POI watchalong: 2x11-2x13

[kindkit]

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.

Comments

2x11, "2πr"

[kindkit]

1) It's a little bit frustrating to have this episode drawing out a major cliffhanger, though Finch's unworried confidence in his contingency plan makes sense. Reese too seems pretty calm: of course he knew the federal government would be no match for Finch!

2) Carter is willing to cross a lot of lines to help Reese. Not just professional ones, either. It's a bit worrisome that she's willing to drug an innocent man so she can get a DNA sample from him--that's assault, and while she doesn't mean any harm, she still could have caused him harm. What if he reacted badly to the drugs? And does she get him to a safe place or just leave him passed out in his car?

3) Speaking of crossing lines, Donnelly definitely crosses into abuse of power at the end of the episode. Civil liberties issues are always a big theme on the show, and here it's highlighted when early in the episode the warden says "This is Rikers, not Guantanamo." But Donnelly has the power to turn Rikers into Guantanamo, and he does. It's a shame because I liked Donnelly up to that point.

4) Turning to the other plot, there's something delightful about Finch having to be a substitute teacher. But isn't the school supposed to be a specialized, selective math and humanities school? In that case, why are there so many tuned-out students and students who are basically just there to deal drugs? (Incidentally, if you pause and read the texts the students are sending when Finch force-pairs their phones, there's a hilarious one asking whether someone likes Ritalin or Adderall better.)

5) Somehow the surveillance comes across as unusually creepy in this episode. Part of it's the "teacher stalks an underage student" thing, and part of it is that we see Finch using the camera in the Phipps' apartment just to watch their ordinary, damaged lives--Mrs. P. drinking herself into a stupor and Caleb looking after her.

6) Finch clearly identifies with Caleb the troubled boy genius. He also seems strongly, personally affected by Caleb's situation with his mother, which makes me wonder if there was parental alcoholism or some other neglect in his childhood. Certainly Finch gives the impression of someone who never felt secure and loved in childhood.

7) The subway conversation is fairly well-handled, without too many platitudes, though I think the "you can't remove a digit from pi, therefore you shouldn't commit suicide" thing is specious and that Caleb would have seen it as specious. More affecting is Finch talking, in a way that is clearly painful to him, about his own mistakes and regrets. He describes himself and Caleb as "two reckless people," and says "the world is better off with both of us in it," which suggests to me that at some point he seriously thought through whether the world might be better off without him. (ETA: I also wanted to mention that extremely hesitant, brief shoulder-pat Finch gives Caleb. It suggests how difficult touch is for Finch, how much it doesn't come naturally.)

8) The implication that Finch was the mysterious teenage hacker who cracked the internet and made it public is intriguing, but I wonder if it's true. He never directly says that it was him, and one thing we know about Finch is that he easily and frequently deceives people with false personas. Is he just telling Caleb what he thinks Caleb needs to believe?

2x12, "Prisoner's Dilemma"

[kindkit]

1) This is a hell of an episode, tightly written and full of tension, a good example of how two people talking in a room can be much more exciting than an action sequence. It's helped by a great performance by Taraji Henson (Carter), who is absolutely compelling to watch as an interrogator.

2) We see the moral decline and fall of Donnelly here as he resorts to Guantanamo tactics, paralleling Reese's moral decline in flashbacks. Poor Donnelly, I liked him until this episode.

3) Reese's affair with Stanton is interesting. It can be read as marking his own moral decline in that he has learned to "love his work," but I tend to see it as showing that Reese trying to form some kind of connection, however twisted, because he needs that sense of connection to survive. But the affair with Stanton is sufficiently meaningless that when he's ordered to kill her, he does so (or tries, rather) without much hesitation, which on the one hand contrasts with his devotion to Jessica, but also doesn't--he fails to get to Jessica in time because of a mission, in fact the mission that sends him to Ordos, so once again Reese's loyalty to the CIA trumped his loyalty to people. The stronger contrast is of course to Reese and Finch's relationship. They've been consistently loyal to each other and in the next episode will be stunningly so. Reese's relationship with Finch, with its real growing affection, can be read as a redemptive counterpart to the previous, negative partnership and affair with Stanton.

4) Both Stanton and Donnelly mention Reese having chosen the life of a killer. Which is true, and we see it happening. This is the first episode that doesn't shy away much from what Reese was doing in those years.

5) Reese's little moment of alternate history, in which he describes the life he might have had if he'd stayed with Jessica as though it's his real life, is rather heartbreaking.

6) Finch is much more distressed about Reese here than in the last episode, because of course he's less confident that he can fix it. We see more of his loneliness (partly expressed through Bear's behavior, because Bear is not only a touch substitute, he's become a sort of symbol of Finch and Reese's feelings for each other) and the desperation that leads him to the "break Reese out" plan. Finch, who hates guns, has an automatic weapon in that scene! Whatever his exact plan is, it goes strongly against his usual behavior and looks, frankly, suicidal. He's willing to risk everything--his own life, the project to save people--to save Reese alone.

7) This ties in with him trying to ignore the phone call with the new number. I wonder if the machine would usually react to that by calling more phones, or if it's aware enough to realize that this number is specially significant? Either way, it's incredibly important that Finch tries very hard not to answer that call.

8) When Finch calls Donnelly, he identifies himself as "the partner of the man in your back seat." "Partner" is a wonderfully ambiguous word. It also provides another parallel/contrast to Kara Stanton, who was Reese's operational partner and also his sexual partner for a while, if never his emotional/romantic partner.

9) A couple of plot nitpicks. First, why was Elias in Riker's Island? Riker's is a jail, not a prison. Does that mean he hasn't been tried yet? And second, why doesn't Kara Stanton shoot Carter? It seems unlike her to leave a living witness. I suppose the answer is "because the show needs Carter alive," but that doesn't make it less out of character for Stanton.

10) The Fusco + supermodel stuff is fun, but silly enough that it feels like it belonged in another episode.

11) Belated additional observation: I'm a little confused by the thoroughness of Reese's John Warren identity. Are we supposed to believe that in addition to the constant surveillance etc. that Reese performs, he's also holding down a day job? But the secretary vouches for him, so either he really is in that office frequently enough to seem like a company executive, or else the secretary is in Finch's pay and is lying--which would be a pretty serious weak spot in a cover identity. And in fact I've wondered the same thing about Finch's former cover identity as a low-level software engineer at IFT: when did he have the time? Especially since low-level software engineers don't have meetings, business travel, etc. to excuse frequent absences. Nitpicky, I know, but since I tend not to see plotholes unless I'm really thinking about it, I guess this is kind of a big one.

2x13, "Dead Reckoning"

[kindkit]

1) Okay, I'll try to focus on plot things first. Is the Mysterious Englishman connected to Alistair Wesley and whatever he was up to? Are they one of the "private intelligence networks" Donnelly was so obsessed with? Are they corporate?

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.

Another thought on 2x13

[halotolerant]

I thought Kara giving Reese the earpiece to listen to her commands was interesting - drawing more parallels like those you've mentioned between his relationship to her and to Finch. It contrasts his reactions to them but also draws attention to how Finch never, ever controls Reese by threats or manipulation, which he would have been capable of doing in terms of his resources and the power at his disposal.

Also, I liked that Mark Snow got a noble end of a kind. The actor plays a character I like in another show (Generation Kill) and I was hoping he'd get a good finish. Also, him being in the car was a clever twist that I did not expect.