What I’m Watching: Person of Interest

Person of Interest: Season 5, Episode 7 “QSO” (B+)

The overarching storyline and the diatribe on government oversight on this show are inarguably great, and sometimes this show goes a bit beyond that to provide some truly fascinating commentary on what it means to be a hero. Forget Samaritan and its manipulative use of Shaw to take out a target in the service of its core mission of keeping the world safe. What was cool about this episode – and different from most before it – was that Scott Adsit’s Max knew the dangers of what he was doing when he went on air about the code he had identified, and even though no one took him seriously, he still got killed by Samaritan because he made a choice. The notion of exercising free will as an undeniable and incontrovertible right makes everything our friends do so much more complicated, and that ties in also to Fusco’s decision to refuse any more help to Finch and Reese. It’s not that they don’t trust him, but rather that they want to protect him, but those two go together, and he can’t do as good a job saving people if he doesn’t understand what he’s truly doing. In her many different amusing identities, Root is communicating very directly with the machine, and fortunately it’s getting her much closer to finding Shaw, whose realization that she is no longer in a simulation coupled with the message from Root has given her renewed hope to get out of her current predicament. Now on to the episode that aired immediately after this one!