I have the fodder for a longer post on the closing of season 2 of Person of Interest (the last two episodes) scrawled in a mini yellow pad from watching it on my elliptical machine again, but that will take a while (it's complex, intersecting the machine as golem with correlations between the machine and both Harold and Grace and Harold's statement earlier in the season about the "mystery of the human heart," throwing in a dash of my own interest in the "mystery of the human author").
But, for a short blurb here, I just wanted to get out a thought that came to me in that last episode. In my previous longer wrap-up of the whole series, I talked about it as a series of conversions or reversions: Reese was always on borrowed time but needed to be converted to the idea that his death could have meaning; Root converts from an idealog to being in Harold's family and following Harold's principle, and so she has a noble-sacrifice death and becomes the avatar of the machine; the whole arc can be seen as the process of the final full conversion of the machine (the ultimate idealog because the ultimate practitioner of logic) to Harold's principle of protecting life, which is what it is finally reborn with after the battle with Samaritan (the two "gods" fittingly fighting it out in space, "hyperboreans" that they are, a nice theomachy touch); Elias is more, like his name, an ally rather than a convert, and so he dies neither nobly like Root nor ignobly like Greer; Greer never converts form being an idealog; Carter never has to convert to Harold's principle of saving lives because she was already there and just needed to be sure she could work with them; Fusco has a reversion, in that he became a cop out of desire to do good, then got lost and needed to be found again.
In this post, I want to simply note what I call the "conversion by kindness" motif in these last episodes of season 2. Carter kind of converts Elias to more giving Harold's side a chance by the kindness of saving his life. It's also a matter of justice in stopping an injustice when she knows about it and can, but that's from her perspective; from the perspective of the person saved, Elias, it is a kindness, as he doesn't necessarily think that kind of justice is owed. And then there is Finch's kindness to Root in taking her with them because Hersch would kill her otherwise, and again, for Finch it is a matter of justice in that he would be unjust to her not to keep her from being killed when he could, but from Root's side, I think it plays as a kindness she can't wrap her mind around (but I think she converts in the end to wrapping her mind around in the form of being willing to lay off her sexual advances on Shaw to try to help her with her unsurety about what is real). And I also think that, for both Finch and Carter, the fact that it is a matter of justice does not preclude it from also being a matter of them caring about a person, an act of charity in the sense of valuing the other person as a person and personally wanting their well-being.
There is also the kindness Carter shows that is not respected or repaid: she doesn't shoot Tierny when he pleads on the grounds of having a family. If I write a further post on this, it will be called, "The Kindness of Detective Carter." There is also Carter's kindness to Fusco in getting him out of hot water with the body of Stills (and the evidence of Fusco's conversion in not killing Simmons). And I'm getting goose bumps already thinking about entering the season that has that amazing bit of visual story telling with the Johnny Cash version of "Hurt" (and that awesome shoot-out in the motel ... Simmons deserved what he got, and Elias's commentary on it is right to the point.
One last note on the the conversions and the co-incident presence of the Cash song (which had June in Cash's own video of it): It's well known that John Cash did not survive June by long. When she left on that trip, he was right behind her going on it with her. One strand of PoI could be seen as that kind of love story. That center of season 3 is that John Reese and Joss Carter have fallen in love and John reveals how she saved him. And then she is lost. And the series always had to end with him following her like Johnny Cash followed June Carter Cash (I live for those kind of coincidences, almost like the universe is doing wordplay: Johnny Cash's middle name begins with R. so it's John R., and June's maiden name was Carter, from the famous Carter family of performers, so he was "J. Carter" ... and if you want to have your heart ripped out, read her essay in the sleeve for the "Love" disc of the three-disc anthology hand-picked by Johnny with the disc titles being, "Love," "God," and "Murder").
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