By ANDY GILCHRIST
Staff Writer
“You are being watched.” This is not just the beginning of the opening narration of CBS’s crime drama series Person of Interest, it’s a fact. With the revelation that the NSA has been spying on private U.S. citizens for years, national paranoia is near an all-time high. Everything is being monitored: e-mails, cell phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, all of it. Everything you say or do is being observed by a man or a woman in a dark back room filled with monitors and computer screens. Freaked out yet?
Person of Interest, which predicted this type of behavior from the government years ago, takes that fear of surveillance and adds to it an action-thriller aspect that’s up to par with anything Hollywood is currently producing. Furthermore, the main characters use the government’s surveillance equipment for the benefit of the people, using it to save lives rather than for personal gain. By combining so many complex elements so seamlessly, Person of Interest has established itself as one of the best crime drama shows on television today.
The series follows John Reese (Jim Caviezel), an ex-CIA agent with a mysterious past who’s believed dead by his superiors. When the series opened two years ago, Reese was homeless on the streets of New York, when he was recruited by the equally mysterious Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), a reclusive billionaire also believed dead by the world at large. After 9/11, Finch was hired to build The Machine, a massive computer that was capable of monitoring every means of surveillance on Earth. The Machine deduced threats out in the world and sent the most dangerous ones, likely terrorists, to the government to take care of. The other threats, common crimes such as murder, were disposed of, until Finch began using a backdoor he built into The Machine to receive the data. Using his wealth and Reese’s special skills, the two began fighting crime on the streets of New York, saving one person at a time.
Over the past two years, they’ve amassed quite a supporting cast. They are aided by Detective Joss Carter (Taraji P. Henson), a former U.S. Army interrogator trying to raise a son alone in New York, and Detective Lionel Fusco (Kevin Chapman), a former crooked cop brought back onto the path of good by Reese and Finch. More recently, they’ve been joined by Samantha Shaw (Sarah Shahi), a recently-burned ex-CIA agent who had been working for the government taking out threats doled out by The Machine, until she started asking questions.
Their rogue’s gallery is equally impressive. Among them are Root (Amy Acker), a computer hacker who wishes to free The Machine from government control, and Carl Elias (Enrico Colantoni), illegitimate heir to a crime family who took over New York’s criminal underworld all by himself, before being captured and sent to prison. In addition, Reese and Finch face off against a corrupt squad of NYPD cops called HR, the shadow branch of the government that uses The Machine and knows that Reese and Finch are piggybacking information off of it, Reese’s old CIA team, who know he’s still alive, as well as the best and worst of New York City scum.
The biggest thing that makes this series work is the characters. Caviezel and Emerson are perfectly cast as the equally believed dead and even more mysterious Reese and Finch, both names of which are aliases by the way. Emerson commits to his role completely, accurately portraying the disabled genius who was caught in a bomb blast years earlier. The role requires him to limp everywhere he goes and not move his neck at all; he has never slipped up. Caviezel is also asked to give a physical performance every week, but in an entirely different way. The character is said to be an expert in hand-to-hand combat and is regularly forced to prove it. While this could turn the character into a one-note lethal weapon, Caviezel adds an emotional element that augments the character greatly. He creates a man who has been around the world and done things he’s not proud of, but keeps fighting the fight because it must be done. He’s a world-weary warrior, complete with a Christian Bale’s Batman-like raspy growl. Indeed, while he’s known as “The Man in the Suit” by the characters within the show, he’s often called “Homeless Batman” by fans watching at home.
But of course, it’s the mistrust in government that’s likely to bring new viewers to the show. Already the show has done the impossible, growing in number of viewers from season 1 to season 2, a trend that’s unlikely to reverse itself since the NSA scandal hit. While the government uses The Machine to spy on you “every hour of every day,” Reese and Finch use it for true good. While there is a clear moral ambiguity about the government violating privacy for safety, it’s clear that Reese and Finch are doing nothing bad. The Machine already exists and they merely use it to save lives. They don’t use any personal information they discover in their work at all, merely using it to save a life, then discard it and move on to the next number. They fight those who wish to control The Machine, literally going toe-to-toe with the government over the fate of private security in the United States. Everyone wants to control The Machine, to control all information in the world, and only John Reese, Harold Finch, and their allies stand in their way.
Person of Interest told us that we were being watched two years ago. They told us how it was being done and they told us who was doing it. But we didn’t listen. Now, we know that they’re watching us at all times and that they’ll never stop. Is the rest of the show true as well? Is it all just one big machine controlling all that data? Are there really people out there using this technology for good, the only ones who are protecting us from total invasion of privacy? At this point it doesn’t matter, because “if your number’s up… we’ll find you.”
