PERSON OF INTEREST Recap: Eternal Vigilance

POI 3.06: Mors Praematura

Finch gets worried and sends Reese to Shaw’s apartment when he doesn’t hear from her for 24 hours.  He finds taser confetti next to her bed. Reese later finds security camera footage of Root abducting Shaw.

Root tells Shaw that she needs her help or the Machine might be destroyed and then innocent people will die. Shaw reluctantly agrees and the two of them form a bickering sociopathic sisterhood of sorts. They break into an apartment that is a CIA facility. After tazering the agent there, Root makes a call and reports that she has the asset – herself. When the other agents arrive, Shaw, with help from the Machine, pretends to be an agent bringing in a new asset.

This weeks’ POI is Tim Sloan, an estate investigator whose job is to determine who figure out who the next of kin is when someone dies without designating someone as an heir. Finch goes undercover as his assistant. Finch suspects that Sloan’s number came up because of his excessive interest in a recent apparent drug overdose. Sloan catches Finch following him and confronts him.

He tells Finch that the decedent, Jason Greenfield, was his foster brother. Jason was a hacker and Sloan thinks his death was not accidental – there was no other evidence of drug use, or strangely any computers recovered in his apartment. Finch helps him decode a damaged flash drive from the apartment that suggests that he feared for his life.

They look into some storage units based on an address Sloan finds in Greenfield’s apartment. The units are empty, but Finch realizes their purpose is not storage, but communication. The walls are covered with text written in ultraviolet ink. The units are also monitored by security cameras – once they find the text, they trigger a security measure and are locked in the unit which fills with gasoline. Reese conveniently arrives right in time to rescue them before the entire unit explodes.

Finch recognizes the text from the unit – it’s encrypted computer code from Collier, the man that killed Wayne Kruger  and shot Reese in the second episode of this season. He’s the leader of a militant privacy group called Eternal Vigilance, and apparently Jason was involved with them.

Reese and Sloan visit Greenfield’s apartment looking for the key to decrypt the computer code. They find a hidden book and Finch uses the title to crack the cipher and finds a plan to kill Greenfield, who apparently did not die of an overdose as everyone thought. Before they can act on this new info, Collier’s group breaks down the apartment door, disable Reese and Sloan with a flash grenade, and kidnap Sloan.

It turns out that the CIA has Greenfield, and he ends up in the cell right next to Root, of course. They bond over their computer hacking skills. He tells her that he agreed to help the feds track Eternal Vigilance once they turned violent and he wanted out, so he helped them fake his death so he could start over, but they screwed him over.  Collier wants to kill him for being a traitor.

Both Greenfield and Root are put in a truck to be transported to another facility. Shaw rides in the cab. Apparently Collier’s plan is to ambush the truck and kill him, but Root (and the Machine) are well ahead of him. Reese arrives right in time (of course!) based on the intel Finch got from the computer cipher.

Root helps Greenfield escape and gives him a new identity. The Machine wants to keep him alive. Root gets trapped by two of Collier’s men, but Shaw kills them and saves her, then knocks her out.

Reese confronts Collier (who has Sloan as a hostage) – he’s still understandably bitter about being shot in the back the last time they met. Collier shoots Sloan and then drives off, leaving Reese to save Sloan while he escapes.

Carter/Laskey

This story line was completely independent of the Reese/Finch/Shaw plot this week. One of Laskey’s jobs for HR is to collect “loyalty payments” and pass them on. Carter watches while he collects one from a childhood friend. He’s amazingly naive with regards to HR, despite them giving him permission to kill Carter previously. Later, Simmons confronts Laskey when the friend misses a payment. Simmons killed him and forces Laskey to bury him. Laskey is so disturbed that he tells Carter that he is actually Russian and that he was a plant from HR to improve their relationship with the Russian mob. Obviously he’s having some second thoughts now that it has all become personal.

My Thoughts:

There was an awful lot jammed into this episode, which made it a bit harder to follow than usual. Despite the complexity, it gave us an intriguing peek into what this season’s mythology will be about – Eternal Vigilance seems to be set up to be this season’s “big bad”.

Shaw seemed to agree a bit too easily to help Root, but she certainly knows enough of the Machine to be able to appreciate its power or maybe it just seemed appropriate to play along for a while. It’s not clear to me whether capturing Root and turning her over to Finch was her plan from the beginning, or if it was just that the option presented itself. I have to say that the chemistry between Root and Shaw is better than that between Shaw and Reese, maybe because both characters are stark raving mad.

We finally got some insight into the Machine’s endgame with Root – it feels threatened by Eternal Vigilance and seems to be using Root to fight it. Harold ending up with Root locked up in the library is certainly an interesting twist and I’m intrigued to see where that goes. Even for Finch, it seems like it would be impossible to keep her imprisoned if the Machine truly wants her out.

It’s still not clear what the role of Hersh and the anonymous female government official who directs him have to do with anything at this point. Clearly the Machine doesn’t see them as an immediate threat or it wouldn’t have made Root spare Hersh. Are they completely independent, or do they have some connection to Eternal Vigilance? We also haven’t found out what happened to him after Finch found Hersh injured in the mental hospital after Root’s escape. Maybe Finch has multiple cells in his library now??

For being a Russian plant in HR, you’d think that Laskey would have had a better idea of what was expected of him. I’m a bit suspicious that he’s putting on an act to get Carter to start to trust him a bit, but maybe it was that easy to swing him seeing as he’s still a naive rookie.

Memorable Quotes:

You’re going against the Machine’s wishes by keeping me here, Harold. You are making her angry – Root

How do you know that this isn’t where it wants you to be? – Finch

Watch Person of Interest on Tuesdays at 10/9c on CBS!