What have I become? My sweetest friend...
When you find that one person who connects you to the world, you become someone different, someone better. When that person is taken from you, what do you become then?
I have to say that after The Crossing I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth, I would have liked for Joss and Reese's romance to have been more flushed out, to see them become a couple instead of a knot of unexplored possibilities and what ifs. And yet there was something poetic about the way everything happened because life is such that none of us get to choose our comings and goings. How long our good byes are going to be or how abruptly our relationships will come to a shuddering stop.
The question of what someone becomes is different for each character on the show.
Fusco was a revelation in the last few episodes, his character has been pushed to the side, in many ways he has been belittled left on the outside, no one likes a dirty cop and yet Fusco has proved himself over and over again. Under Carter and John's watch Fusco went from being a scumbag cop who killed people for money and power to someone who would not only endure death and torture for what is right but make a sacrifice that many of us find incomprehensible, that is, allowing his own child to be killed for the chance to destroy an evil that would claim many more sons and daughters if allowed to continue. In this episode you find yourself smiling at his courage and dedication to upholding his partners memory by bringing in the scumbag who murdered her. I love how thankful he was to have her as his friend and partner it was truly a testament to both Carter and Fusco.
Shaw was mostly Shaw, but you understood that Carter had earned her respect and trust and she wasn't willing to let Carter's killer go.
Finch came up against some hard truths, his hubris and fear may not have caused Jocelyn Carter's death but it brought about the circumstances that enabled her killer to sneak in like a dirty rat and shoot his two close friends. Root warned him. But his fear of her and unwillingness believe that he might be wrong, that his approach to the numbers and the Machine might actually be flawed allowed the tragic events to unfold.
This situation was reminiscent of Ingram and himself years earlier where his unwillingness to see that having 'irrelevant' numbers might pose an ethical dilemma for his friend that he was unable to stand by and watch as people were thrown on the way side because Harold only saw the function/application that he was hired to design the machine for, which was stopping the next 9/11. Harold is once again confronted with the fact that while brilliant and extremely gifted he is not God. And while the Machine has evolved past it's initial design it is still finite.
I could go into Root but she really annoys me as a character she was much better as a villain than as a would be hero. I feel like with many shows they can't have a villain be a villain they must change them into something or someone you pity. She was a okay villain a twisted mirror to Finch but as an overly capable hero/anti-hero she leaves much to be desired.
John Reese has in some ways gone through the most and least change since the show started, at the beginning you understood that he was broken, when we meet him, John is living on the streets drinking himself into an early grave. Joss finds him and his life changes shortly after. When you look at the beginning episodes of the show it's easy at first glance to discount the role Carter has on John's evolution. But at a second glance you see that Joss effects the way Reese executes his missions. Soon she is the measuring stick as to how he will perform certain tasks. She becomes his compass to all things moral. It stopped being about what Harold would put up with and started being about what Carter would want him to do. Then season 2 comes around and it is good until about mid way and I started to feel a little cheated because John Reese was pulling away from everyone and becoming a facade of himself. And while it is understandable it left him hard to sympathize with. Yes Stanton revived old ghosts and it made sense that Reese would pull away in wake of having his old partner/lover kidnap and strap a bomb vest to him and then threaten the people he called friends. And as John starts distancing himself from the people around him things start to fall apart, Fusco is left in the cold, Joss is left to handle Fusco and all the dirty deeds that go along with it including Elias... It isn't until season 3 that things start to fall back into place and then we are competing with Shaw, Root and the non scary Anti- Surveillance terrorist group... The show becomes more and more about the cases and less and less about character development. And then we get some really lovely episodes right before they kill Carter (which they planned on doing since 2011 or the very beginning!).
Without Carter, John is suddenly back to square one, like many of us when times of stress or great hardship we go back to our default setting. John's default thought process is find the person who took from you and then kill that person so no one will think of taking from you again. Admirable in it's simplicity. Caviezel has such amazing eyes, so able to convey a myriad of emotions, his acting is tip top in the episode The Devil's Share especially toward the end when Reese is about to kill Quinn and Finch is trying to reason with him using the wishes of a dead woman to argue why John shouldn't kill Quinn. What Finch failed to understand was that it wasn't about Jocelyn Carter and what she would have wanted Reese to do it was about loosing solid ground sliding back into the familiar to put things in a right perspective. Reese is trying to find his center, the north on his compass. And the look on Caviezel's face when he pulled the trigger was wonderful, you went from thinking he would back down to watching his eyes go dark and you knew that he was going to be a man of his word. Which I totally understand because when you run in certain circles one cannot afford to be a liar about the price person would pay for crossing you.
