#poi spoilers

[linusbenjamin]

Person of Interest | 2.16 'Relevance'

[sci-fi-gifs]

Sarah Shahi as Sameen Shaw Person of Interest | 3.03 'Lady Killer'

[thetorturedtrudiedepartment]

"Acker flawlessly oscillated between portraying Root as someone who blew with the wind and playing her as the most determined, intuitive woman in the world.

Root had an emotional intelligence the others didn't possess because she was forward (okay, overfamiliar…) and unafraid to express herself. Acker also had an accessible reserve of gravitas only true scene-stealers possess. When Root, of all people, appeared at crucial turning points to declare things were about to get bleak, that meant things were really bleak.

While Person of Interest framed Shaw, Harold, and John as willfully naive sometimes, Root would say the quiet part out loud about the growing Samaritan threat. Before any other characters accepted that the only way to win was to take some losses, Root had processed there was no scenario where they would win cleanly. That gristly reality, and Acker’s ability to play to Root’s dynamism, made her a singular presence and a surprising emotional core. She forced other characters to reckon with things they didn't want to, whether it be romantic chemistry or the probability their life’s mission was about to be torn to shreds by an opponent they couldn't beat."

I rewatched POI recently and NEEDED to write about it. My (free) love letter to Root, who was hands down one of the best TV characters of the 2010s 🍹🔫.

Very spoilery, because it's written by a fan with other fans in mind!

[coraniaid]

#19 for person of interest and #2 for willow rosenberg

#19 ... one behind-the-scenes trivia fact I've learned somewhere and my thoughts on it.

I honestly don't really know that much trivia about Person of Interest. One thing I think I remember reading somewhere once is that the writers originally cast Amy Acker to play [a version of] Caroline Turing and only quite late in production decided on the twist that Caroline Turing was actually an alias for Root [at which point, presumably, they renamed her character, because she probably wasn't called 'Turing' before that].

Which is kind of amazing to me, if it's true: Amy Acker as Root is such a huge part of the show that's it's strange to think it almost didn't happen [and, presumably, the show itself would have gone off in an entirely different direction in Season 2 without Root: we'd have seen a lot more of Alicia Corwin for a start].

But, well, I can't find the original claim now and even if I did it probably didn't have any particularly solid proof to back it up. So maybe it's not true at all. (I think it's obvious that the writers hadn't yet cast Amy Acker as Root in Season 1's Root Cause, but that's a much less interesting claim to me).

#2 ... ...how I would have chosen to change their story from canon

Not an original take, I suppose, but to me the big problem with Willow's arc is the way that everything the show has been building up to since (at least) Becoming gets utterly derailed by the Willow-as-a-metaphorical-drug-addict subplot in Season 6. And, yeah, I can see arguments for this subplot: magic had been used as a metaphor for drug abuse before, and it does fit with Season 6's wider theme of exposing the characters to more bleakly quotidian problems like bills and dead-end jobs and (metaphorical) battles with social workers. But it just doesn't work for Willow or her arc. Willow's descent into villainy ends up being almost something that happens to her [because of bad actors like Amy or Rack or Warren] rather than something that evolves naturally from her own flaws.

And that's frustrating, because the show's already spent a lot of time setting up Willow's character flaws and how they will surely lead to tension between her and Tara and her and Buffy. We know Willow has self-image problems ["I'm not your sidekick!" she snaps at Buffy in Fear Itself], that she's afraid that people won't like her if they see the real version of her [see her dream in Restless for example], that she compensates for this by trying to help everyone and make herself useful ["I want to help", she tells Buffy in The Harvest, "I need to"].

We know Willow is prone to being jealous when other people get attention despite (in her eyes) not working as hard for it as she's had to or when they threaten to come between her and the people she loves [see: Faith in Season 3, Anya in Season 5]. We know Willow is very often unsympathetic to other people's problems if she can't personally relate to them [see ... well, many examples, but in particular Buffy in Dead Man's Party].

We know that Willow's been getting into magic to an extent that worries all the other sympathetic magically-aware people we know. We know that Willow has a strong sense of herself as a 'good person' despite the fact she often does things that are illegal or dangerous or unwise. We know that Willow is proud of her intelligence and her accomplishments and that she often ignores advice she doesn't like or lashes out at people she thinks are talking down to her [see, for example, the way she talks to Tara in their fight in Tough Love]. We know Willow has had trouble respecting other people's wishes and that her first reaction to relationships going wrong is to try to work out how she can "make" people forgive her [how she reacts to Oz discovering her with Xander in Season 3, for example].

None of this has anything to do with Willow being tricked into being a magical drug addict by a girl who used to be her pet rat. It just doesn't.

In my ideal version of Season 6, Tara still leaves Willow (for much the same reason she does in canon: Willow not respecting her boundaries, using magic to mess with her memories to 'resolve' arguments they have) and Willow still reacts terribly (and manages to de-rattify Amy). But Rack doesn't exist and more generally Amy is not at all the person she is in canon who pushes Willow to use magic more and more because she's some sort of self-destructive hedonist.

Amy should be more or less the same person she was halfway through Season 3. She shouldn't be luring Willow into drug dens [drug dens which she shouldn't even know about!]. She shouldn't suddenly be recast as a Bad Influence. She should be more or less the person she was in Gingerbread. She should be (honestly) amazed by how much better at magic Willow's gotten since high school. She should think of Willow as her friend and try to 'stand up for her' because she (thinks she) knows that Willow lets people push her around too easily. She should (unintentioally) feed Willow's ego: tell her that she's perfectly in the right and it's everyone else who's over-reacting to her growing magical strength.

