PERSON OF INTEREST Finale Thoughts

[This post contains spoilers for the PERSON OF INTEREST finale, “YHWH.” Please don’t read this until you’ve seen the hour.]

PERSON OF INTEREST concluded its excellent fourth season by, once again, blowing everything up.

It wasn’t a surprise. Heck, POI co-showrunner Jonathan Nolan warned as much last month when we talked about the final few episodes. But even with the warning that there would be bloodshed, and life would be difficult for Team Machine going forward, I still watched the hour completely captivated and terrified about what would go on next.

I don’t normally do post-episode reviews, but I did have a few thoughts about what went down and what it means for the show…

• In hindsight, it feels a bit crazy I didn’t see the Control/Samaritan bait-and-switch coming. But I was honestly so focused/concerned about how badly the Fusco/Dominic/Elias situation was bound to blow up that I was blindsided by Control being, well, out of control.
• Holy Samaritan bloodshed. For a show that has existed so deliciously in bringing familiar faces in and out of the show, the rotating guest star list just took a massive hit. And while Dominic was so fun this season, personally, I’m most upset to lose Elias. His relationship with Team Machine was long-standing and so delightfully bizarre.
• It says a lot about the stakes on this show that I, truly, worried for every lead character in the finale. This isn’t a show where everyone is going to live happily ever after, and they’ve never been shy about sticking to that. But on TV, normally creators are precious about their leads. Whether they’d actually kill off Finch and Reese before the final batch of hours of the series is another matter, but the fact that I wholly believe they could? Makes for compelling television with actual stakes.
• I loved the reveal of where the Machine has been hiding all this time. Didn’t see that coming, at all, and now that it’s portable — and compressed — I’m so curious how it’ll be able to help Team Machine going forward.
• On that note, poor, sad Machine. Is it weird I got emotional when it told Harold maybe it was better for it to die?
• Root and Reese taking out 30-plus baddies? BADASS.
• (Okay, to be fair, the final, like, 20 minutes had me ridiculously stressed out.)
• Michael Emerson (Finch) is seriously underrated on this show. He’s always been great, but it hit me when I was watching the finale how little people actually talk about how good he is.
• Seriously, is there any better show on network television? And it’s certainly in the top couple of shows, period, for me as well.

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What did you think of the POI finale?

PERSON OF INTEREST airs Tuesdays at 10 PM on CBS.

Related:

PERSON OF INTEREST Season 4 Finale: ‘YHWH’ Photos
PERSON OF INTEREST: Jonathan Nolan Teases Deaths, ‘Messy’ A.I. War in Final Season 4 Episodes
PERSON OF INTEREST Post-Mortem: Jonathan Nolan on Bringing a Bit of Closure to Carter’s Tale
PERSON OF INTEREST: Jonathan Nolan on Carter’s ‘Return,’ the Mystery of Reese, and More

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