Drama
A Man in Full
Talent and intrigue ultimately can’t cloak the truth about this vulgar, crass and graphic drama on Netflix.
There’s something suspicious about Santa Claus.
Oh, sure, he seems nice and all—a right jolly old elf, really. But I’m not sure if I like the idea of him watching me while I sleep, or knowing when I’m awake, or somehow knowing if I’ve been bad or good. It makes me wonder … is my dog a North Pole informant? Are my houseplants keeping notes on my movements? If St. Nick wasn’t such a saint, and if he didn’t live on a sheet of lawless international ice up north, I’m sure his habits would stir a great deal of discussion about civil liberties.
Which brings us, oddly, to Person of Interest. Because you can really think about this sci-fi drama’s massive, information-gathering machine as a computerized Kris Kringle, or perhaps a binary Big Brother. It sees all, knows all and watches our every move—ostensibly for our own good.
Makes you feel safe, doesn’t it?
In its final season, Person of Interest has ironically come down to a match between two mostly all-knowing computers: Samaritan and the Machine, the latter developed by brilliant billionaire Harold Finch. Finch’s Machine has always stood at the center of the show, tasked with sifting through humongous piles of bits and bytes that make up modern-day society: our texts, our posts, our smiling visages when we take money out of the ATM. It was designed to look for terrorists, mostly. But to find them, it’s been told to sift through everyone else’s stuff too, like a shopper burrowing through a tub of DVDs to find the last copy of Big Fish.
So why let all that good, juicy info just go to waste? Why not secretly design the computer to search for non-terrorist but still criminal activity along the way? In fact, why not go after people who look like they might be involved in a crime? Hey! What if you could use the computer to stop murders before they’re actually committed?
Finch thought through all those things before he designed a back door into the computer’s software, telling it to spit out a Social Security number every time it detects a murder about to take place. The number might belong to the victim. It might belong to the killer. Finch doesn’t know. All he knows is that the person is involved somehow.
But Finch isn’t exactly a man of action. So he partners with a spook named John Reese, a former special ops military man and (perhaps) one-time assassin. “I don’t like to kill,” Reese tells a potential informant, “but I’m very, very good at it.”
As the series has progressed and gotten more serial, the show’s cast of characters has waxed and waned, with many dying to serve Finch’s cause and protect his artificial sidekick. Assassins, hackers, even mob bosses have all chipped in at one time or another. But now, as the story nears its conclusion, Finch’s friends are fading fast. And he must consider whether to unleash his biggest, strangest and most incisive friend—the computer he created. If Finch allows the Machine to run free and battle the other computer, Samaritan, it may save the world … but might it also end it?
Finch’s team historically has been out to prevent murders, not commit them. Not that that stops the dead bodies from piling up around him like dirty clothes around a hamper. Rarely does an episode of Person of Interest go fatality free.
That makes violence one of the bigger content concerns on this show. Passing references to and hints at sexuality (heterosexual and homosexual) pop up as well, and language can be harsh.
And then there’s that Santa-evoking premise itself, of course. But maybe it’s not so much the Santa-impersonating computer that’s really at issue. After all, the Machine’s just doing what it’s told. Rather, it’s the questionable decisions made by the human beings privy to its digital output.
Finch, you see, is using his creation illegally to thwart crimes before they happen. There are and have been serious questions about Reese’s criminal past. And every mission involves breaking a slew of civil laws (through eavesdropping and wiretapping) and moral ones (through cheating, lying, stealing and potentially killing).
So families will have to think a little bit about whether this is really the kind of thing that’ll get you on any kind of Christmastime “nice” list.
“The Day the World Went Away”
Samaritan is closing in on Finch, and it’s pulling out all the stops. Finch is pretty sure he’ll be dead before long, but he still holds out hope that some of his companions may survive. Alas, two key characters don’t make it out of the episode.
