Person of Interest: "Ghosts"

Welcome to week 2 of our Person of Interest blog with Chris Doran, who has graciously agreed to join me week after week to discuss J.J. Abrams' latest effort. This week, I'll let Chris go first!

Chris:
Well, Nikki, I thought tonight’s episode got off to a promising start with our first peek at the new credits sequence. Very high tech, very sexy – and it took all the relevant information from Michael Emerson’s monologue last week about The Watching Machine and condensed it down to under a minute! The short scene that followed was a blueprint for what this show COULD do well – play with our expectations and deliver a little wry humor to go with the action sequences. Jim Caviezel forces his way onto an elevator, flashes that killer smile and the audience thinks the man with the flowers is in trouble. Well, he is … but not in the way that we expect. Bonus! A lawyer joke!

Sadly, the scene that immediately follows brings the enthusiasm to a screeching halt. Srsly? Caviezel following Emerson on the streets of New York while talking to him on the phone? The dialogue is painfully dull, the tension non-existent, and even Emerson’s disappearing act can’t liven things up. This scene, like the alley scene with guest star Natalie Zea in last week’s pilot, appears to have been spit out by TV Procedural Central. Unfortunately, there are a few of those in this week’s episode. Person of Interest needs to lean on its strengths more or pretty soon The Watching Machine will be coughing up Reese & Finch’s social security numbers.

But wait! Is that backstory I smell cookin’? The timeline shifts and LOST fans immediately recognize Goodwin –er, Brett Cullen as Ben –er, Emerson’s partner way back in 2002. Finch has yet to acquire his limp, The Machine is taking shape and optimism abounds that it can be a force for good. Good luck with that, fellas! As if this shout-out to Emerson’s previous series isn’t good enough, the next interlude serves him up to us standing on a pier overlooking a marina. Desmond, look out! That milk carton won’t stop a bullet!

… Um, Nurse Ratched, I think it’s time for my medication now. Over to you, Nikki! How did you find our second installment?

Nikki:
Haha! I definitely had my “oh my god, it’s Goodwin!” moment, too. (Oh, this show just won’t let go of the shackles of Lost, will it?) I wonder if “Our Founder” died in 2010 because he was impaled on a spear?

You know, I actually liked this week’s episode more than last week. I watched last week’s a second time and found the dialogue even more stilted the second time through, but this week’s wasn’t as bad. Sure, it had some wincey moments:
• The hitman looming towards Ben and Teresa at the end, holding up his gun, and… getting hit with a hail of gunfire EXACTLY the way he had half an hour earlier in the Laundromat. Seriously?
• The fact that Reese could take out two hitmen in an elevator but a kid on a skateboard evades him. Sigh.
• Michael Emerson’s walk. What… was that?! He changed the limp entirely, and now it’s not just a limp a la House, but more like he’s got a steel rod jammed up his ass that’s made his entire body rigid and unmoving, and he turns his entire body to the side instead of moving his head. I said to my husband, he moves like Pee-wee Herman, the way Pee-wee would always have his arms bent at the elbows with his hands limply hanging around his shoulders, moving his body rigidly from side to side and acting like his head didn’t turn. But maybe I was just getting Pee-wee vibes from that new haircut. (He was also wearing new glasses.)
• Why was Finch in the hotel room with the girl sans gun or the two bodyguards he had with him last week?

But overall, I really enjoyed this one. It moved away from the more mundane courtroom drama of last week’s (I remember being disappointed that the person of interest was a lawyer because it gave the episode a distinctly Law & Order feel) and to a family. The mystery was interesting, and while the solution was a little pat, I really liked the reunion between the aunt and Teresa at the end.

And the use of Roisin Murphy’s “The Truth” was FANTASTIC at the end. I’d never even heard the song before and immediately looked it up.

What did you think of the visual cues we got for segues? I thought they were a lot tighter this week, and they’ve developed that style for shifting from one scene to the next that seems to mark most Abrams shows (like the overview of buildings in Alias or the buildings with the block letters over them in Fringe).

Chris:
Well put, Nik. While the scenes themselves lacked a bit of the visual flair of the pilot, the segues were fantastic. These drive the premise of the show extremely well and carry us past some of the slightly creaky elements with great panache. I’m sure it would be distracting but I would actually like to see some more monitoring to get a sense of how The Machine is parsing the data and screening out the “irrelevant” information.

