Summary: Harper is the next POI. She stole money from the Brotherhood who are out to kill her. They capture Trey, Harper's boyfriend. Reese and Fusco protect her and try to broker a deal with Dominic but their attempts fail. Reese saves Trey while the Brotherhood and the cartel come to blows. The cops arrive to arrest them for unregistered weapons. The cartel are arrested but the Brotherhood are not since Harper warned them ahead of time. The Brotherhood make peace with Harper. Finch attempts to follow Root who is trying to get an app for the Machine. She meets with Caleb from "2PiR".
The Good: Harper's character is an interesting one. She is much better than Anna from the previous episode and has lots of more charisma and unpredictability. Though I have my problems with her (see: The Bad), she is a lot more interesting to follow as a main POI character, and I liked that she had a connection with both the main group and the Brotherhood. Dominic had a good episode. Winston Duke's performance felt more complete than in previous episodes, and that made the character a lot more interesting to me. I especially enjoyed the diner scene with Reese (see: Best Moment). This latest episodes of season have frequently been reintroducing characters that have been absent for a while (Ex. Claire, Zoe). This episode continues that trend by giving us the surprise return of Caleb from "2PiR", a return that I'm more than happy with. It feels like the show is giving us all of these returns so that we can have a large group of characters going up against Samaritan. The Bad: This episode felt rather stagnant. The POI story took a long while to get going and it didn't develop into as much drama as we usually get. Plus the episode was really lacking a sense of urgency or reason for me to care about what was happening. Trey's capture did nothing for me and he ended up being a really useless character. Furthermore, did we need an entire B-story of Finch attempting to follow Root to set up the ending reveal with Caleb? I feel like the same feeling could have been accomplished with 5 minutes of screentime shaved off. It's not like "Person of Interest" to stretch out a plot line that doesn't have much story behind it. This show usually does the opposite and condenses a complex story into just 45 minutes. The Brotherhood have been really disappointing as villains. Unlike Vigilance who always seemed like they would have an interesting involvement with the Machine, the Brotherhood don't seem to have any actual bearing on the main Samaritan story, so they come off as unimportant side villains that we are spending far too much time with. I enjoy them for their personal connection to Elias, and I want to see them cross paths with him, not with Reese, Fusco and Finch. I think that having the Brotherhood appear in an episode without any tie-ins with Elias was a very poor decision, and it did nothing to further the story that I became invested in back in "The Devil You Know". Harper is a pretty annoying character at times and the actress playing her doesn't do a particularly great job. The biggest issue I have with her is how non-innocent she is. I struggle to believe that Finch and Reese would care so much about the well-being of a con artist who has done some pretty bad things to criminals. Worse yet, they seem to believe that her behaviour is almost justified which feels at odds with the morals they usually display, particularly Finch. Dominic calling out Reese for siding with Elias, a pretty bad man by all rights made perfect sense and I don't think that Reese was able to give a sensible answer to Dominic's inquiry. Surely this moment should have been a bigger deal than it was. It would have been nice for either Reese or Finch to maybe consider a peace offering with the Brotherhood that closely matches what they have with Elias, especially earlier in the story. Dominic seems like a reasonable guy, and he only seems to attack those who have purposefully and knowingly wronged him. Why not work with him? Elias certainly did much worse than Dominic back in season 1. The Unknown: What will this mysterious app do? Is Caleb going to be used to create the app or maybe for another larger purpose? Will we see more returning characters soon? How about Leon who hasn't appeared in nearly 2 seasons now? Best Moment: Reese and Dominic's meeting was pretty good. It was shot like one of those old school movie scenes where the protagonist and antagonist have a tense stand-off in a diner. The writers clearly put much more effort into that scene over anything else in the episode. Character of the Episode: Dominic. Conclusion: This episode was a mixed bag. There were some interesting aspects, but as a whole this felt lacking. Score: 54
2 Comments
Ben
6/20/2019 10:45:41 pm
We disagree massively here. I thought Anna's backstory with her sister was touching. I thought the fight scenes last episode were well set-up and that her fighting skills made her entertaining and an active part of the plot, as opposed to the typical PoI. I also liked how her story ended fuelling into the Samaritan story with the Greer twist at the end. I knew it would be unlikely, but I'd have been happy to see her again.
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Aaronic
6/21/2019 06:01:36 pm
Wow, this must be the first time we have disagreed in such a big way! I went and rewatched the last 2 episodes to really compare Anna and Harper to make sure I wouldn't have missed anything in particular. Honestly, I think that both characters are similarly average overall. I didn't particularly care for them but I wouldn't mind seeing them again. I found Anna to be a more interesting character the second time around for sure, but she was hurt by the fact that she was shafted to the B-story in her own episode. In my first watch of "Q&A", I found myself anxiously waiting to get back to the more interesting scenes with Finch and Claire, so Anna's scenes never really stuck with me. If the show wanted me to care more about her character, they should have made her the central focus instead of an afterthought that almost seemed like filler for much of the episode.
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
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