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“Person of Interest” recap (5.09 & 5.10): God is a Lesbian

Root: “You can’t live with me, and I can’t live without you.”

I’ve said a few times now that one of the Person of Interest‘s core theses is that connection, loyalty, love, and friendship are humanity’s greatest strengths-to be effective against an enemy, and not only to allow wholeness and goodness in people, but to redeem them from themselves when they are lost or corrupted. There are different ways to approach Root’s death in “The Day the World Went Away,” and I wouldn’t want to make anyone adopt mine even if I could; I can only offer my own perspective. So when I position this death as not only valid (for the most part; I’ll make some critiques below) for the story, but reinforcing the show’s investment in its characters’ connections, please understand that this statement is not meant to argue that anyone’s pain or anger is wrong or somehow not allowed. This approach is, to some degree, a choice I’m making, to focus on the value in this development rather than on the boxes it simultaneously checks.

To start out with the good, then, let me back up to “Sotto Voce,” which hammers home this theme of connection at every turn. Its villain, “The Voice,” typifies cold, disinterested isolation. His motto, “Cleanliness is all,” refers to his insistence on wiping out liabilities and cutting off loose ends wherever they occur. He has no partners, no friends, and it would appear no real acquaintances: only employees, victims, and mask after mask of false identities, shell corporations, P.O. boxes, and spoofed signals. While bringing him back is part of the bookending tactic many shows turn to when they’re ending (so is the later return to Elias’s old stomping grounds), it’s a strong use of the tactic because he so closely parallels Samaritan in that the ASI also ruthlessly wipes out anyone that could compromise its secrecy and its operations. Throughout the episode, it’s human connections that allow the core characters to defeat both enemies-The Voice and Samaritan.

It’s not just that Elias comes out and tells The Voice that his belief that compassion and loyalty make people weak is why he’s “gonna lose” as he’s in the process of defending his friend, Harold. It’s that “Sotto Voce’s” plot is all of Team Machine coming together to protect Harold. It’s that Fusco takes a bullet for John even when he’s furious with him. It’s that John finally tells Fusco the truth, observing that when nowhere is safe (not that it ever really was), “Maybe all we can do is trust each other.” And it’s that it’s Root’s love for Shaw that manages to rescue her, if only partially, from the hell of ambiguity that Samaritan has forced on her.

Via personofinterestshaw

Shaw’s killing herself would have been a victory for Samaritan both in that it successfully broke her at last, and because it would have been an unforced error for Team Machine-a valuable asset lost with little gained in the process. Only the extreme extent of Root’s love for her, and Root’s willingness to die for those she loves could prevent Shaw from giving Samaritan this victory at last after she thwarted it for so long. Only Root could so exceed both Samaritan’s and Shaw’s imagination of her as to convince Shaw that the interaction was, if not real, then close enough that it’d be better not to take unnecessary risks; and only Root was loved enough by Shaw to make the threat of her death an unacceptable risk.

“#only irl could you be this OTT root #only irl #computers cannot calculate how fucking extra you fucking are” (Caps via woobiesftw, caption via mswyrr)

Thus “Sotto Voce” ends with the team finally whole (but for Carter), Fusco and Shaw returned, facing the city under the same bridge where Harold first recruited John. Even there, Shaw hesitates, but Root is able to reel her in with a smile.

In this sense, “Sotto Voce” builds up the team in its wholeness, and “The Day the World Went Away” begins the process of breaking it down that will probably occupy much of the remaining episodes. The theme of connection and loyalty remains, as the team constantly moves and recombines to save whoever is most endangered at a given moment, Harold is protected by his community, and Elias is protected by several communities around the towers where he brings Harold. It’s just that here, they can’t quite pull it off. That Root is the first to go hurts, but in certain respects, it’s fitting (other respects will be dealt with shortly). She has always courted death and seen her life as subordinate in value to the Machine’s; she has come to include Harold and Shaw in that calculation. She has spoken before about what a “good end” means to her, and one version of it included dying for both her cause and her loved ones. For Root not to outlive this battle makes sense: she has always been the Machine’s prophet, and prophets often don’t live to see the realities they help create. And as Root explained to Shaw and to Harold, she truly believes that a world with the Machine in it is a world in which none of them can die. This is an end she would have chosen for herself. (Whether she precisely chose this moment is debatable-certainly she was warned at the last minute that the sniper was there and swerved, but it’s hard to be certain she was deliberately taking the bullet for Harold rather than taking general evasive action. It was certainly not “a stray bullet,” however, which is the only reference I’m going to be making to a show I never watched.)

