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POI watchalong: 2x11-2x13
This post covers three episodes to finish off the ginormous mid-season plot.
Episode summaries under the cut. My comments and further discussion will be on DreamWidth, because I'm having trouble getting LJ to load.
As always, anyone is welcome to join the discussion, but please, no spoilers for anything after the episodes discussed here.
2x11, "2πr"
Reese is in Riker's Island jail, in isolation, awaiting the results of DNA and fingerprint tests to sort out which of the men in suits is the man in a suit. Finch contacts him by somehow getting a phone into his cell and assures him that there's a contingency plan for this situation and he'll be free within 72 hours.
Meanwhile, Finch has to work the latest case himself with Fusco's help. The number is that of a high school student, Caleb Phipps, whose older brother Ryan was killed in 2010 when he was hit by a subway train, possibly after being pushed onto the tracks. Finch poses as a substitute math teacher to learn more about Phipps, who is brilliant but carefully keeps his grades and test scores average.
It turns out the Phipps has secretly become the supplier for the school's drug dealers. He has also coded a groundbreaking new data compression algorithm; his computer science teacher, Chris Beckner, meets with a venture capitalist and seems prepared to sell the algorithm as his own work. Meanwhile, the school's previous drug supplier threatens Caleb unless Caleb pays back all the money he made.
When Finch confronts him, Beckner denies having stolen Caleb's algorithm--he's going to give Caleb full credit and all the money. But Caleb only asked for half the money, in a trust fund for his alcoholic mother. Finch realizes that Caleb plans to kill himself out of guilt for his brother's death--Ryan was never pushed, instead he was killed because the two brothers were racing across the tracks. Finch finds him at the subway station where his brother was killed and talks him out of suicide.
Meanwhile, Carter has deleted Reese's fingerprints from the system and swapped his DNA sample for someone else's. This should lead to Reese being released, but at the last moment, FBI Agent Donnelly orders all four men held as "unlawful combatants" until their identities are proven to his satisfaction.
2x12, "Prisoner's Dilemma"
Donnelly asks Carter, as a former army interrogator, to question the four "man in the suit" suspects. She spends much of the episode interrogating them, with Agent Donnelly communicating with her via an earpiece that Finch eventually hacks into. Finch, meanwhile, is preparing a plan to break Reese out of Riker's island if necessary, and has sent Fusco to assist the latest number, a supermodel (throughout the episode we see moments of their adventures). And the CIA, or whoever they are who've been trying to eliminate the "rogue agent," infiltrate an assassin into Riker's Island to kill all four possiblities.
One suspect, Kelly, is quickly broken and eliminated as possibly being the man in the suit. Meanwhile, Reese is sent out to the exercise yard, where he's confronted by the Aryan gang from several episodes ago and then by Elias, who offers to help, though Reese has to refuse any obvious protection.
As the interrogation continues, Reese offers Carter an only slightly falsified version of much of his own background as we know it, with Finch creating evidence for the details Reese invents. Another suspect breaks and offers to identify the man in a suit, but Finch contacts him and persuades him, by threatening his family's finances, to change his mind. So he fingers the last remaining suspect who isn't Reese. But meanwhile, the assassin has killed Kelly, leading Donnelly to believe the whole investigation is compromised and that "Warren"/Reese must be the right man. Further interrogation provides no evidence, so Donnelly sends Reese out into the yard unprotected, to see if, when attacked by the Aryans, he'll show his combat training. Instead Reese allows himself to be beaten up until Elias eventually stops the fighting. And Carter gets the last suspect, Holt, to reveal a military background that makes him seem like the man in a suit.
Reese is freed, just as Finch was preparing to start breaking him out. But Donnelly follows either Carter or Reese to their meeting and arrests them both, planning to take them to a safe house until he finds a contact he can trust.
Finch, trying to track down what has happened to Carter and Reese, gets a ringing payphone that signifies a new number. He tries not to answer, but every phone he passes starts to ring and eventually he gives in. The number is Agent Donnelly's. Finch calls him, but too late to prevent his car from being deliberately hit by a truck. While Donnelly, Finch, and Reese are dazed in the wreckage, Kara Stanton approaches, shoots Donnelly dead, and drugs Reese.
