Person of Interest

Person of Interest

Episode 5: Bury the Lede

Episode 6: The High Road

By: Carlos Uribe

Person of Interest is a drama about preventing planned crimes before they happen.

Spoilers Ahoy!

Bury the Lede:

Bury the Lede is an episode which is surprisingly complicated. It deals with HR. The organization has been largely silent since many of their leaders were arrested in the finale. There are still many corrupt cops in New York City and the FBI is looking for the big leader. A leader that the episode establishes is not a cop. Someone outside the police force is in charge of all the corruption within the force. That someone must have a lot of money and connections. Considering that nobody really knows the identity of the person, it's hard to arrest him. At the same time, there's currently an election in New York City. Two candidates for mayor are hoping to be elected. The FBI are able to conclude that one of the mayoral candidates is actually the head of HR. The audience, along with Finch, know better. The episode had outright stated that politicans rarely hold any real power. They come and they go. The real person in charge of HR is the person running the camapign for the other candidate. Bury the Lede has a surprising weekly plot but the way it delivered it was excellent. It was a way that kept things clear while at the same time remaining entertaining.

The number this week is that of a journalist. She is willing to do what is necessary to get to the truth. If this means going into a hotel room and blackmailing someone then that's what she will do. She's good at her job but she's not perfect. It's entirely possible to set her nose on something and manipulate her into running a story that isn't true. This turns out to be the case when someone in HR is able to get her to accuse the wrong guy of being the head. I'm not talking about the mayor but rather a businessman who is a family member of the mafia. The businessman is clean and he's been working with the FBI to get the head of HR. He had a book that would have incriminated the entire organization, including Fusco. She frames this clean buisnessman and it leads to his death. She's able to recover the book and salvage her career but she wasn't the victim. She was an unwilling perpetrator. She got that man killed because she had rushed to get her story.

What made the episode even better is that Reese couldn't just protect her. She's been working on a story to uncover the man in the suit. She's hoping to plaster his photo on the front page of every newspaper. This means that for most of the episode Reese has to either keep his distance of pretend to be a date that she found online. The episod ends with her announcing her intent to drop the story of the man in suit. There's a hint that she has figured out who the man is and she decided to repay him for saving her life and salvaging her career by not printing a story about him. Bury the Lede was an exciting episode that brought HR back to the viewer's attention in an interesting and engaging way. Just about everything in this episode worked.

The High Road:

The High Road is less complicated but it has a fun idea: send John to the suburbs. John is a character who is used to the city. He's used not having to deal with no-parking zones and with being a tough guy. Sending him to the suburbs is a way for the show to draw him out of his element. Sadly the show doesn't really do much with this idea. He may be in the suburbs but the series never properly explores what he thinks of being out there. It's a sense that the writers thought up of the idea but they never developed what it could explore. When the episode ends, it feels like the series wasted the potential that sending a character like John to suburbia while having him try to protect someone. I think part of the reason is that it confined most of the action to the actual city. The bad guys lured this week's person of interest into the city to meet with him and then to eventually rob a wealthy guy's apartment. The High Road never fully dedicates itself to the idea of having an actual episode set around the suburbs and instead uses it to temporarily shake things up. It's this lack of commitment that stops this epsiode from being as amazing as this series can get.

So what's the plot? It's simple. There's this guy who lives in the surburbs. He has a wife, a daughter, and is self-employed. The only potentially shady part of his life is when he buys some scalped tickets to a Springsteen concert. It seems like he's living the perfect suburban life and that he's a saint. This is Person of Interest so that means there's more to him that meets the eye. It comes in his past. It turns out that this guy pulled a Don Draper. He's a wanted thief in Pennsylvania who changed his identity when he started his life over. His past is now coming to haunt him as his old two partners want him to crack open a safe before they kill him. Reese is forced to integrate himself into this guy's life. He has to move in to the neighborhood with Zoe pretending to be his wife and he convinces the guy to install a security system around the former crook's house. When the character agrees to rob the place to protect his family, Reese manages to infiltrate the group after the robbery has already begun. It's a basic plot and the only reason that it's different is because of the change of setting for the first half of the episode. It's not a bad plot but I would have prefered one that dealt more with suburbia than something that merely started there.

It's true that the High Road wasted a lot of opportunities but it still had many good moments. The scene where Zoe and Reese play poker is a funny one that continues to slide them towards sleeping together. It's actually a pretty good episode for Zoe where she gets to continually prove her value to the team while being able to comfort the wife of this week's person of interest. The series could have theoritcally done more when it sent both Reese and Zoe to the suburbs but the episode did what it did well. The High Road was a pretty great episode that simply couldn't live up to it's full potential because it didn't dedicate itself to it's premise.