A powerful new AI has been created and allied with the United States government. However, Samaritan has its own agenda and no interest in being shackled by human control. Meanwhile, the Machine has gone undercover, trying to resist Samaritan or align its goals with humanity. With this becoming less likely, the Machine's operatives - living incognito for fear of discovery - have to take the fight to Samaritan where they can, whilst also dealing with a burgeoning gang war in New York.
Person of Interest's fourth season marks a significant shift in the show's format. Our erstwhile heroes are living under cover identities they cannot endanger without immediately being detected and eliminated by the Samaritan AI and its operatives. This forces them to have to act within the normal confines of their job at all times, even when dealing with their regular "persons of interest." This adds an interesting new tension to the show.
This tension means our characters can't go in all guns blazing as much as they did in previous seasons, and helps with the problem last season that our team was too overpowered, between Finch's elite hacker skills, Reese's formidable military abilities, Shaw's exceptional infiltration skills and Root as an even eliter hacker and competent combatant and AI-assisted assassin, not to mention access to two highly competent police officers (before one of them was killed off). Our crew have to be more circumspect in Season 4, forcing the writers to be more creative.
The result is probably the strongest run of episodes in the show's history. The already exemplary cast is expanded by the addition of some pretty big names (either at the time or in the years since) including Cara Buono (Stranger Things), Winston Duke (Black Panther), Wrenn Schmidt (For All Mankind) and Jamie Hector (The Wire), who are all superb. John Nolan (uncle of showrunner Jonathan and his director brother Christopher) continues to impress as semi-antagonist John Greer, and Enrico Colantoni has a bigger role as recurring frenemy gangster Carl Elias. Camryn Manheim also continues to be superb as "Control," this season moving from enemy to extremely reluctant, situationally-dependent ally.
What is interesting is that format encourages both greater serialisation and a renewed focus on the person-of-interest-of-the-week cases, an unusual move in a show with a continuing storyline in its penultimate storyline, when you'd expect the serialisation to have completely taken over. Instead, the threat of Control or the growing war on the streets between Elias and new kingpin Dominic often take a backseat to whomever the person of interest is.
This has several benefits, most notably it encourages the main storyline to be less convoluted than if it had had to fill 22 episodes. The show notably eliminates several factions this season to make the main storyline much clearer: The Machine versus Samaritan, who is allied to the US government, but some government officials are very uneasy about the deal they've made.
The gang war storyline could threaten to be formulaic, but it is elevated immensely by Winston Duke and Jamie Hector (here playing the right-hand-man rather than the boss, which prevents too many comparisons with his epochal turn as Marlo on The Wire), whose formidable charisma makes the Brotherhood are force to be reckoned with. The show also cleverly integrates the gang war into the main storyline with Samaritan, in a way it never managed with the HR storyline which dominated the first two-and-a-half seasons and threatened to become tedious. This storyline is better-handled and better-paced, being wholly contained within this one season. There's also a number of short arcs revolving around new recurring characters, and some PoIs from previous seasons return in clever ways.
The season also features several of the show's very best episodes: The Cold War features the first direct confrontation between the Machine and Samaritan, whilst If-Then-Else has the team trapped and the Machine has to run tens of thousands of simulations on their best way of escaping. The what-if nature of the episode is tremendous fun, allowing the characters to have several moving/dumb-as-hell death scenes. One sequence, where the Machine cuts the detail of the simulation to move things along faster, resulting in the characters becoming paper-thin descriptions of themselves, is the funniest thing the show has done so far. A twist ending prevents the episode from being too lightweight.
The back half of the season suffers a little from losing one of the regular castmembers due to behind-the-scenes circumstances beyond their control, which makes some episodes feel a bit clunky, with the introduction of some recurring characters clearly meant to just stand in for the missing one. It's not a major problem and some of the new characters are interesting, but it is a slight bump in the road. As we get to the end of the season it throws up another one of the show's best-ever episodes with Terra Incognita, where Reese has to investigate one of Carter's cold cases, resulting in the return of Taraji P. Henson in flashback sequences. The two-part season finale is also huge, packed with big plot twists and revelations that are quite satisfying.
Person of Interest's fourth season (*****) is potentially its very best, with excellent ideas and plot twists being undertaken by a cast at the top of its game.
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