At intervals throughout the episode we see flashbacks of Reese's work with Stanton, focusing on how she trained him to suppress his emotions and conscience.
2x13, "Dead Reckoning"
Reese wakes up to find himself Kara Stanton's prisoner. She's put a bomb vest on him and makes him and Mark Snow perform various tasks. First they pick up the hard drive Snow previously stole, which has now been formatted to Stanton's specs by cyber-criminals. Then they attack two ATF agents, taking their car and their jackets, and immediately receive a call on one agent's phone telling them they need to report a building where there's been a bomb threat. Before discarding the phone, Reese uses it to text "UXO" to Finch, who's been desperately trying to track him down with Carter and Fusco's help. "UXO" means "unexploded ordinance," and that plus the info on the phone's owners directs Finch's attention to the building.
Carter and Fusco go to the building while Finch tries to work out what's happening. Meanwhile, Reese and Snow have infiltrated a secret Defense Department lab on the top floor that produces cyberweapons to attack enemy computer systems. Since the lab is shielded from all electronic contact, Stanton sets the bomb timers to 15 minutes. Believing Stanton intends to steal a supervirus, Reese gets a scientist to wipe the entire system. He also calls Finch and tells him to stay away from the building. Stanton arrives and it turns out that her aim wasn't to steal anything, but to use the hard drive to insert her own program into the system. Once that's accomplished she resets Reese's and Snow's timers to 5 minutes, locks them in, and exits.
They manage to override the door lock, and Reese tries to convince Snow to go with him to get away from civilians before their bombs explode, but Snow escapes, saying he'll try to get to a CIA safe house nearby. Carter and Fusco arrive, but Reese sends them away for their own safety. Reese then goes to the roof, where he finds Finch waiting for him. Finch refuses to be sent away and manages to defuse the bomb at the last moment.
Throughout the episode are flashbacks showing how Stanton, after surviving the Ordos attack, was approached by an Englishman working on behalf on an unnamed agency. He offers her the name of the person who sold the laptop in exchange for her help with the project she's just completed. But when Stanton returns to her car, Snow is there waiting for her. Snow's bomb vest explodes, killing them both.
Finch is unable to figure out what's on the hard drive beyond the fact that it's set to take effect in five months. Carter learns that the FBI have decided that Snow was the man in a suit and have officially closed the case.
In the final scene, we flash back to the explosion of Stanton's car, and see the name that the mystery agent gave her: Harold Finch.
Episode summaries under the cut. My comments and further discussion will be on DreamWidth, because I'm having trouble getting LJ to load.
As always, anyone is welcome to join the discussion, but please, no spoilers for anything after the episodes discussed here.
2x11, "2πr"
Reese is in Riker's Island jail, in isolation, awaiting the results of DNA and fingerprint tests to sort out which of the men in suits is the man in a suit. Finch contacts him by somehow getting a phone into his cell and assures him that there's a contingency plan for this situation and he'll be free within 72 hours.
Meanwhile, Finch has to work the latest case himself with Fusco's help. The number is that of a high school student, Caleb Phipps, whose older brother Ryan was killed in 2010 when he was hit by a subway train, possibly after being pushed onto the tracks. Finch poses as a substitute math teacher to learn more about Phipps, who is brilliant but carefully keeps his grades and test scores average.
It turns out the Phipps has secretly become the supplier for the school's drug dealers. He has also coded a groundbreaking new data compression algorithm; his computer science teacher, Chris Beckner, meets with a venture capitalist and seems prepared to sell the algorithm as his own work. Meanwhile, the school's previous drug supplier threatens Caleb unless Caleb pays back all the money he made.
When Finch confronts him, Beckner denies having stolen Caleb's algorithm--he's going to give Caleb full credit and all the money. But Caleb only asked for half the money, in a trust fund for his alcoholic mother. Finch realizes that Caleb plans to kill himself out of guilt for his brother's death--Ryan was never pushed, instead he was killed because the two brothers were racing across the tracks. Finch finds him at the subway station where his brother was killed and talks him out of suicide.
