A quick review of tonight's Person of Interest coming up just as soon as I send you an Emily Dickinson poem…
In my pre-season review, I noted that “Truth Be Told” wasn't my favorite of the four episodes CBS made available to critics. The show hasn't entirely evolved past Number of the Week episodes, but at this stage of the Samaritan arc, and in the midst of a shorter season than the previous four, the Number stories either have to have a significant twist (like the Machine's glitches in last night's outing), shed significant new light on one of our heroes, and/or be so flawlessly executed that it's standalone qualities prevent it from feeling like a speed bump on the race to the end.
“Truth Be Told” unfortunately didn't really hit any of those exceptions. It was a Reese spotlight, but not one that taught us much that was new about his time doing bad things for the government. We've been taken down this guilt-ridden road before, and while having the Number turn out to be the brother of one of his victims was a bit different from previous stories in this vein, it wasn't different enough. The presence of Keith David as one of Reese's former bosses perhaps has promise for down the road – with Control in Samaritan custody, the team's going to need some kind of friendly face in the intelligence community – but the A-story of “Truth Be Told” mostly dragged.
Root's stint as a package delivery driver helping Finch with ongoing Machine/Samaritan business was fun, at least, and I liked having Greer and Finch compete for narrating duties in the introductory segment, with the Samaritan-themed intro being far less benign: “But to it, you are all irrelevant. Victim or perpetrator, you stand in its way.”
What did everybody else think?