Person Of Interest - Episode 1.23 - Firewall (Season Finale) - Review

 

Person of Interest came with a lot of expectations, at least for me. Jonathan Nolan is my favorite screenwriter and when I heard he had created a show that Bad Robot was pitching to various networks, that was all the information I need to decide that I was going to watch this show. Of course, that sort of thinking puts a lot of expectations on the show, like I said. When the Pilot episode aired, I watched it with a certain amount of cynicism because no way it could meet my unrealistic expectations, and it didn't. The episode exceeded my expectations; it did not just excel at one or two departments, it was a great pilot overall. And ever since that episode, the show has continued to blown our minds with each new episode.

That this show had not  yet delivered a single bad episode put that much more pressure on the finale to be good. And it came full circle, because I watched the finale with the same sort of cynicism that I had before watching the first episode. Was it a finale worthy of the incredible first season? Yes, it was.

"Firewall" starts, unlike a regular episode, in the middle of the week's case. Finch calls Carter for help as Reese is in trouble. Before she has to chance to go and help him out, she is called into the "Real Time Crime Center" to help hunt him down. Then the show takes us about a day earlier to show how they got on to the case.

The number-of-the-week is Caroline Turing whose online profile Finch deems to be "carefully managed". She is a psychologist who may be targeted by one of her clients. Reese then follows their SOP: bluejacks her phone, monitors her workplace and eventually goes in as a patient. A client called Hans Friedrickson becomes the top suspect.

While all this is going on, Fusco has climbed the ladder of HR and gets a face to face meeting with the top brass. At the meeting he realizes that they have expanded their operations. Now they are in the murder for hire business and it just so happens that their target is "Team Machine"'s number of the week. Now, they need to track down the source of the threat whilst keeping an eye on Turing. Finch enlists the help of Zoe Morgan to help narrow down who ordered the hit. HR is quick to mobilize a team to take her down and Reese gets to them first and escapes with Turning. He walks into "the most heavily surveilled six-blocks in the world" and gets himself on the FBI radar.

Reese and Turing now find themselves stuck in Grand Point Hotel with both HR and FBI on their assess. FBI want Reese and HR want Turing. With the hotel under FBI surveillance and HR getting their information from Simmons, Finch's initial plan to get them out is foiled. While Finch scrambles to find another way out, Reese is dodging two teams of armed foes within the hotel. Not something you can keep doing for a long time. Turing, who initially diagnosed him as paranoid retracts it after seeing all the craziness around them to which Reese quotes Joseph Heller from Catch-22.

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you"

Finch discovers another way to get Reese out. He asks Reese to take the freight elevator to parking sublevel four where there is an old service tunnel which leads out to an old water treatment plant at the seaport. Zoe discovers that the real Hans Friedrickson is actually away on a business trip. The one we saw was a Jimmy White who was blackmailed by some anonymous party into impersonating Hans. The mystery seems to go even deeper than the shitstorm that it looks on the surface.

Alicia Corwin, who had been following Finch since episode 22 "No Good Deed", infiltrates Team Machine's base of operations and snoops around. Reese and Turing having survived for this long with the help of Carter seem to have reached a stalemate with the FBI who are ready to barge in and HR ready to blow them up from the floor below. Luckily, Finch had one last trick up his sleeve. He hacks into DHS's failsafe and shuts down every cell tower south of Canal Street thereby blocking out any and all communication between the FBI and HR teams, and their handlers. This gives Reese enough time to get to parking sublevel four where he spots HR's car with the rest of "the gear".

Carter suspects it is Fusco who has been feeding HR intel and confronts him only to find out that Fusco, too, has been helping "the man in the suit and another guy". Carter confirms this with the description of "the other guy". Fusco tells Carter he knows everyone inside HR and promises her that they can take them down once all this is over and they head over to help out Reese.

Let's face it. We knew this was gonna happen eventually.

Reese and Turing reach the service tunnel and he shows her the way out and goes back in and gets into a gunfight with HR. Just when is cornered, Carter and Fusco enter and provide suppressive fire while Reese gets in a car with them and they chase the HR team. Once they reach a safe enough area, Reese asks Carter to slow down and blows up the HR car with the bomb that he found in their vehicle. He then proceeds to walk away as though nothing happened which is kind of reminiscent of the scene in the Pilot episode where he walks out of the car crash after shooting Fusco.

Zoe goes to Turing's office to try and find out who could have paid White to intimidate her. But what she finds out, instead, is that Reese and Finch were set up. Her office and most everything in it, is fake. On her computer, Zoe sees the escrow transfer that HR received. But when she tries to access the computer, it automatically invokes a program that deletes all the files and goes into an infinite loop printing the string "#root".

As Finch waits for Turing to come out, Alicia gets into the car and demands he go with her and shut down the machine. She blames the machine for her current predicament and the death of Nathan. Finch explains to her that he machine is not bad in and of itself. But the people they gave it to shouldn't have been trusted. He in turn blames her for paying corrupt cops to target an innocent woman to get to him and just when she says she has no idea what he is talking about, a gunshot to the head kills her. If the previous scene hadn't done it, this makes it absolutely clear. Turing is not who she says he is. But it's too late.

Zoe calls Reese and tells him Turing had somehow found out how they operated and set the whole thing up so that they would find her. Turing aka Root explains to Finch that she put herself in danger but trusted them to save her. Reese reaches the seaport to find Alicia's dead body and no Finch. Fusco sends an anonymous mail to the FBI that leads to the arrest of the top brass of HR, except Simmons.

Reese looks for Finch, but when he is unsuccessful, as a last ditch effort, he looks at a surveillance camera nearby and says, "He is danger now because he was working for you. So you are going to help me get him back." In the machine's POV, we see that as it listens to Reese, it gets an error "Continuity of Operations Compromised" and starts evaluating options. Seconds later, a payphone near him starts ringing and he picks up.

At first, I thought this is like Eagle Eye and the machine has started communicating with Reese to save Finch. It is one possibility, I won't rule it out. Although, another more realistic possibility is that Finch has been captured and since he has access to the machine, the "continuity of operations" is compromised. And the phone call he received could be completely unrelated. I am sure any number of people could be tracking Reese and are trying to contact him. But we can't know for sure what all of that meant until next September.

Looking at the finale in terms of the ongoing plots, the finale ended HR storyline, although not completely. It also ended the FBI manhunt, for now. Looking back, we can see that while Elias story has ended, Elias himself is not dead. The machine's story is nowhere near completely revealed, neither is Reese's CIA story which has reached a crucial point and I suspect both of these stories are going to go on throughout the course of the series. Though none of the stories ended necessarily, we got some closure with most of them. What I liked about the finale is that it doesn't go astray from the regular format. Although the finale has a lot of moving parts, and there are some nice revelations, it remains within the confines of the number-of-the-week format which was nice. There were no flashbacks in this episode which was unexpected to me. 

Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman's writing was great. Richard J. Lewis, who previously directed "Root Cause", the episode that introduced Root, directed this one very well. I think in the end it's a job well done both as a finale, and as a Person of Interest episode. Season 2 can't be here soon enough!