The Bad Episode (Person of Interest)

This post was one that was sitting in the drafts bin for a long time. Friends have been watching Person of Interest with a couple of their oldest kids, and I have been over watching with them sometimes. The episode I'll mention is episode 20 of season 2 and they have just finished season 3, and they usually go about an episode per week and then sometimes have hiatuses. so this has been a while.

Anyway, it's episode 20 in season 2, which is episode # 43 of the whole series, and it's titled "In Extremis." Actually it was my friend's wife who was a bit unsettled by the episode, and that was when I noticed that, yeah, it was kind of problematic.

This is the episode where a research doctor is given radiation poisoning (radioactive material slipped into his water at a talk). The ethical problem is that, when they find this out, Reeses teams up with the doctor to find out who did it ... and make them pay. At least revenge killing is a distinctly possible interpretation, and that is very ethically problematic. One could say that perhaps this guy was so far up the chair of power that killing him was the only way to insure that he would not be able to kill again, but Reese's "black hole" thing from some other episode seems pretty effective at stopping even somebody so high up. It really does seem as thought the killing was for revenge.

And it is really bad if Finch was involved. He seems to be busy throughout most of the episode helping Carter deal with Simmons' attempt to get Fusco taken out by Internal Affairs, but there is the scene where Finch is in the banquet room where the doctor drank the radiation and is the one to find out it was in the drinking water provided .. and then he seems to be pouring some of it. If this is where Reese gets the radiation to poison the poisoner, and especially if Finch is willfully complicit, then it's not just Reese slipping back into his old ways a little; it's Finch going with him.

I still love the series overall. But even the best sometimes have some spurious stuff creep in. This episode does not stick out as the place where Finch started going dark, but rather as an odd-one-out written by somebody who did not get the character. Still, sad that it made it in.