- Title: Person of Interest – All In
- tv.com: link
After saving Leon (Ken Leung) from yet another group of angry business associates looking to put him in the ground, Reese (Jim Caviezel) heads to Atlantic City when The Machine gives Finch (Michael Emerson) the number of a nearly broke elderly gambler (Ron McLarty) who the mob wants dead. While continuing to look into Internal Affairs investigation into Detective Beecher (Sterling K. Brown), Carter (Taraji P. Henson) gets a little help from Detective Szymanski (Michael McGlone) to find out about the number’s past ties to organized crime in the 1970’s and the corrupt owner (Michael Rispoli) of the person of interest’s latest casino of choice.
Hacking into the casino’s records, Finch discovers the man with only a few hundred dollars to his name has somehow lost $2,000 a day for a grand total of $320,000 over the past six months. While tailing Lou (McLarty), Finch recognizes several of the same elderly faces from the casino, all with similar debts, showing up in the man’s pharmacy. A little more digging turns up the fact that the same man who owns the casino also owns the pharmacy and Finch begins to suspect the entire operation is nothing more than a complicated money laundering scheme.
Looking to wealthy backers to help fund HR’s return to power, Quinn (Clarke Peters) and Simmons (Robert John Burke) frame Szymanski in order get their hooks into the head (Morgan Spector) of the Russian mafia in New York who the detective was scheduled to testify against that morning. When Carter learns that one of Beecher’s informants provided the tip she goes looking for Fusco (Kevin Chapman) for advice only to ignore it and trace the money used to frame a good cop back to HR. Despite Carter’s work, Simmons still finds a way to win by killing Szymanski and the Assistant D.A. (Jennifer Van Dyck), with Detective Terney’s (Al Sapienza) help, insuring a mistrial and a healthy influx of new funds into the HR coffers.
After getting the full story from Lou, Finch does his best to get the man out of town safely while working with Reese to figure out how to take down the owner and free all the other senior citizens under his thumb. The pair call on the unique skill sets of Leon once again to play the role of a playboy billionaire and provide a distraction while Reese and and Finch attempt to get their hands on the proof they need to put him away, but the reappearance of Lou winning heavily at the casino tables makes their job much, much harder. Unable to convince the man to leave, Finch stakes him instead providing Harold with a second distraction to keep the casino owner busy while he pulls down the real accounting books from the casino’s servers.
By the end of the night Reese and Lou walk out with more than $20 million of the casino’s money but Finch and Leon aren’t so lucky forcing Reese and Lou to turn themselves over as well leading to a impromptu game of Russian Roulette in one of the casino’s back rooms that the foursome barely survive. Although ongoing storylines including possible problems with The Machine or the machinations of shadowy Washington insider (Jay O. Sanders), Hersh (Boris McGiver), and Root (Amy Acker) are all put on hold, the foreshadowing of an even deadlier version of HR on the rise certainly spells trouble for Reese and Finch in the coming weeks. Carter’s suspicions of Beecher aren’t put to rest as the circumstances around the frame of Szymanski seem to point the fact that her new on-again/off-again boyfriend might be a member of HR.
