A quick review of last night's Person of Interest coming up just as soon as I have a bit of liquid courage…
Where the Number of the Week story from “Truth Be Told” felt like too much of a throwback to less urgent days for the series, more recent episodes have done a better job of integrating the Number stories into the larger war against Samaritan. “Shotseeker” (which I didn't review) demonstrated how law-enforcement's increasing reliance on technology makes it an easy target for Samaritan, while last night's “A More Perfect Union” juggled a traditional Number story with a pair of Samaritan-driven subplots, with Greer trying to convince Shaw to switch sides(*) and Fusco's ignorance of all things Machine/Samaritan finally getting him into big trouble with the tunnel explosion.
(*) I know Shaw's in the position she's in because Sarah Shahi needed to leave the show as a full-time job, and that the series would have trouble functioning with Finch in that position – even if it might be amusing to put Root in charge of Team Machine for a bit – but I couldn't help lamenting that it wasn't Michael Emerson sitting there as Greer insisted that his group were the good guys, and Team Machine were the villains in all of this. Karmic retribution for all the times Ben Linus tried similar word games with Jack's group on Lost.
Yet as intriguing as both subplots were, the Number story carried the episode, because it was so much fun, and kept providing unexpectedly light moments for Caviezel, Emerson, and Acker to play, whether it was Reese's discomfort being at a bachelorette party with a cop stripper, Finch doing a terrible Irish brogue – and, better, using it to sing Twisted Sister's “We're Not Gonna Take It” – Reese using wedding gifts as weapons to take out one of the hitmen, or Root saving the day on horseback and, when the impressed photographer asks who she is, smoothly saying, “The caterer.” Over its run, PoI has become much more comfortable adding humor, knowing that jokes won't undercut the seriousness of the missions, and both this episode and “SNAFU” have been among the series' best at using humor to liven up what's now a very familiar structure.
We get two episodes tonight, as CBS tries to get the final season off the air as quickly as possible. Not sure I'll be seeing them immediately, but I'll try to review at least one of next week's episodes. In the meantime, what did everybody think of the country wedding adventure? And, given how close we are to the end, how worried are you about Fusco?