Meanwhile, Carter has deleted Reese's fingerprints from the system and swapped his DNA sample for someone else's. This should lead to Reese being released, but at the last moment, FBI Agent Donnelly orders all four men held as "unlawful combatants" until their identities are proven to his satisfaction.
2x12, "Prisoner's Dilemma"
Donnelly asks Carter, as a former army interrogator, to question the four "man in the suit" suspects. She spends much of the episode interrogating them, with Agent Donnelly communicating with her via an earpiece that Finch eventually hacks into. Finch, meanwhile, is preparing a plan to break Reese out of Riker's island if necessary, and has sent Fusco to assist the latest number, a supermodel (throughout the episode we see moments of their adventures). And the CIA, or whoever they are who've been trying to eliminate the "rogue agent," infiltrate an assassin into Riker's Island to kill all four possiblities.
One suspect, Kelly, is quickly broken and eliminated as possibly being the man in the suit. Meanwhile, Reese is sent out to the exercise yard, where he's confronted by the Aryan gang from several episodes ago and then by Elias, who offers to help, though Reese has to refuse any obvious protection.
As the interrogation continues, Reese offers Carter an only slightly falsified version of much of his own background as we know it, with Finch creating evidence for the details Reese invents. Another suspect breaks and offers to identify the man in a suit, but Finch contacts him and persuades him, by threatening his family's finances, to change his mind. So he fingers the last remaining suspect who isn't Reese. But meanwhile, the assassin has killed Kelly, leading Donnelly to believe the whole investigation is compromised and that "Warren"/Reese must be the right man. Further interrogation provides no evidence, so Donnelly sends Reese out into the yard unprotected, to see if, when attacked by the Aryans, he'll show his combat training. Instead Reese allows himself to be beaten up until Elias eventually stops the fighting. And Carter gets the last suspect, Holt, to reveal a military background that makes him seem like the man in a suit.
Reese is freed, just as Finch was preparing to start breaking him out. But Donnelly follows either Carter or Reese to their meeting and arrests them both, planning to take them to a safe house until he finds a contact he can trust.
Finch, trying to track down what has happened to Carter and Reese, gets a ringing payphone that signifies a new number. He tries not to answer, but every phone he passes starts to ring and eventually he gives in. The number is Agent Donnelly's. Finch calls him, but too late to prevent his car from being deliberately hit by a truck. While Donnelly, Finch, and Reese are dazed in the wreckage, Kara Stanton approaches, shoots Donnelly dead, and drugs Reese.
At intervals throughout the episode we see flashbacks of Reese's work with Stanton, focusing on how she trained him to suppress his emotions and conscience.
2x13, "Dead Reckoning"
Reese wakes up to find himself Kara Stanton's prisoner. She's put a bomb vest on him and makes him and Mark Snow perform various tasks. First they pick up the hard drive Snow previously stole, which has now been formatted to Stanton's specs by cyber-criminals. Then they attack two ATF agents, taking their car and their jackets, and immediately receive a call on one agent's phone telling them they need to report a building where there's been a bomb threat. Before discarding the phone, Reese uses it to text "UXO" to Finch, who's been desperately trying to track him down with Carter and Fusco's help. "UXO" means "unexploded ordinance," and that plus the info on the phone's owners directs Finch's attention to the building.
Carter and Fusco go to the building while Finch tries to work out what's happening. Meanwhile, Reese and Snow have infiltrated a secret Defense Department lab on the top floor that produces cyberweapons to attack enemy computer systems. Since the lab is shielded from all electronic contact, Stanton sets the bomb timers to 15 minutes. Believing Stanton intends to steal a supervirus, Reese gets a scientist to wipe the entire system. He also calls Finch and tells him to stay away from the building. Stanton arrives and it turns out that her aim wasn't to steal anything, but to use the hard drive to insert her own program into the system. Once that's accomplished she resets Reese's and Snow's timers to 5 minutes, locks them in, and exits.
They manage to override the door lock, and Reese tries to convince Snow to go with him to get away from civilians before their bombs explode, but Snow escapes, saying he'll try to get to a CIA safe house nearby. Carter and Fusco arrive, but Reese sends them away for their own safety. Reese then goes to the roof, where he finds Finch waiting for him. Finch refuses to be sent away and manages to defuse the bomb at the last moment.
