In the sixteenth episode of the third season of Person of Interest, CAN THIS SHOW GIVE ME A BREAK. PLEASE. I AM A GOOD PERSON. I DESERVE GOOD THINGS. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Person of Interest.
You are all allowed to laugh at the fact that it took me until the VERY END of this episode to realize that Daniel Casey’s laptop is THE laptop that set this whole fucking show’s story into motion. HOW DID IT TAKE ME THAT LONG, IT’S LITERALLY THE SAME PROP, I EVEN FIGURED OUT THE MOROCCO CONNECTION
welcome to the way my mind works
Look, this is one of those episodes where I almost wish I could just write WHAT ON EARTH DO I SAY ABOUT THIS because that succinctly conveys my entire reaction to “RAM.†Right? That is a form of critical analysis all by itself. But I do want to delve deeper in this because HOLY SHIT, it’s such an unreal use of a flashback, one that provides perhaps the biggest single puzzle piece we’ve ever gotten for the mythology of the show. IT TELLS US SO MUCH OH MY GOD.
Dillinger
I might be remembering this wrong, but I think Root once made reference to the fact that John was not the first person that Harold had working with him, so this episode would have been satisfying enough if it had just been about the first partner that Harold ever hired. And “hired’ is the best word to describe this, since Dillinger was a mercenary (I caught that Blackwater reference, which… that alone made me not want to trust Dillinger), and it ends up being the major mistake Harold made. He chose someone who did what he did for the money, not because he believed in it. That flaw is one of the main reasons this unravels so quickly. And how could Harold have ever grown to trust someone who was so consistently trustworthy???
Seriously, I greatly disliked Dillinger, and I don’t just mean that while comparing him to John. That would have been a difficult set of shoes to fill regardless, but Dillinger doesn’t have the ethical boundaries, the charm, or the finesse of John. Instead, he’s brash. Impulsive. Violent for the sake of it. And throughout this episode, he got dangerously close to screwing everything up until he just OUTRIGHT FUCKED UP AND DIDN’T CARE.
And really, that’s what got me the most: he didn’t care about any of these people. He cared about his paycheck, and he cared about sex. That’s about the only thing he ever seemed truly interested in this entire time, and he was never going to make a good partner.
Daniel Casey
You know, it can’t be stated harshly enough that Control is the WORST. Not just Control, but that whole wretched CIA group, who act in the “self interest†of the United States, but do so in ways that are consistently horrific and illegal. IT IS BARELY A FICTION, Y’ALL. Barely! I couldn’t even start to list the monstrous things the CIA has done in the name of national security. And with this flashback, we find out they hired someone – Daniel Casey, to be exact – to attempt to break into Harold’s Machine, all so they could control it. (This sheds even more light on their interest in Samaritan, JESUS CHRIST.) And when Casey began to get an idea of the massive thing he was working on, he tried to get out, and THEY NEARLY MURDERED HIM. People are absolutely disposable to these demons!!!!
Yet Casey’s work unleashes hell upon everyone else in ways that are only understood years in the future. Because of Dillinger’s sloppy and self-serving job trying to protect Casey, he caused complications in John’s assignment alongside Kara Stanton, which is what got them sent to Ordos, China, where the CIA had that facility bombed in order to take out the laptop and punish John and Kara. It’s through this that we finally understand what Harold meant when he spoke about his guilt and complicity in John’s life. IT WAS SO MUCH WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
For what it’s worth, he tried. He tried to tell Dillinger that this would end in his death, that he was dealing with something he didn’t understand. But this was inevitable. It was entropy. Dillinger’s selfishness backfired on him, and it is the other major thing that set in motion the events that led to… my gods, everything.
Seriously, HOW LONG HAVE THEY BEEN PLANNING THIS??? The same with Root and Greenfield??? Wasn’t Greenfield that dude’s foster brother in “Mors Praematura�??? I CAN’T DO THIS, PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE, Person of Interest, PLEASE.
The video for “RAM†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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