The bits of plot surrounding this week’s case were more or less successful by turns. Scenes of Reese surveilling the uncle were a bit blah while Finch interviewing the aunt was more interesting. Ultimately, the story is Theresa’s and things move a bit better when we’re with her. It was hugely enjoyable to see Reese get his butt kicked in the Laundromat (it was getting a bit stale to see him so easily overpower/outgun opponents) even if gunplay did save his bacon. Overall I see the show settling into a bit too much of a well-worn groove with the case-of-the-week elements.

Mr. Finch remains the more compelling character. Reese’s discovery of his “double life” as a Cube Nerd was interesting and the later flashback to another scene with Brett Cullen definitely had me wanting more of this kind of thing in future episodes. Did I ever tell you that I once saw Brett Cullen at the Long Beach airport? I resisted the urge to bother him and just reveled in my private LOST Geek Moment. I’ll save a few last thoughts and ask you how you feel the series is progressing. Getting better? Showing promise to break out of the formula? Tell us, O Goddess of the Nitewatch!

Nikki:
I’m the same as you: I’ve had spottings of famous people up close and I tend to keep my distance, because I’m always worried that if I walk up to them and say something and they’re total jerks, it’ll be a ruined experience. I tend to just revel in being close to them, like when I was in a customs lineup next to Stephen Fry last year. ;)

I thought Caviezel was excellent last week and really carried the show, with Emerson being a great sidekick. This week it was Emerson who carried the show, and Caviezel came off as a bit formulaic and dry. I think the cop who is tracking Finch is so separate from the story that every time I see her I go, “Oh yeah, right, she’s in there, too.” So they need to fix that if she’s going to be essential. Maybe she’ll be like the cop in the first season of Angel, who was hovering around him, trying to figure out his secret (even becoming a love interest) only to be dropped when she just came off as annoying.

So I think next week we really have to see both of the key players come to the fore. Lost’s first true masterpiece was in the third week, fourth episode, with “Walkabout,” so here’s hoping next week gives us the jawdropping excellence. For this week, I liked the laugh I got from Finch’s dry, “Guess I could use the miles,” when Reese says he booked the entire floor of the hotel. I thought moving the person of interest story to something more personal worked a lot more than the lawyer story did last week.

But mostly, I was intrigued by the backstory, as you say. Why wasn’t he limping back then? What happened to him? Does it have something to do with the Machine? I was so intrigued by the idea that this very wealthy man who owns a software company is so isolated that he actually pretends to be one of the office drones working for him. There were definitely elements that were added in this week that hadn’t been present last week, as if they showed the pilot and responded to audience requests and altered things. Among them:
• Give Finch severe scoliosis on top of the limp.
• Make Finch evasive, so where he sought out Reese in the first episode, now he keeps away from him as if he’s keeping secrets.
• Give Finch a darker backstory.
I half expected him, after dumping the box in the lobby when he was talking to Reese, to go through the revolving door and walk away, limpless, a la Keyzer Soze in the Usual Suspects.

Chris:
Okay, let me finish with a few Random Thoughts:

- We get another peek at the ASR (Awesome Server Room), this time tracking from a wide angle to the flashing LED on a specific server, the inverse of last week’s shot.
- From the looks of the hotel room where Reese brings Theresa, I’d be a little suspicious of that “$50 cheeseburger”. Does that come with the $20 fries or the $17 side salad?
- I have GOT to get that cool “Wiretap Established” app for my iPhone. I don’t even care if it WORKS. I just want to walk into offices, stare at the screen for a few seconds and say, “Yep, it works. We’re good here” and walk out.
- We went almost the entire episode without Reese shooting someone in the leg. Then, at nearly the Last Possible Second, he takes out the hitman with a shot to the knee. An almost sober night for the Legshot Drinking Game.
- I’m with you on Michael Emerson’s “limp”. He’s got to get some therapy or something. The poor man will need a body brace before the end of the season.

Overall, I think POI needs to find a way to integrate Taraji P. Henson into the main storyline more effectively and tighten up the scripts for the weekly case stories. That and ratchet up the direct connection to the Watching Machine. Who is running it now? What were the circumstances of Mr. Finch’s departure from active involvement? I feel that the show needs to step up its game or more viewers will be clicking over to the post-Steve Carell-Office. Thanks for sharing the blogverse, Nikki! See you next week.

Nikki:
Thanks, Chris! Tune in next week, where Finch will either be dragging his leg behind him or in a wheelchair, and Reese will, I hope, show the same charisma he had in the first week’s episode. I’m looking forward to it!