Monday, April 8, 2013

Person of Interest 2.19: "Trojan Horse"

“If the agency taught me one thing, it’s that the best spy is the one you’d never suspect.”
- Reese

We begin this week with the Machine picking up chatter about a man named Jason Lee being dead an executive digging into things. We cut to Finch playing chess with Elias and Elias does something rather interesting. He removes pieces from his own side and adds a few to Finch’s to simulate the power struggle currently going on. I have to say I do enjoy Elias. The HR storyline is getting old but Elias always brings little interesting tidbits. They part company and Finch gets a number. He lets Reese know (who is out in the woods observing an older couple). Finch has gotten himself a cover ID as a new IT guy at the tech company where this week’s POI, Monica Jacobs, works as a high level executive. Things look pretty calm (relatively speaking) on this front.

We cut to the precinct where Carter and Detective Turner are chatting about the Shamanski shooting. She wants to be kept in the loop on the investigation. She’s still suspicious of Beecher. Speaking of, he shows up and when he won’t tell her the name of his CI that got Shamanski killed, she just brushes him off. Lionel offers to look into things for her. I really hope he can tell Carter his history soon so they are completely honest with each other. There needs to be someone other than the viewer who can appreciate his transformation. He corners Beecher in the men’s room and goes all overprotective partner for Carter. He says that by Beecher keeping mum it makes him look involved and dirty.

That evening, Finch follows Monica into the R&D floor and sees her copying files and sneaking around. Definitely some shady business going down there. Reese reminds Finch that even though he may like her (he was totally geek crushing out earlier), she may be a spy. He has to cut his end of the conversation short because our not-so-dead Agent Shaw has returned. It turns out the couple Reese has been watching are Shaw’s dead partner’s parents. She’s there to make sure Control doesn’t kill them, too. Reese figured that was the case and he’s just been waiting around to run into her. She’s not up for company though. I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ll see of her.

The next morning, Finch tries to copy the files that Monica nicked the night before but he gets caught by a guy and has to lie and say he’s performing a security upgrade. Meanwhile, Monica is off on a super-secret lunch meeting. She meets Ross, the head of R&D and gives him the info she’s found on Jason Lee. Finch needs to see the encrypted emails she found on Lee’s computer so Reese does a little sleight of hand pick pocketing to nab the flash drive. Finch is quite happy to have Reese back on the case. Out near the water, Beecher meets with the head of HR to ask about where the tip about the money came from. Beecher gets the run around but we do learn he is the head of HR’s godson. If Beecher doesn’t stop digging, he may end up just like Shamanski. Things aren’t going well for Monica either. Finch watches as someone syncs Monica’s phone with calls, contacts and appointments she never made or had. Someone is setting her up and it’s enough to get her fired.

Reese tails Monica the next morning and follows her back to work. Her former assistant comes out and she starts tailing him. So it’s kind of like tail the leader. Meanwhile, Beecher pays Elias a visit and learns that Shamanski was clean and Beecher got played by HR. Unfortunately, this means that HR is now going to have to deal with him. Monica catches up with her assistant and we overhear him speaking Chinese. Reese intervenes when the assistant gets physical and manages to get himself and Monica out of harm’s way after exchanging gunfire with a rooftop shooter. Finch also discovers they’ve just picked a fight with the People’s Republic of China. Carter found that Jason Lee vanished (no body in the morgue). Oh boy. This is going to be complicated.

Speaking of complications, Shaw shows up at the library. An article was published that morning about a CIA agent dying in the line of duty to uncover a domestic terrorist plot. Not the real story of how her partner died but it’s nice. She couldn’t just say thank you though. She spots the wall dedicated to Root and takes some info on her. Apparently hunting down the crazy techie is going to be her “hobby”. At the safe house, Finch and Monica bond over trying to hack the system to find the hidden network and identify all the spies within the company. They almost break the firewall when the spies hack the computer they’re using and the battery kind of explodes. There may be another way to directly access the servers at the company. An alter comes up at the front desk showing that Monica is in the building. The security guards head off to try and find her. I saw it coming a mile away (as I’m sure most of the audience did) that they strapped the ID card to Bear’s collar and let him run around the building. Finch manages to get Bear to herd them into a contained area so Monica can access the information they need.

They hook into the serve and Finch finds all kinds of goodies. More than half the senior staff is spies and they’ve been hacking and monitoring all kinds of government agencies and banks and such. Not surprising, they’ve got operatives in the building and Reese has to take out like four of them. Finch points them to Ross’s office since that’s where all the internal messages are coming from. But, Ross isn’t a spy. He’s just dead and the real mastermind shows up; Martin (the founder of the company). Martin goes on about how there’s no use for patriotism these days and that it’s all about power. Yeah we’ve heard that before. Martin ends up committing suicide at the order of the man who recruited Stanton after the botched elimination attempt in China.

As predicted, HR uses its reach to take out Beecher. Carter’s kind of torn up about it since Lionel proved he wasn’t involved and they were supposed to get dinner that night. Meanwhile, with the FBI dismantling the company, Monica is in need of a new job and she mentions one company that looks promising. It’s obvious we are supposed to assume it’s one of Finch’s outfits so he can keep an eye on her. He’s also discovered that the majority of the information taken from the company was siphoned to a company called Decima Technologies and that it shared code with the virus Stanton uploaded. Finch is convinced the virus’s sole purpose is to find and infect the Machine. We end with the Brit who hired Stanton confirming that they are safe since the Feds are following the China connection.

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