Person of Interest
So. Yeah. That happened.
While I would always be unhappy about Carter's death, I think it would've worked for me if she'd been killed in action while trying to get the bad guy to the federal building. It would've been a tragic but organic ending to her HR story arc -- a hero takes on impossible odds for a noble cause and pays the price. It would've allowed her to go out on her own terms, in a story that was all about her.
Killing her off after the main conflict was over felt like cheap melodrama, and the way they staged it with her dying in Reese's arms, compounded my other problem with the episode, which is the sudden shoehorning of a Carter/Reese romance. Except it wasn't really a romance. A romantic relationship between Carter and Reese, if that's what the writers wanted to do, should've been started many episodes ago and given time to grow. Mentioning it for the first time in the same episode where she gets killed off makes me think that the writers didn't do it because they wanted a romance, they did it because they thought it upped the stakes somehow. As if Carter's death wouldn't be tragic enough if a dude wasn't in love with her when she died. As if she wasn't important in itself, quite apart from John's feelings for her.
Also, Reese suddenly going "You're the one who saved me, and that's why I love you" to Carter flies in the face of two and a half seasons of Reese waxing eloquent about how Finch saved him. And even if you set aside Reese's characterization, why does Carter have to be his personal saviour in order for him to love her? Why couldn't he have loved her because she's heroic, honorable, smart, compassionate and smokin' hot?
What it comes down to for me, at the end of the day, is that they took a character who has alway been portrayed as awesome and important in her own right and the heroine of her own story, and suddenly made her be All About Reese. From this show, I had naively expected better.
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