Person of Interest's first two seasons were mostly made up of procedural, episodic stories linked by a few continuing arcs. The third season nominally continues in this mode but the story arcs are now much more front-and-centre. We have former antagonist Root gradually coming in from the cold as a fellow ally (albeit a very unpredictable one) in the service of the Machine, and the police storyline becomes more desperate as a now-demoted Carter and still-in-the-loop Fusco work to finally expose the machinations of HR. The team's ability to deal with the numbers has been augmented by the full-time joining-up of Sameen Shaw, though having two extremely competent ex-government agents on the team does threaten to make them a bit overpowered.
For a show that basically started off as a two-hander between John Reese and Harold Finch, it's now quite busy, with an ensemble cast to rival any other show's, to the point that Reese feels like he's getting lost in the mix a bit. The results in a mid-season decision to reduce the cast by one, with a huge build-up to a major climax that finally resolves the long-running HR storyline. I'm going to be honest and say that this storyline was never the most gripping, and only really worked because the actors involved (particularly Taraji P. Henson's Carter and Clarke Peters's Alonzo Quinn) are so damn good. Still, once it's wrapped up, it's at least wrapped up for good.
The show shifts gears in the latter part of the season thanks to a superb episode where Finch is reunited with one of his former friends (an outstanding guest turn by Saul Rubinek) and learns that a second AI may be on the verge of coming into existence, which triggers a complex multi-episode story arc involving our team, the intergovernmental organisation Decima, the US government, and an anti-surveillance state hacktivist terror group known as Vigilance. Though this arc risks getting a bit convoluted at times (there's only so many secret organisation names one can take), it remains pretty gripping, as well as timely.
This storyline exposes Person of Interest's central core theme, and the one that will span the rest of its run: the struggle to create an AI Aligned with human interests, and will therefore protect us, and the dangers of creating one that is Unaligned with them, and may simply choose to destroy us, with the Machine as the former and Samaritan as the latter. This was science fiction in 2014, when this season aired, but is a distinctly closer idea now.
The strengths of the show remain the core cast's excellent performances, the strong exploration of increasingly topical ideas, and the show's interesting willingness in maintaining its number-of-the-week storylines, sometimes right in the middle of critical arcs, always giving each episode its own identity instead of completely losing itself to serialisation. It's a tricky balancing act the show handles well.
On the negative side of things, the HR storyline outstays its welcome by at least a few episodes, and the interweaving of different conspiracies from multiple organisations risks tripping up the plot a few times, but the show at least is willing to kill off significant recurring characters and entire organisations to maintain a strong plot focus.
Person of Interest's third season (****½) is its strongest so far, with some gripping storylines and thorny questions raised, with no pat answers given. The show is available on physical media and streaming worldwide.
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