TV Review: PERSON OF INTEREST - No Good Deed 1.22 - Reese v Two and a Half Men

The penultimate episode of Person of Interest finally arrived on our screens this week and as expected it was in no way disappointing, just when you think things simply can no get better than the previous episode J.J Abrams and his team ramp up the drama, mystery and action to the max leaving us all with bated breath as to what we can expect in next weeks finale. Seriously, as someone who has covered this show from start to finish I really have no idea which direction Person of Interest’s finale will take us, there are so may avenues to explore and so much building to what will surely be a brilliant second season of this show.

“No Good Deed” was another brilliant episode for me, ok it didn’t quite have them emotional weight that last weeks “Many Happy Returns” delivered but it did have it’s moments and succeeded once again in proving that maybe the main character in this whole story is the machine itself. This week’s POI Henry Peck, a seemingly simple dude who works as a journalist. Of course that proved not to be the case as Reese uncovered that Peck was in fact an NSA whistle blower who had started (quite rightly) to ask some questions regarding the existence of a machine which predicts future crimes. It seems that the American government and pretty much all of its law enforcement agencies are keen to protect the interests by way of removing anyone and everyone who has ever had anything to do with it.

I’ll start this week with Finch, remember a couple of weeks back when we discussed the issue of big fish? Just how much of a big fish is Finch? I would say clearly he is a very big one and the net of mystery that surrounds his character has yet to unravel. We have also discussed in the past as to weather Finch is responsible for killing his business partner Nathan Ingram, “No Good Deed” showed that maybe Finch or someone else had a reason to kill Ingram as the highly secure machine was hacked by him with a backdoor entry to the system aptly named “contingency”, quite what Finch and Ingram thought the government were going to use the machine for is anyone’s guess but what ever it is they certainly don’t want anyone knowing about it.

“No Good Deed” would suggest that perhaps what Nathan Ingram did in writing a contingency plan into the system was not such a good idea, as everyone who has ever been involved with the machine is now in danger including, Alicia Corwin who is starting to become more of a prominent figure in recent episodes, she’s the lady who met with Nathan Ingram’s son in New York and was immediately concerned the moment Harold Finch’s name was mentioned. Alicia seems content now on doing her own snooping weather that’s on Finch or the NSA I’m not sure but my money would be on the afore mentioned Finch, this all rolls back to the question of how big of a fish is Finch?

Did you catch Reese making a joke about Two and a Half Men? Weather that was aimed at their CBS TV show counterparts or was just a quirky one liner I’m not sure but amidst the kick ass and bullet off loading Finch told Reese, “there are three men Mr Reese”, who shot one of them in the leg before announcing back “two and a half men”, inconsequential of course but it tickled me so I thought I’d mention it. You do have to ask though why shoot them in the leg? After all they are chasing you with a semi automatic sub machine gun, they are highly trained agents and shooting them in the leg is probably not going to prevent them shooting back at you.

This was an episode where a lot happened with a lot of characters some old, some new and the other purely electronic but Person of Interest is certainly providing a platform at a great pace to take us into a second season, remember some characters were not even in the story this week, the corrupt HR, CIA v FBI, Elias isn’t likely to stay in prison very long and there is still Root to worry about, who may or may not be Reese's old CIA partner, roll on next week I can’t wait.

Side Notes

Did you see this week’s bad guy? Didn’t he look like a throw back to 80’s action? Seriously this guy looked like he was the fifth member of the A-Team or something, actually he kind of looked like Chuck Norris. Oh yeah I should probably also mention that this week we learnt that Finch had made a massive sacrifice for the machine in leaving his fiance.