It says something about Person Of Interest’s notion of heroism that, since being picked out of the gutter and given a life’s mission by Mr. Finch, Reese has scarcely allowed himself to be distracted by thoughts of tracking down the people who set him up and left him for dead. Personal revenge is the province of punks and sociopaths—which means that it’s all his ex-partner, Kara Stanton, has had on her mind for the past couple of years. Tonight, in flashbacks, we finally see what happened to Kara immediately after that missile hit. She comes to in a hospital bed in Dongsheng, where she has epigrammatic conversations with a Well-Manicured Man wannabe who’s so clipped and proper that he pronounces “Mandarin” with the accent on the last syllable, which for all I know is the correct way. He pulls out the MacGuffiny laptop that her handlers wanted destroyed and croons that it possesses “the answer to a very interesting question. Would you like to what know what that question is?” “I don’t care,” she says. “No, you don’t, do you?” he says. “That’s why you and I are going to get along.”
The only question that Kara has is, who does she need to kill to right the score. This is why Reese, whom Kara took hostage at the end of the most recent episode too many moons ago, wakes up on a New York City bus sitting across from his old partner, and next to their traitorous former boss, Mark Snow, who, like Reese, is strapped into a bomb vest. (This scene will have a sobering effect on anyone who’s been aboard public transportation in Manhattan and found themselves wishing they had some dynamite.) Taking in the situation, Reese looks at Snow and says, “Mark,” to which Snow replies, “John,” because no matter what your history with a person might be, it never makes things better to discard the basic pleasantries. Kara, who wants Reese and Snow to break into a Department of Defense installation and steal a cyber weapon capable of “killing the entire Internet,” first takes them to a diner, where Reese declines her offer of lunch. She tells him that she knows what he’s going through. “You can’t control the situation, so you fight back in little ways that you can, like refusing to eat.” “I’m just not that hungry,” Reese insists, smiling, “But when I do fight back, you’ll know it.”
I suppose you could chalk this up to my being nuts, but as far as spy thrillers about chickens coming home to roost go, I enjoyed this hour of television more than I did Skyfall, with its unfortunate last-act development of the villain turning into a suicidal, blubbering mess of mommy issues. If “Dead Reckoning” goes soft in its last act, it’s in the focus on Reese’s self-sacrificial nobility, as, the minutes ticking down, he forsakes both revenge and human contact, preferring to go hide on the roof so he can blow up without hurting anybody. Of course, Finch is waiting for him up there, and eager to try his mechanical expertise at defusing suicide vests. “It appears,” he says, “that she’s wired the phone to a capacitor-based trigger. If the phone is called, it will charge the capacitor, which will in turn release its charge in a single…” “Finch…” says Reese, whose expression is that of a man who can’t decide if he’s more miserable because he’s about to die, or because if only he’d died a few minutes earlier, he wouldn’t have to be listening to this. “I’m sorry,” says Finch sheepishly, “this is my process.” “Dead Reckoning,” which wipes a fair amount of the show’s narrative slate clean, for now, moves like greased lightning, and it strikes some surprising notes: Snow, who is a craven scumbag, is given a first-rate exit scene and a first-rate last line. In this kind of thriller, that’s a real grace note.
