusco would probably manage to get the drop on his
tormentors, because one of them is played by Lee Tergesen, whose
smirking, sadistic crooked-cop character is pretty much carried over
directly from his appearances on
Longmire. Simmons
just runs into him on the street, and the show treats him as if he’s a
recurring character we’ve seen before, though he isn’t. But anyone who
watches TV immediately knows that he’s at least as despicable as
Simmons, so it tosses him into the mix so that Fusco will have the
chance to blow away someone as richly deserving of some violent payback
as Simmons. Fusco can’t blow Simmons away, because his services are
required at the end of the episode, when, as has been mentioned already,
somebody dies.
But thanks to the CBS publicity department, that
doesn’t come as a surprise. Here’s a surprise: Reese has the hots for
Carter. I did not see that coming, and I hope to never think about it
again, though it should at least provide some subtext for next week’s
episode. Just to be clear, Reese and Carter are both interesting and
sympathetic characters, and Jim Caviezel and Taraji P. Henson are both
attractive and likable performers. So when I say that seeing them kiss
made me throw up in my mouth a little, I’m referring to the queasiness
one may feel when a show seems to be pulling a major plot development
out of its ass, one that has not been sufficiently prepared for and that
does not ring true, just for the sake of an effect—say, to make it seem
especially sad when, later, somebody dies, and to explain why somebody
else is going to be especially broken up about it. But more about that
next week, I guarantee.
Anyway, for an attempted big event that
misfires, it has enough solid thriller effects to give a fan hope.
Somebody who works on this show has the proper love and respect for ’70s
movies: When HR puts out a city-wide contract on Reese and Finch
announces that “every criminal in New York” is gunning for him, Reese
and Carter are on a subway train that looks a little rundown by current
standards, and when the doors open and a bunch of hoods make a beeline
for Reese, the scene is so neo-
The Warriors that I was holding
out hope that a bunch of guys with clown makeup and baseball bats would
enter from the other end of the train. It’s just too bad that the
torture scenes and the prolonged shots of Reese and Carter mooning at
each other eat into the time that could have been spent further
developing that setup, or providing some followthrough on Finch’s
conversations with Root about the changing nature of The Machine and
their different relationships to it—or, as Root insists, “her.” After
the show has worked through its grieving period, it would be nice to
really explore that. I have always maintained that it is better to have
Amy Acker on a show where she doesn’t have anything to do but hang out
in a caged area of a library than to not have Amy Acker on the show at
all, but I’m not sure I want to see that theory really tested.
