Person of Interest 1.1-1.16
Things I intended to do with my weekend in terms of consumption of fiction, fandom, and internet life:
1. Watch Call the Midwife and the last 2 (though hopefully not "last 2 forever") episodes of Pan Am.
2. Work on writing up things i've read recently, as I been rather bad about that since I started having helth problems late last year.
3. Read.
4. Upload icons, as I still haven't even finished posting the ones I made when I was semi-laid up after surgery.
What I actually did with my weekend in terms of consumption of fiction, fandom, and internet life:
1. Marathoned the first 16 episodes of The "Jim Caviezel Is An Unrealisticaly Badass Vigilante But He Does It with Amusing Style And Kinda Heroworships The Awesome Lady Cop Who Strongly Disapproves Of The Whole Vigilante Thing" Show." Which is more properly know as Person of Interest.
PoI is one of those caper shows that isn't as smart as it thinks it is but is entertaining enough that you don't care. The premise is that a reclusive, paranoid multimillionaire named Finch (he has a fetish for birdnames in aliases) invented a program for the goverment that finds the most obscure threads to predict terrorist attacks. But since The Machine (indeed) dismisses non-terrorist crime as "irrelevant" Finch creates a back door that sends him the social security numbers of people who will either commit of become the victims of violent crime. For help, he shanghais John Reese, an ex-CIA operative in hiding and living as a hobo on purpose. Reese, in turn, shanghais a dirty cop named Fusco to be his inside man on the police while another cop, Carter, is determined to hunt Reese down due to that whole thing where he keeps shooting people in her city and vigilante justice is just not something she's cool with.
Actually, the fact that the narrative is all "Well, yes, Reese and Finch are our main guys and our premise relies on promoting vigilateism in fiction, but really she has a very good point and is on very firm moral ground here." was one of the big appeals early on (as was the fact that Reese's annoyed admiration seemed to grow to the point of near hero-worship in the first half of the season) and that's being maintained even though the initial dynamic between the characters has been tweaked in the second half.
I freely admit to shipping Carter/Reese in a "Frenemies who fight crime and sometimes break for sex" way. (A lot.) Actually, I'm pretty sure the writers raid porn meme prompts for at least one exchange between them or comment one makes about the other/does from episode 11 onward. The most blatant example being an instance Carter saying she fantasized about having Reese in the back seat of her car a lot, but there were usually handcuffs involved and Reese getting a "hmm..." face before he responds. Reese also likes to stalk Carter in his spare time (on his black motorcycle, wearing black leather) because he figures she's too good a cop not to have people trying to kill her all the time. (He's basically right, though she doesn't exactly need much help taking care of herself.) Actually, I think Reese just likes stalking people. He seems happiest when he's stalking people for the greater good. I half think the real reason he joined Finch is that now he can stalk people and save lives at once.
Reese is basically Wolverine, only taller, more likable, more attractive, and probably with way better personal hygeine. (After the pilot, at least.) No, really, in the second episode he was trying to save a scrappy runaway teenager who managed to get a few over on him and I fully expected him to just keep her because that's what Wolverine would do. Reese is also Very Very Badass, to a giggly degree. (The fun kind.) The best explanation of that is a scene where he walks unarmed into a bar full of armed thugs and you hear fighting sounds and he walks out without a scratch and everyone else is unconscious. I kinda of want a PoI/Nikita crossover just because they both have the same "no matter how badass you are, this person is more badass" thing going, though Nikita somehow feels more plausible about it to me. He's also Wolverine because he has a tendency to heal surprisingly rapidly. In a lot of episodes, he gets facial wounds (and other, less visible wounds) that should take weeks to heal but are magically better a few days later. In the midseason finale, they finally manage to hurt him enough that it carries over to the next episode, even though they still forget a couple times in that episode. In one episode, I'm half-convinced that Carter was just hanging back while he was locked in the trunk of a burning car just to see what superhuman feat he'd pull off to get out of it.
There are, annoyingly, 2 apparently-dead women in Reese's past (a partner and a girlfriend), but I'm pretty sure that one or both is still alive, and that part of why Reese is in hiding is that he helped one of them fake her death. Actually, I seriously hope that Reese's partner is an as-yet-unseen character called Root.
Finch and Fusco annoyed me in early episodes, but they've grown on me. The show overall reminds me of White Collar, despite the fact that they don't really have a lot of common (though I feel I could draw comparisons between Finch and Mozzie and a recurring character named Zoe Morgan and Alex.) They both have that "this is entertaining and kind of addictive braincandy but it's too bromance-y and needs more prominnt women to get attention more for me to get invested...oh wait you just did something to get me invested I might be a bit annoyed with you about that" thing for me. (I guess a lot of the similarities in my head come from the fact that I like these two shows despite being turned off by most premises with a bromance at the center?)
Anyway, certainly far from the best show ever, but an entertaining one and fairly addictive brain candy.
P.S.-My favorite of the early episodes is the one with the gratuitous Count of Monte Cristo references where Reese proves to us that he's not that bright unless it involves stalking, fighting, or brief spurts of machiavellian manipulation. Which gets a bit surreal once you start noticing that it's CoMC and you largely associate Caviezel with Edmond Dantes because the 2002 version of CoMC was the first thing you saw him in. (A teeny part of me may have been sulking the last few months that they didn't get him to play David Clarke in Revenge.) Though my favorite scene is another episode where Kahlan from Legend of the Seeker shows up with a haircolor that actually suits her shows up and abducts Reese's hair with the rest of him still attached so she can give him better hair and the experiences a complete inability to mentally or vocally function because apparently the CIA doesn't train you when it comes to random redheads flirting with you. That was seriously hilarious.