There’s a person of interest, they could be the criminal or the victim. A highly advanced machine telling a rag-tag team they need to investigate this person and stop the crime.
“I’ve got a list. A list of people who are about to be involved in very bad situations, murders, kidnappings. The people that are on my list, they have no idea that anything’s about to happen to them. Most of them are just – ordinary people.”
Set in modern-day America, there’s a machine that exists, one that listens to you, watches you and follows everything you do. It could just save your life, or might just stop you from taking another.
Enter, the tormented soul of John Reese (Jim Caviezel) an ex-military special ops man and pursuer of redemption. His past is dark, and one suspects far from squeaky clean, but what keeps him awake and determined in his actions is to protect the innocent. But it’s not enough, haunted by painful memories, he looks only to punish himself. Until one day, he’s approached by elusive billionaire Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), who might just be the man to understand his sense of guilt and responsibility; having had some experience of loss himself. However, like Reese, Finch is a private man, maybe even more so, and as such it takes them a while to trust and to share their stories. Thankfully, more is revealed to the audience through flashbacks, and in this you see Finch’s past being that much more interesting – building the machine, questioning ethics and learning just as much as he teaches.
Emboldened by the disaster of 9/11, Finch builds a machine to help stop these attacks from happening again, and how does it do this? By monitoring the activities of everyday Americans; emails, phone-calls, surveillance footage, browser history etc. From this information Finch’s machine decides who has the potential to be a terrorist; marking them as relevant, while others are just a “person of interest” to a crime – and thereby marked irrelevant. The machine discarding the latter, for the individual number of casualties are too small for the government to care about.
Unable to accept such harsh and uncaring attitudes, Finch steals the identities of those considered irrelevant, and with Reese they try to work out if the “person of interest” will be the victim or the villain.
The two lead personalities couldn’t be more chalk and cheese. Finch especially seeming out of place in Reese’s world of action, mayhem and just general spying. Oh, and did I mention that everyone thinks our heroes are dead? Wrongly of course, but if they want to keep working in the shadows they’ll have to keep everyone thinking that way. Unfortunately, a resourceful cop called Carter (Taraji P. Henson) is hot on their tails, if she catches them will she turn them in or will she find herself involved in their heroics?
Person of Interest successfully misses the usual trappings of predictability, with stories that interweave and with a constant shift in relationships; the baddies sometimes being the people you might just need. To top it off the show’s casting is fantastic, with Taraji P. Henson and Amy Acker (who joins later in the series as the character Root) being personal favourites, while the working relationship of Reese and Finch become something like family. Even Reese’s relationship with a questionable cop, Fusco (Kevin Chapman), provides some light-hearted banter.
As with any series, fan favourites go and new ones come along, such as the character Shaw (Sarah Shahi) who joins later in the second season as a tough and ready-to-go compatriot to Reese and Finch’s duo. But, as with any show there are characters that are eventually written out, and unfortunately this has the knock-on effect that the final season never seems to quite capture the magic of the earlier ones, and I can’t help but feel it’s because two certain characters are missing from them. Still, each episode will have you rooted to your seat.
Broadening out from the machine’s ability to identify “people of interest”, the series also explores control of personal information, misuse of power and the tightening grip of the government on freedom. Most excitingly however, it looks at the possible outcomes of artificial intelligence as the machine becomes sentient, searching within this the morals it has come to learn from watching others, including its creator Harold Finch.
In Person of Interest the outcomes are never quite what you expect, nor are its people. A vigilante crime-thriller that’s also one of the most realistic sci-fi series to be produced; investigating many of the issues we increasingly face as our technology grows.
Creator: Jonathan Nolan
Other notable works:
- Westworld 2016 –
- Interstellar 2014
- The Dark Knight Rises 2012
- The Dark Knight 2008
- The Prestige 2006
- Memento 2000