Throughout the episode are flashbacks showing how Stanton, after surviving the Ordos attack, was approached by an Englishman working on behalf on an unnamed agency. He offers her the name of the person who sold the laptop in exchange for her help with the project she's just completed. But when Stanton returns to her car, Snow is there waiting for her. Snow's bomb vest explodes, killing them both.
Finch is unable to figure out what's on the hard drive beyond the fact that it's set to take effect in five months. Carter learns that the FBI have decided that Snow was the man in a suit and have officially closed the case.
In the final scene, we flash back to the explosion of Stanton's car, and see the name that the mystery agent gave her: Harold Finch.
2x13, "Dead Reckoning"
2) So, Finch sold the laptop to China, thus causing Reese and Stanton to be sent to "retrieve" it. I can't think of a good reason why he'd sell what presumably was a copy of the machine's operating system. And we know that whatever was on the laptop was encrypted and the encryption wasn't successfully broken. So what was he trying to achieve by this? If he wanted to stop the machine from being used, he'd have gone public with his knowledge (even anonymously). And I don't believe he actually wanted the Chinese government to have a machine of its own. Anyway, regardless of what he was trying to do, one effect was to do Reese a good deal of harm, a fact which I'm sure is going to come up and bite them both. Finch is aware of that, hence his "Please, don't mention it" when Reese thanks him. And was selling the laptop also the trigger for whatever happened to Nathan and Finch himself?
3) Okay, enough plot. Though this episode gave me so much of what I wanted that it's almost hard to talk about it. First of all, the scene of depressed!thoughtful!Finch, clearly missing Reese, and reassuring Bear "We'll get him back, I promise." As I said earlier, the show is using Bear as a way to demonstrate Finch and Reese's feelings for each other.
4) "Harold, I need you to stay clear of the building." Oh, Reese, you've come over all Noble Suicide but you have to make sure Reese is safe. Which is genuine, but I wonder if subconsciously it's also a version of Finch's "I'll make sure no one can save me" gesture from the end of S1, a sort of quiet plea that the other one will in fact care enough to come and save him. Reese definitely should have known that Finch's reaction to "stay clear of the building" would be "What the hell is he planning? I'd better get over there NOW." Just like his reaction in S1 to "CIA agents are trying to kill me, save yourself!" was to floor the gas.
5) I will not ask how Finch got himself onto the roof, but will vigorously suspend my disbelief, because it leads to . . .
6) The bomb-defusing scene of LOVE and AWESOMENESS. Unlike Carter and Fusco, Finch refuses to be sent away even when Reese pulls a gun (to be fair to Carter, her decision was about her son, not her own fears). And there's such lovely dialogue in which all the things they've never been able to say get said, albeit in indirect ways that suit their repressed personalities. When Reese says that this is his past catching up with him and doesn't concern Finch, Finch says, "But this moment does. I'm not leaving you here, John." And there's this fantastic exchange: "I'm pretty sure I'd be dead already if you hadn't found me." "It's hard to say." "Not really." All that on top of Finch's decision that he'd rather be blown up with Reese than just let him die. This is like his Riker's Island jailbreak plan, only more so. And unless Finch has another contingency plan we don't know about, he knows that if he and Reese both die, there'll be no one to do anything about the numbers. So he's willing to sacrifice not just himself but his whole mission to try and save Reese.
7) I'm curious about which part of bomb defusal protocol requires Finch to unbutton Reese's shirt (as opposed to Reese doing it himself). A wonderful part, obviously.
8) In that moment after Finch turns off the bomb, when they're standing there with their eyes closed, breathing heavily, overwhelmed with relief, and then the camera cuts away and we don't come back to them until the other bomb goes off? I choose to believe there was . . . something. A kiss? A hug? Something they were both embarrassed about afterwards but secretly treasure the memory of.
9) Then, just when I thought it couldn't get any better, there was the scene of Reese coming back to the library. Bear goes wild with joy, and Reese and Finch just give each other those amazing looks and smiles. And then Bear knocks Reese to the floor and leaps on top of him, which I'm sure is what Finch would do if he were less repressed.