She could die at this point, also, because her evolution as a character was complete. She had been fully redeemed morally, as much as she ever would be; Shaw was no longer missing; she and Shaw had established that they love each other; she had united herself with the Machine as fully as is possible without a physical “death,” and such a death is the only way she could have become more fully part of her god, her adopted mother, perhaps her first love. And so at last, after a truly stunning performance of violent heroism, Harold voluntarily calls her by the name she chose for herself.

Via larry-gergich

Shaw’s muted reaction was entirely in keeping with her character (we saw in the past how she handled her father’s death as a child), and to my thinking far more effective than a big display of grief. Person of Interest has generally tended toward reserve in the face of tragedy (which is one reason why John’s journey into the wilds of mangst after Carter’s death was so jarring), and never more so than with Shaw. Given how she handled her partner’s death when she was introduced, I fully expect she will be exacting spectacular and effective revenge, for herself and for Root. The watchword of John’s relationship with Jessica in the early seasons was, “When you lose that person who connects you to the world, what do you become?” In “Sotto Voce,” Root had become very literally the person who connected Shaw to the world. What will come of losing her, for Shaw, will likely be quite something to watch.

More unusual, but still in keeping, was Harold’s response. He has always been motivated by loss. 9/11 started him building the Machine; Nathan’s death brought him to the Irrelevants list; and the last time we truly saw his darkness come out, Grace had been kidnapped. We have seen (and crowed about) how close he had become with Root by the beginning of this season, and her loss not only moves him to great wrath, but nudges him closer to unleashing both the Machine and himself precisely because it illustrated Root’s own argument that his code of honor was going to doom them all. It was searing proof that she was right.

In the end, Root lives on through the Machine, which adopts her voice as a gesture of deep love and honor, ensuring Root lives on not only in her archive but also every time she interacts with the world outside herself. But she also lives on through Harold. Root and Harold have always been a conversation about order versus chaos, and two different kinds of pragmatism-Harold’s deep fear of human fallibility and inhuman power versus Root’s insistence that limiting themselves and the Machine is not only detrimental, but inherently wrong. When he threatens Samaritan in the interrogation room (“I wasn’t talking to you”), and later when he unleashes chaos at the prison, Harold, at least for a few moments, becomes chaotic and rejects limits. He becomes Root. If Team Machine wins this war at all, it will likely be because he will ultimately listen to her. Connection. Loyalty.

Via the Person of Interest Twitter

Now for the bad. Firstly and most obviously, we have had a lot of fictional queer women die this year. Regardless of the fact that this end for Root was planned before she even was made a lesbian, and before the other high-profile instances in the recent rash of deaths, it’s still another Buried Gay. Secondly, that many other characters-almost certainly some white, straight, male ones-are going to bite it before the end may or may not “help” in some way, but having Root go first means that of the main cast, we’ve had a black woman and a gay woman die (and a bi Iranian woman fake-die twice) on this show. (While I loved Elias and was sad to see him go, he’s not part of the main cast and he had largely outlived his own story.) This sucks. Thirdly, having Harold finally get over his worries because of Root’s death means that on one level, at least, she died to motivate and develop a white male main character, something we’ve all seen too many times. Many have already pointed out that it could well have made more sense to use John this way, especially because-as I’ve noted many times by now-his story is long over, and his whole existence is dedicated to Harold and Harold’s cause. He’s been with Harold the longest. I suspect one key reason he didn’t die here is that the writers want to kill him at the end for symmetry, since Harold told him they were both probably doomed at the very beginning. (If he survives the whole story, I will be very unhappy; everything else aside, it’s just wrong for the character.) I can understand this. I don’t know that it justifies anything.

Person of Interest has never been especially stellar when it comes to positive representation of social minorities. It tends to write its main characters very well regardless of their race, gender, or orientation, so long as they’re alive, but its more minor characters-especially people of color-are often presented in troubling ways, and its universe is terribly white. There are some useful charts on this matter (only covering through Season 4) here. This is a show that essentially opened with a fridging, though it deepened and complicated John’s relationship with Jessica (and matched it with Harold’s with Nathan) over time. It’s hard to know how much of the responsibility for these issues lies with the writers and creators, and how much with CBS, at least until someone gives me the excessively detailed oral history I’ve been longing for for years. I have always loved the show partly in spite of such shortcomings, and most of what I wrote above represents a continuation of such compromise. I understand, truly, why others are unable to make such a compromise.

