Samaritan's power seems unmatched, with the American government now fully on-board with its operations after it brutally ends a gang war in New York City (with limited attention to due process). Howard Finch and his allies, bruised from several defeats and with one of their number missing and the Machine's power curtailed, now have to make a fateful decision: to take the war to Samaritan and try to end it forever, or accept a future where humanity's destiny is out of its hands.
Person of Interest's final, somewhat curtailed final season (with only thirteen episodes compared to previous year's twenty-plus) has a lot to accomplish. Over its lifetime, Person of Interest has built up a huge number of storylines and character arcs it needs to service if it wants to nail its ending.
Fortunately, it succeeds with unusual ambition. We still get PoI-of-the-week storylines, perhaps unexpectedly given how close to the end we are, but most of these are still connected to the main storyline in one form or another. The show's off-kilter sense of humour remains intact, with an early storyline where the Machine's facial recognition fails, making all the actors have to play one another's characters, being a highlight (alas they don't sustain it for a whole episode).
The biggest weakness of the season is having to keep the gang split up; Shaw was captured by the bad guys late in Season 4 and the show is not in any hurry to have them reunited. This does give us one of the show's finest hours, where Shaw is subjected to countless VR simulations of what would happen if she escaped, but arguably keeping the gang split up and not having the rest of the team trying to rescue her (Finch seems to think she's dead but is not fully convinced) with vigour is strange.
As the show approaches its endgame, it's refreshing to see it shed any writing or commercial inhibitions. There are some well-executed major plot swings, but the show's biggest moment is saved until the end. The show's finale, Return 0, is possibly the show's finest hour. A killer soundtrack, borrowing music from Philip Glass and the Ex Machina soundtrack, frames a non-linear depiction of the final showdown between the Machine and Samaritan, with our characters trying to swing the balance in the Machine's favour (and showing hesitancy about entrusting humanity's favour to another AI, albeit a "good" one). The episode is filmed in a style and atmosphere completely unlike the rest of the series, feeling more like a big prestige drama than a CBS procedural, and it works brilliantly.
Few long-running shows deliver a solid ending, and Person of Interest does that, making it an exception to the rule. The ending allows for the viewer to speculate about what happens next whilst also not leaving too many unanswered questions. The viewer may also feel the ending, and the show as a whole, feels a lot closer to reality now than when it originally aired a decade ago.
Person of Interest's final season (****½) maybe takes a bit too much time to regroup from the Season 4 finale before pushing the main storyline forwards, but when it starts moving, it does so with determination and focus. A superb finale, illuminated by great performances, confirm the show's position as one of the most underrated genre series of the past decade. The show is available on physical media and streaming platforms worldwide.
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