10) This is really not a ship I was sold on from the beginning, or even a ship I was entirely inclined to like. But, damn, I can deny it no longer.
11) I wanted to end on a happy note, but . . . one thing I've been expecting to happen, because I have watched TV before, is that something will create a serious conflict between Reese and Finch. Finch having sold the laptop could be the thing.
Re: 2x13, "Dead Reckoning"
But yeah, I liked this ship from the beginning, and the rooftop bomb-vest scene is THE moment. Remember it; treasure it. I do.
Re: 2x13, "Dead Reckoning"
1&2) Agree on both of these. I thought Mysterious Englishman was Wesley at first. I am getting quite lost in all the various agencies now chasing Reese and/or Finch and/or the Machine. I think I need a giant 'investigating stuff' board with pictures connected with string on drawing pins like they have on TV...
Why would Finch sell the laptop indeed? Although, was it Finch? At this point, surely, pretending to be 'Harold Crane' in imitation of Finch could be done by a couple of people (Nathan? Alicia? Grace even?) Also, how can 'Harold Crane' not be on any known database? Surely there is at least one Harold Crane in the whole USA, just randomly? (nitpick)
Good point about how it did Reese harm (is *this* even the first instance of Finch getting interested in Reese's case?)
3) Ah, the 'we'll get him back' is this episode, sorry, got a little mixed over watching these over a few days!
And then askjgionweong;kojhohg the roof scene OMG...
Parallels between this and Finch trying to nobly sacrifice himself at the start of the season, yes. Parallels in the devotion of the other to get to their partner. Interestingly reminiscient of the rooftop scene with Sherlock and John in 'Sherlock' with the 'if you tell me to leave you alone I think I'll run like hell towards you actually' measure of loyalty.
And yes, Finch insisting on staying when no one else will. Agreed, Carter has good reason to save herself and this is part of what makes the Reese/Finch realtionship what it is - they have nothing and no-one else. This is it for them. They've basically both said they'd rather be dead together than alive separately, which is just.. this is what I mean about how adding sex would not add much, really, to the depth of feeling already between them (well it would allow more expression and change some things, but being ready to die for someone is about as intense as it gets. Or to put it another way, plenty of people sleep with people they wouldn't die for...)
I also think there's an amusing metaphor with the expression of feelings, gun and bomb vest: 'Don't come near me with feelings or I'll hurt you!' 'No, no, I will have the feelings, and you want them really, don't you?' 'OK, I want the feelings, but the feelings will kill us both!' 'No, it's OK, trust me, we will not die just because of the feelings'
8) THE CUT AWAY I AM SO GLAD YOU ALSO NOTICED THAT. Really really annoyed me. I'm thinking a nearly-hug with pressing of faces to necks and hair-smelling...
9)And then Bear knocks Reese to the floor and leaps on top of him, which I'm sure is what Finch would do if he were less repressed
YOU ARE READING MY MIND HERE *g*
Re: 2x13, "Dead Reckoning"
3) this is what I mean about how adding sex would not add much, really, to the depth of feeling already between them
I was skeptical of this, as you know, but I can see it at this point. I do think that sex would add certain vulnerabilities and potential complications, since it's so tied up with body image and self-esteem. But the love, and the emotional vulnerability created by love, are already there and declared in actions if not in words. A lot of the fics I've read show them as being hesitant to take that last step into sexual intimacy on top of everything else, but I could just as easily see them shrugging and saying "Why not?" Possibly with Reese afterwards teasing Finch along the lines of, "Do you remember there was a time when you wouldn't tell me what you ate for breakfast?" Of course Finch is still keeping a lot of his life secret despite the mutual "I would die for/with you" stuff, because Finch is weird that way.
8) I'm thinking a nearly-hug with pressing of faces to necks and hair-smelling
*nods* Somehow a kiss or an ordinary hug would be almost too conventional, if that makes sense? They'd do something odd and almost shockingly intimate like that.
Re: 2x13, "Dead Reckoning"
Re: 2x13, "Dead Reckoning"