And yes, maybe eventually she should start directly encouraging Willow to misuse magic (to help her 'fix' her relationship with her Dad, for example, or to get back into college despite technically not finishing high school). But it should be a gradual process. It shouldn't be something that starts fan theories about Catherine Madison somehow posessing her again. And the narrative should [and I can't stress how much it doesn't do this] care the slightest bit about Amy herself as a person, and recognize that she has gone through something awful and traumatic.

Amy's role in the plot of Season 6 should be to encourage Willow to keep telling herself she can use magic all the time whatever anyone else says because she's a good person. She should enable Willow, sure, but not intentionally. She's been a rat since she was 17; she shouldn't know things about the world she didn't know three years ago (except rat things, I guess). She shouldn't force Willow to do magic or trick her into it, because then what happens to Willow is no longer a consequence of who Willow is as a person.

You can make Amy a catalyst for Willow's continued bad behaviour without making her deliberately evil. You just need to make Willow the more active partner in their relationship. Wilow should be the one to decide to keep using magic but just keep it hidden; the one who keeps finding excuses for why she can treat people like objects and still be a good person; the one who keeps redefining where the line is everytime she steps over it. Until eventually Willow goes too far even for Amy, and she has to reckon with what she's been doing all this time.

And that makes Season 7 Willow works better too, because she's actually got something real to feel guilty about. She's not just sorry that after Tara died she reacted by temporarily going a bit crazy and having a relapse into her former addiction [and then being persuaded by some bad magical energy she absorbed into wanting to end the world]. She should be sorry about what she deliberately did to Tara (and to Amy, and to Buffy, and to Dawn, and to everyone else), not what she almost did to the world when she wasn't in her right mind.

I mean, sure, you can keep Warren killing Tara if you want [I'm not sure I would, but...]. Play up the parallels between Warren and Willow, even. Keep Willow killing him and trying to kill Jonathan and Andrew. Keep her trying to end the world, too. But the fundamental moral agency should be Willow's.

Her arc shouldn't be a temporary drug habit she's tricked into by her Bad Friend followed by going cold turkey for a bit and then relapsing after a random horrible event. She shouldn't decide to end the world because a coven of witches we've never met use Giles as a proxy for some elaborate and almost self-defeating 11-dimensional chess game (I quite like Grave, all in all, but that particular twist is infuriatingly stupid). Willow should drive her Season 6 arc by being Willow, only worse. By being the same "callous and deeply strange" Willow we know from the high school seasons, just more so, one who ignores Buffy's advice from Ted to "use [her] powers for good".

The writers shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge that Willow Rosenberg (who, to be clear, is one of my favorite characters in fiction) actually does have the capacity to be a bad person without external factors forcing her into it.

[julesnichols]

The whole storyline of Root and the Machine (and Finch's response to it) in season three is so much funnier if you look at it like "Finch's daughter is in a rebellious phase and Root is the bad boy she's picked up to piss him off"

[aardvaark]

i was kinda hoping for mistynat to be a thing in yellowjackets because they reminded me a little of root & shaw from person of interest, but then the end of season 2 happened and they unfortunately are a bit too much like root & shaw from person of interest lmao

[kickbutts-singsongs]

Person of Interest spoilers: throwback to when I watched ‘Bury the Lede’ for the first time lmao

*Alonzo Quinn shows up being all sweet and kind*

Me: haha I bet he’s the villain that’d be funny

Him: *isn’t the perpetrator*

Me: oh well

Him: *is actually the head of HR and one of the main villains of the series*

Me: 🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨

[loser-xx]

I can't believe Harold Finch literally blew up and immediately acted like he knew nobody.

[argylepiratewd]

Made-up title for a fic game ask: "All the cinders and all the embers"

Post-POI finale, John comes back and reunites with Harold. He's badly scarred and won't be the Man in the Suit ever again, but of course Harold is glad to see him

[stripesysheaven]

as someone who is a robotfucker i love watching person of interest

[otogariado]

WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT

[linusbenjamin]

Sarah Shahi as Sameen Shaw Person of Interest | 2011-2016

[praesaepe]

johns therapist gf subplot was the relationship version of fridging - female side character with very little personality has tragic romance with male main character so he can be sad and brooding all the time

[thetorturedtrudiedepartment]

"There’s a kind of on-screen dynamic you have no hope of achieving artificially. Manufacturing a fictional relationship is one thing, stumbling upon it is another, much more pleasant, thing. They simply had electricity — this was undeniable, like the answer to an equation.

One of the things that made the unexpected Root and Shaw arc so flavorful was that they're excellent characters individually. Root was defined by transience. She colored outside the lines, believing she had no future. Amy Acker’s charming hacker also had a fleeting, malleable quality because she was inconsistent — she rotated through moral codes and identities like socks. Shaw, on the other hand, was a constant. She was sure of herself and her path as a soldier — a predictable modus operandi of working the numbers and keeping teammates alive. The odd attraction between them lay in those fundamental differences. Shaw, a solid brick wall, found chaos seductive, and Root, who weaved in and out of the story like a quirky ghost, was intrigued by bluntness and walled boundaries. Unstoppable force meets an immovable object… you get it. They brought out the best and worst in each other."

Hello, y'all! My free Substack (which as of right now is entirely POI blogs) needed watering and I needed to get my Shoot rambles out of my brain.

This is the result. Like my Root essay, this is a long read and spoilery. In this, I explain why Root and Shaw were absolute dynamite together and how POI executed a memorable romance with a lot of hurdles in the way

[el-ffej]

If ever there was a coda for Person of Interest... this is it. Moving, fits perfectly, and absolutely brilliant

- Clare Harner, "Immortality"

[io-lu-art]

Your concerned 3rd party...

...is watching you.