Root’s death confirmed what I’ve feared since Shaw’s first death: that we would never get to really see #2SAM2FURIOUS actually happening. We had maybe half an episode of it here, and the simulation in episode four, but that’s it. I certainly believe that this season confirmed that Root’s love is reciprocated by Shaw; that they were, by the end of “Sotto Voce,” finally a couple; I can believe the idea that they were already sleeping together even before “If-Then-Else”; I can understand the notion that seeing Shaw’s innermost feelings for Root effectively consummated their relationship, especially since Shaw confided in Root about these feelings; and I can even find the notion that violence and mayhem is actually the scene of their deepest intimacy compelling and plausible. I can and do accept and buy into all of these arguments.

But as I’ve said many times, my issue has never been with one of them dying. It has always been that their story is all the aching, longing tension of their coming together, and none-or very little-of the beautiful light of the 4-alarm fire in full existence.

We got a glimpse of it here. (Via tunneys)

I know the writers are not to blame for the show’s ending or the shortened season, and I’d like to think that if they’d had some more scope, we could have had some time with Root and Shaw actually being together instead of trying to be together. I know the network more or less insisted on this season’s still including one-off procedural episodes, which ate up time that could have been given to that purpose. But at the same time, a variety of events could have been set up differently so that Shaw and Root wouldn’t be separated in the episode immediately after their reunion. I can understand why writers who aren’t familiar with the particular pains of Bury Your Gays might not see that as a priority, and instead be more concerned with not making Shaw’s escape too easy and letting us actually see the Root/Machine union operating onscreen instead of just presenting it as a concept and leaving it there. But this is my line. This is where I cannot look around what bothers me to the aspects of the show I love so much.

Whether or not this death “counts as an instance of the trope” ultimately does not interest me; I think it’s perfectly possible to argue it, either way, depending on how you define the trope, which the various arguments on either side are showing clearly is not so well-defined as we often imagine. All I can do-which may not be right for you-is think about this as part of Root’s story and the show’s story. I think this is Root’s most fitting end, and I also think that not letting her and Shaw’s relationship have a little time to be between crises is a mistake. I think that having the moment of her death take place offscreen is difficult to swallow in a show that has usually given its major characters big, dramatic, heartfelt deaths, but that she said goodbye in her own way throughout the episode before she was even shot, and that while her human loved ones might not have been there with her, she didn’t die alone. The Machine was with her, closer than touch, as it has been for years and will be forever.

Via personofinterestshaw

I referred to the Machine’s copy of her as part of its “archive” rather than its memory or its simulations because archives are as much about the future as they are about the past. They are not just the heaped detritus of the past, but collections of it that are chosen, curated and cared for for the precise purpose of being remembered into the future. Root has been right, every time, about the true nature of the Machine, and I choose to believe that she’s right about her own death. Root is dead; long live Root.

Final notes:

  • The Machine is “she” this week because having chosen to represent herself through Root, I think the Machine can be seen as having chosen a gender presentation, if not exactly an identity in the human sense. This was a transformation for her.
  • I couldn’t find a good spot to mention this, but Harold’s general refusal to get his hands dirty has always been somewhat hypocritical. No matter how much he criticized John’s use of violence in the early seasons, that violence was precisely what he hired John for. His old insistence that the Irrelevants list was, well, irrelevant clashed with his stated objective of protecting the whole society. And in this episode, his repeated assertions that the others shouldn’t risk themselves for him, and that he could accept his own death so long as they ended up okay, is contradicted by the fact that he never does a single thing to put this idea into action. No matter what he says, he never seriously tries to stop them or to give himself up to save them. I’m not saying this isn’t understandable, but if he doesn’t go all-out now, his legacy-which has always been a delicate balance between nobility and hypocrisy, culpability and making amends-will tip pretty permanently toward a side I have trouble respecting. Which would be a shame.
  • I’m really looking forward to other characters’ reacting to hearing Root’s voice from the Machine.
  • Next week better be executed perfectly. It looks like a stunningly pedestrian number-of-the-week premise, and if it just pokes along, I will be having very strong words with it.
  • At least we have this.

  • And we’ll always have Root asking for a really big gun and a scrunchie in the same breath.
  • We will also always have Sarah Shahi as the Lone Ranger.
  • A big hug for everybody here. For those who are hurting, your pain is shared by many, and it is your pain. It’s valid. Let yourself be supported, whether that means disengaging or talking with others.

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