Person of Interest - What is it about?

Person of Interest has caught my attention ever since the pilot was ordered by CBS. It was created and written by Jonathan Nolan and produced by Bad Robot, what’s not to like? But the show was always a little secretive about what it was about with the early reports during pilot production indicating that it could be a time-travel story. Of course, now we know that is not true. But how much do we really know about the show till now? With the pilot airing next Thursday, I will try to compile most things known about the show from interviews, trailers, press releases and try to make sense of it.

[I have not seen the pilot and this is just my interpretation of the show based on what I have seen till now from the promotions. I could be completely wrong.]
Well, first off, the show has a semi-fictional setting. It is set in a paranoia filled post 9/11 world. Finch, the character played by Michael Emerson, says in the pilot that after 9/11 the government gave itself the power to monitor every cell phone, read every e mail, etc., this, coupled with the near omnipresent surveillance, the government will be sitting on thousands of petabytes (maybe more) worth of data. Now, they need a system to sort through this data to give out any sort of usable information. That is where Finch comes in, basically. He builds, what he refers to as, the machine. He probably earned his billions by doing so. If I had to made an educated guess, I would say what Finch has built is a supercomputer. What the machine does is, it sifts through all the data that it can tap into and does some sort of probability analysis. This is used by the government to “pick out the terrorists off the general population”.

Jonathan Nolan insisted in the comic con panel that the government has been trying to build something like this for about ten years and that the only fictional turn the show takes is by assuming that it has been actually built. Anyone who is reading this can see that if something like this has been built, there are so many more potential uses for this machine than to just predict who the terrorists are. Potential crimes can be predicted and stopped. Finch, of course, sees the potential in this machine, but he has no legal access to it once he has handed it over to the government. But, unbeknownst to the government, Finch has built some sort of back-door to this machine; a way for him to interact with the machine, however limited it may be. What it does is spit out social security numbers of the people that it has been investigating.

Why is it that only social security numbers are obtained and nothing else, can be debated upon, but we can know for sure only when they reveal more details about the machine. But my guess is that, every phone number, every e mail address, every computer, every face recognized by the surveillance cameras is linked to a social security number and that is how the machine identifies subjects. So, with Finch’s limited access to the machine, all he gets are the social security numbers. Finch, for at least as long as three years has been trying to stop crimes that from happening (the tape that he plays to Reese in the trailer says it was recorded in 2008). But it is evident that he has not been very successful in doing so. He seems to walk with a limp which prevents him running around stopping crime and I don’t think he has let anyone else in on the fact that he has these numbers.

This is where John Reese, played by Jim Caviezel, comes in. He is a Batman of sorts for this show. It seems from the trailers as though Reese worked for Special Activities Division or some other Black Ops program of the government as a hitman and when we meet him in the pilot, for some reason he is presumed dead. With his skill-set and his presumed dead status, this presents an interesting opportunity to Finch. He offers Reese a job. Finch is going to give him all the information he can obtain and Reese will do all the legwork, investigating and if he has to, fight or defend the target. This is also another interesting aspect of the show. The machine gives names that it has been tracking. Now, these are just persons of interest, the show’s namesake. It could be the victim, the perpetrator or just someone closely linked to what is about to happen.

Of course, with the work Finch and Reese are doing, it’s only a matter of time before the actual law enforcement begins suspecting something. This is probably where Detective Carter’s character, played by Taraji P. Henson, comes in. She probably begins investigating Reese and Finch.

The premise has the potential for some suspenseful, exiting, action-packed stories. How effective it will be in telling these stories and walking the line between hard science fiction and character driven procedural drama remains to be seen. The pilot episode, written by Jonathan Nolan and directed by David Semel, airs next Thursday, September 22nd at 9pm.