- Title: Person of Interest – Prophets
- wiki: link
Other than being forced to live their days in their new cover identities and be far more careful of helping the numbers delivered to them by The Machine, the world of Finch (Michael Emerson) and his friends hasn’t been largely effected by Samaritan going online. That all changes here. In an episode that offers flashbacks to Harold’s own difficult creating a trustworthy artificial intelligence, “Prophets” showcases what a system without his painstakingly-created safeguards is capable of accomplishing in almost perfect secrecy.
With Reese (Jim Caviezel) on desk duty and mandatory counseling sessions for his excessive shooting in recent weeks, it falls to Finch, Shaw (Sarah Shahi), and Root (Amy Acker) to save a campaign wiz (Jason Ritter) whose perfect record for predicting winners is ruined by election tampering that the team eventually traces back to Samaritan itself. Orchestrating the election and death of an elected official merely to get a malleable candidate in office, “Prophets” offers a chilling example of what Samaritan unchecked can accomplish with no one, not even Decima Technologies, holding it back.
Amy Acker shines here both in scenes between Root and Finch discussing her disconnect from The Machine (and even darker days to come) and in scenes with Sarah Shahi as the show’s kick-ass women do their part to save the election expert with Reese largely unavailable. The flashbacks to a more driven Finch also remind us just how much effort the genius put into crippling his creation in order to make it care about humanity in an attempt to prevent the kind of behavior which Samaritan is currently engaged. Root’s comment about the likelihood of all of them making it through this alive sounds like a dark harbinger suggesting that Carter won’t be the last member of the group to fall. I hope she’s wrong as I don’t want to see any of these characters go away anytime soon.
