No time for the usual entry speech - this is all the machines perspective, beginning with it's first eye-opening to see it's creators face (Can you see me? - in opposition to Can you hear me? which has been discussed here last week). The machine gives us a short summary of season 1 in it's own black-and-white style with glimpses of important conversations. And the story picks up at the exact same moment where it left, when Reese picks up the phone after urging the machine for it's help to find Finch - only this time the viewer can hear the eery voice that is a compilation of many voices, male and female: Uncertainty/Romeo-Kilo, Family/Alpha-Mike), Reflections/Juliet-Oscar. So strange and mysterious, although some of them might mirror John's feelings, like uncertainty, Alpha (Finch), Family and Reflections.
The machine is searching for Harold and finds him in a cafe with Root and we are back into PoI's complicated storytelling:
- John and Leon sorting out his mess with the Nazis money and with Carter and Fusco helping them,
- Harold and Root on a mysterious journey,
- Special Council, Denton Weeks and Hersh looking into the murder of Alcia Corwin,
- Flashbacks about the machines beginnings and explanation why it didn't protect Finch.
Any lesser show, that ended with a cliffhanger at a season ending would soon wrap it up in the first new episode and get back to normal as soon as possible. Not so here, the solution/rescue is not solved immediately, because the introduction of Root will take more time and they do it nicely: those short but very informative dialogues with Harold while following a complicated plan to get a hold on the machines location through government operators is excellent. Root is just adorable in her intelligent way that is so wrong at the same time. In fact when she talks about setting the machine free, it might be the same plan that Greer follows later in the show with Samaritan, and we know where that ended!
Like many highly intelligent persons she looks down on others, only Harold is someone she can admire. Her path to the caring team member of season 4 and 5 is astonishing.
But all in all this episode has a silly undertone in it although it starts with a sad and desperate Reese, who is a bit at loss after Harolds dissapearance. But what is served to him in the course of the action is really hilarious in a PoI-understated way: Leon and his stupid mess with stolen money, those over-the-top-stereotyped Nazis, the way Reese takes them out while the camera doesn't bother to show us the details, because we all know by now how it ends, the guy flying through the window like a ragdoll, the giant on a motobike that gets shot by Carter with Reese' granate launcher (Carter will borrow that thing again in s. 3) and last but not least Reese ends up with adopting a dog! How could that happen?
But the most intense scenes are the ones when Reese negotiates with the machine while talking to a surveillance camera, nervous little Leon hopping at his side and thinking that his saviour has gone crazy. Reese has no care in the world for the danger he is in. He threatens that the machine will end up alone, no human left to pick up the phone and saving the numbers, and this seems to be the trick, because the machine must save Reese too.
This is one of my favourite episodes just because it is so highly entertaining while carrying the storyarc about the machine and Root forward and making it all the more interesting.
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