Person of Interest – Dead Reckoning

• Title: Person of Interest – Dead Reckoning
• tv.com: link

Abducted by his old partner Cara Stanton (Annie Parisse), Reese (Jim Caviezel) awakes from the car accident to discover a bomb strapped to his chest just like the one strapped to his old friend Snow (Michael Kelly). With Reese missing, and forced to run errands for Stanton’s mysterious end game, Finch rallies Carter (Taraji P. Henson) and Fusco (Kevin Chapman) to discover her plan involving a stolen government hard drive and masquerading as ATF agents before it’s too late. Meanwhile Carter tries to cover up her involvement in the events leading up to the car wreck and shooting that left a member of the FBI (Brennan Brown) dead and her friend kidnapped.

Through a text message Reese is able to leave Finch on one of the ATF agent’s phones, the computer genius is able to track down Reese and Snow to an evacuated Manhattan building under a bomb threat. A little more research discovers an entire floor of the building is unaccounted for and owned by a corporation that doesn’t exist and guarded by agents from the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, Reese and Snow force their way into the secret headquarters of the DOD’s cyber-terrorism squad  to copy government created cyber weapon named Sigus onto the DOD drive.

As Finch continues to search for answers the episode fills in Cara’s missing years through a series of flashbacks that include how she made it out of the bombing alive and how her new employer (John Nolan) used just the right leverage to offer of a job not to steal anything from the DOD’s cyber-terrorism database, but to leave something behind. Despite Reese’s best attempts to send the team home and play martyr as his bomb vest clicks down to the inevitable explosion, Finch refuses to abandon him and works a little last-second magic to save his life. Snow isn’t as lucky, but his sacrifice isn’t in vain as his bomb takes Cara with him and gives the FBI what they need to close the case on both Donnelly’s murder and the Man on the Suit for good.

As to the purpose of the code Cara loaded onto the U.S. Government servers, all Finch knows is that it is incredibly complex and set to go off in exactly five months time (or just about in time for the season finale). The episode also confirms the foreshadowing from earlier episodes that Finch and the secrets concerning The Machine were at the heart of the mission that ended Reese’s work for the CIA and nearly got him killed.