Mob boss Carl Elias brings Finch to an apartment complex surrounded by competing gangs, and they hole up in a place that used to be a meth lab. Elias brags that even Samaritan’s “all-seeing eye” can’t penetrate this world. But it does. Several gang members and Samaritan operatives are gunned down, including Elias himself: He’s shot in the forehead, with a small bullet hole and a trickle of blood marring his visage.
Root is shot twice: The first one is just a flesh wound (we see a glimpse of her bloodied side), the second is much more serious. She passes out and, later, we see her dead body in a hospital. Dozens of other people are wounded or killed: The episode features several frenetic shootouts, sometimes with massive weapons. The living and dead litter the floor/ground, some still writhing. Grenades are thrown. An SUV runs into another car and explodes, presumably killing those aboard.
Sexual significance can be seen in Shaw and Root holding hands. Root compliments Shaw on her figure during a shootout, and Shaw complains that she picks the strangest times to flirt. Root tells Finch that he “built God,” what with the machine knowing us better than we know ourselves. She describes human life as “a tiny finger tracing a line of the infinite.” Characters say “h—” three times, “d–n” and “a–” once. God’s name is misused once.
“The Devil’s Share”
Reese, Samantha Shaw and others search for Simmons, the dirty cop who murdered Carter in the previous episode. Reese—bleeding from previous injuries—crashes into a car with three bad guys in it, quizzes a badly bleeding man, then walks away while flames engulf the vehicle, killing those inside. He later neutralizes about a dozen U.S. Marshals.
He tells a key captive he needs info from, “I’m not going to threaten to kill you. I’m going to kill you whether you tell me or not.” And he adds that he can make “the last three minutes of your life last forever.” Finch, of course, comes in before Reese shoots, reminding him, “That’s not our purpose. We save lives. You save lives.”
“Not all of them,” Reese returns ominously.
Shaw throws a guy against a bar counter and punches him repeatedly in the face, splashing blood on a picture she’s carrying. She interrogates a man chained in the air by his wrists, and we hear that Reese has already broken his legs. Several people are shot, sometimes in the legs and sometimes fatally. A corpse is found—the man used, Shaw says, as “an ashtray” (implying a fiery torture) before being shot in the head.
Characters let loose “b‑‑ch,” “a‑‑,” “h‑‑‑” and “d‑‑n.”
“Identity Crisis”
The machine spits out the SSN for Jordan Hester. But Finch and Reese soon learn that “Jordan” is actually two people: One a worker bee at a corner dive and the other a buyer of high-end antiques. One, it would seem, is stealing the identity of the other.
The case leads Reese and Finch to an Ecstasy ring headed by one of the Jordans. Finch is drugged by an evildoer, making him comically high. Reese throws his quota of punches, knocking a few people out and shooting a baddie in the kneecaps. (There’s no blood, but we see the fellow writhing in pain.) He also throws a bottle of water into someone’s face, but his target thinks it’s acid as he screams in psychosomatic pain. Others are threatened and nearly killed. We hear “d‑‑mit” once, “h‑‑‑” three or four times and “b‑‑tard” twice.
“Mission Creep”
Finch and Reese investigate a decorated army veteran who’s mixed up in an armed robbery racket. Is he a bad guy? Legally, yes. But in the eyes of the show, the soldier’s evil deeds are at least partly justified by the fact that he’s putting the money into the college fund of a dead friend’s daughter. When a heist goes bad, we see two of his friends betrayed and shot to death (their bodies lie in the street). Reese saves the soldier, though, and instead of turning the robber in, allows him to escape with his girlfriend.
“He’s paid his dues,” Reese rationalizes. “He deserved a second chance.”
We see a corpse pocked with bloody bullet holes. We hear a brief description of how the soldier’s friend died. Reese head-butts a trash-talking banker, while the soldier hits the banker’s friend in the face.
Reese intercepts private texts and calls from others, and he takes covert pictures of them. Characters drink whiskey and beer; they say “b‑‑ch,” “h‑‑‑” and “d‑‑n.” The soldier’s girlfriend asks him to go apartment-hunting with her, apparently so the two can move in together.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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