In all the Devil's Share was one of the best episodes of the season, not to mention that Elias just rocked at the end.
I have to say that after The Crossing I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth, I would have liked for Joss and Reese's romance to have been more flushed out, to see them become a couple instead of a knot of unexplored possibilities and what ifs. And yet there was something poetic about the way everything happened because life is such that none of us get to choose our comings and goings. How long our good byes are going to be or how abruptly our relationships will come to a shuddering stop.
The question of what someone becomes is different for each character on the show.
Fusco was a revelation in the last few episodes, his character has been pushed to the side, in many ways he has been belittled left on the outside, no one likes a dirty cop and yet Fusco has proved himself over and over again. Under Carter and John's watch Fusco went from being a scumbag cop who killed people for money and power to someone who would not only endure death and torture for what is right but make a sacrifice that many of us find incomprehensible, that is, allowing his own child to be killed for the chance to destroy an evil that would claim many more sons and daughters if allowed to continue. In this episode you find yourself smiling at his courage and dedication to upholding his partners memory by bringing in the scumbag who murdered her. I love how thankful he was to have her as his friend and partner it was truly a testament to both Carter and Fusco.
Shaw was mostly Shaw, but you understood that Carter had earned her respect and trust and she wasn't willing to let Carter's killer go.
Finch came up against some hard truths, his hubris and fear may not have caused Jocelyn Carter's death but it brought about the circumstances that enabled her killer to sneak in like a dirty rat and shoot his two close friends. Root warned him. But his fear of her and unwillingness believe that he might be wrong, that his approach to the numbers and the Machine might actually be flawed allowed the tragic events to unfold.
This situation was reminiscent of Ingram and himself years earlier where his unwillingness to see that having 'irrelevant' numbers might pose an ethical dilemma for his friend that he was unable to stand by and watch as people were thrown on the way side because Harold only saw the function/application that he was hired to design the machine for, which was stopping the next 9/11. Harold is once again confronted with the fact that while brilliant and extremely gifted he is not God. And while the Machine has evolved past it's initial design it is still finite.
I could go into Root but she really annoys me as a character she was much better as a villain than as a would be hero. I feel like with many shows they can't have a villain be a villain they must change them into something or someone you pity. She was a okay villain a twisted mirror to Finch but as an overly capable hero/anti-hero she leaves much to be desired.
John Reese has in some ways gone through the most and least change since the show started, at the beginning you understood that he was broken, when we meet him, John is living on the streets drinking himself into an early grave. Joss finds him and his life changes shortly after. When you look at the beginning episodes of the show it's easy at first glance to discount the role Carter has on John's evolution. But at a second glance you see that Joss effects the way Reese executes his missions. Soon she is the measuring stick as to how he will perform certain tasks. She becomes his compass to all things moral. It stopped being about what Harold would put up with and started being about what Carter would want him to do. Then season 2 comes around and it is good until about mid way and I started to feel a little cheated because John Reese was pulling away from everyone and becoming a facade of himself. And while it is understandable it left him hard to sympathize with. Yes Stanton revived old ghosts and it made sense that Reese would pull away in wake of having his old partner/lover kidnap and strap a bomb vest to him and then threaten the people he called friends. And as John starts distancing himself from the people around him things start to fall apart, Fusco is left in the cold, Joss is left to handle Fusco and all the dirty deeds that go along with it including Elias... It isn't until season 3 that things start to fall back into place and then we are competing with Shaw, Root and the non scary Anti- Surveillance terrorist group... The show becomes more and more about the cases and less and less about character development. And then we get some really lovely episodes right before they kill Carter (which they planned on doing since 2011 or the very beginning!).
Without Carter, John is suddenly back to square one, like many of us when times of stress or great hardship we go back to our default setting. John's default thought process is find the person who took from you and then kill that person so no one will think of taking from you again. Admirable in it's simplicity. Caviezel has such amazing eyes, so able to convey a myriad of emotions, his acting is tip top in the episode The Devil's Share especially toward the end when Reese is about to kill Quinn and Finch is trying to reason with him using the wishes of a dead woman to argue why John shouldn't kill Quinn. What Finch failed to understand was that it wasn't about Jocelyn Carter and what she would have wanted Reese to do it was about loosing solid ground sliding back into the familiar to put things in a right perspective. Reese is trying to find his center, the north on his compass. And the look on Caviezel's face when he pulled the trigger was wonderful, you went from thinking he would back down to watching his eyes go dark and you knew that he was going to be a man of his word. Which I totally understand because when you run in certain circles one cannot afford to be a liar about the price person would pay for crossing you.
In all the Devil's Share was one of the best episodes of the season, not to mention that Elias just rocked at the end.