Person of Interest (TV Series) Last Call (2014) User Reviews

A New Powerful Enemy

[claudio_carvalho · 9/10 · 2 March 2024]

Finch goes undercover to work as 911 operator since The Machine delivered the number of the efficient call operator Sandra Nicholson, who is training him. He is monitoring her calls, and she receives one from a boy named Aaron, saying that someone is breaking in his house. She instructs him to hide while she sends the police to his apartment. However, he is found by the thugs and kidnapped and immediately after, she receives a phone call in her personal cellphone. The voice instructs her to call off the call for the police cars saying that it was a prank. Then he asks her to delete thirty thousand calls from a recent date. Reese and Shaw confirm that the boy was abducted. Fusco is helping the rookie Det. Jake Harrison on the murder of the executive Tara Cook. Finch locates the origin of the call and Fusco finds a man driving a car and retransmitting the signal. Soon Fusco finds that both cases are related, while Reese and Shaw hunt the kidnappers down.

"Last Call" is a tense episode of "Person of Interest". The plot begins with the abduction of a boy and the pressure on a great call operator, who had a tragic past, reason why she was chosen. The mastermind seems to be a new powerful enemy of Finch. The case of Tara Cook is well-resolved by Fusco, who is helping his new Homicide Detective. The conclusion of the episode is nice. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "Last Call"

Ugh

[A_Different_Drummer · 6/10 · 8 March 2015]

Defining the credibility ceiling...

There is nothing wrong with borrowing themes from hit movies for TV, especially if you boast the kind of talent this show has access to, both in front of and behind the camera.

But now, with this episode, we the viewers know something that the writing team seemingly missed.

There is a credibility ceiling. As long as you don't hit the ceiling, the viewer experience is solid. No harm no foul.

But if you nudge the ceiling even a little bit, the experience changes.

I love this series. From memory, the only negative review I gave of a single episode was when the show suddenly woke up one day and decided it was really Touched by An Angel, only with guns...

This episode starts as a riff off the "call for help on a deadline" theme that we have seen in several movies over the last few years, many of which were A-list.

It should have worked well. The life of an innocent child is at stake. The cameo actress playing the 911 operator is solid and holds the camera. Everyone is working it.

Except that by the half way point, the whole thing starts to seem forced. Two many coincidences. The 911 operator makes AN ERROR SHE WAS TOLD NOT TO MAKE. Fusco is suddenly acting like a rock star and refusing calls. Reese and Shahi are not getting a lot of face time as a result of the need to maintain tension at the call center.

There follows a barrage of more coincidences than you would expect to find on an episode of ASK THE PSYCHIC.

And BANG we hit the credibility ceiling.

Plus -- I can't believe everyone missed this -- at the end when Finch threatens to electrocute a bad guy, which is possible because said villain is standing in a pool of water, the innocent 911 operator has to enter THE SAME POOL OF WATER to pick up the gun, therefore removing the threat to the 300 pound thug.

UGH An object lesson for future writers of future episodes, we hope.

One of the weaker episodes

[ThatDoesntMatter · 14 July 2014]

The scriptwriting was just lazy, and I'm not sure I'm into this 'let's take up feature film topics and rehash them in a POI episode'.

So here are the flaws I found with this episode:

• at least 3 or 4 feature films come to mind immediately with the setting- up of this story. While that in itself is not necessarily bad, it a) takes you out of the episode, and b) was badly done, nothing new added here, or what was added, stupid.

• which brings me to the 'deleted calls' -> everything about that was stupid. If Harold can send them to Fusco, he could send all of them to himself and save them, duh. Which they would have been somewhere anyway. There is just no way a simple operator could enter the server room PC, hello, that was just so lame, unbelievable!!! She would have no access, why would she have. She would not know where those recorded calls are on the PC, yeah maybe one could find them when searching for them, but accessing the PC in the first place is, as I said, unfeasible.

• walking around the room with her headset on would be suspicious, as it usually is connected to the PC at your station - and the idea that there's a camera attached was obvious as soon as the caller could see what she was writing.

• which brings me to the next item: Generator rooms tend to be locked. What was this supposed to be, an underground locker room? 'I lost an earring' - ??? The security guy would then join her or tell her they would look for it - isn't she supposed to be on shift?

• this generator room sadly is the worst floored basement I've ever seen, it has a major pit in the middle, how convenient for putting in lots of water (where did that come from so quickly - that is not just just from one bucket of water...if we are supposed to deduct it was taken from the cleaning guy's trolley...)

• Sandra is not that stupid to be looking at Harold when she enters the server room again, how convenient for a little plot twist - I say lazy

• pulling earrings out is not that painful, and why would they take them with them and put them onto the dashboard - come on, that is stupid!

There were some nice jokes in there, and the usual 'we shoot them but they never - or very rarely - hit us' James Bond stuff, which is okay, I am willing to let go of probability, but the script has to be smart and make sense.

But, even though I thought from the moment the boy called 911 'oh boring, The Call and Phone Booth and Taken and Mercury Rising etc etc ', I was still game until Reese and Shaw entered the apartment through an intact door - at first I thought maybe they had been misled to another apartment, but no, that was supposed to be correct one, the one the kidnappers had broken through to get Aaron, now neat and tidy and door intact - THAT was just SO bad, though, to be fair, not really the scriptwriter's fault but the director's/producer's. One of those mistakes is OK, but after that headphone continuity disaster in 4C I am becoming more warily concerned about the quality of direction/production...and Last Call was a lowpoint scriptwise to boot.

And John is now a bomb-defusing expert (after having done it once with a completely different kind of bomb...) - yeah. It would have been nice if he had - against generic bomb defusions - been able to defuse it with, say 23 seconds left, but no, they at least added 1 to the usual 1 second left and made it 2 - yawn.

But of course they know all that.

Just had to get it off my chest.

Maybe the worst written episode in the entire series

[SAX_155 · 4/10 · 22 May 2015]

Fully agree on all the points in the other 2 reviews: Full of lazy, unimaginative and downright illogical writing. In addition to the unoriginal plot and the unbelievable character actions highlighted by the other 2 reviewers, I would add 2 more huge inconsistencies in the scene in the basement when the gunman drops his gun raises his hands because Finch threatens to electrocute him by dropping a live wire into the puddle of water in which he is standing. 1) Finch instructs the victim to retrieve the gun from the water - why?? it is unusable and the gunman is not moving. 2) The victim enters the same pool of water as the gunman, thus nullifying the threat from Finch (unless Finch is willing to electrocute her to death also) and the gunman does nothing! To add to the viewer's frustration this unfolds at an agonizingly slow pace, exacerbating the inconsistency. Very disappointing episode for those of us who have come to expect better from this show.

Weaker Version of an Episode from Season 1

[Ryan_Robbo · 30 August 2020]

This is probably the worst episode of Person of Interest I have watched. Felt like I was watching a badly re-written PoI S01E17... episode entitled "Baby Blue". Loved that episode but could not like this weaker attempt.