Minicap: Person of Interest

Continuing with last week’s theme of Reese over identifying with this week’s person of interest, this week’s person of interest is Lindsay Weir, who finally stopped traveling with the Grateful Dead, went back to school and became a doctor named Megan Tillman.  Sort of.  She’s still leading a Lindsayish double life of good doctor by day, boozy but upscale barfly by night.  Only she’s traded in James Franco for Jim Caviezel.  Upgrade? I wouldn’t have said so a couple of years ago, but even if Caviezel’s ten years older, Franco was looking kind of rough and bloated at the Oscars.

Tillman keeps casually crossing paths with this totally greasy snake named Andrew Benton who’s so gross he monogrammed his entire loft.  And he’s a sex offender who keeps his coke out in the open in  a coffee container.  Seriously, dude.  You should be arrested for being criminally stupid.  And criminally gross.

So, with a pretty girl at the top of the list and a total scumbag in her orbit, she has to be the potential victim, right?  Psych.  Reese and Finch learned nothing from the pilot and are once again confronted with a female perpetrator.  Only this one’s different.  This one’s Linda Cardellini and she’s a good doctor so there has to be more.  Which there is.  And it leads to Reese over identifying with yet another person of interest.  And it goes somewhere much darker for Reese than we, or even Finch, knew.

It also leads him to be sloppy and if not for his Jim Caviezel eyes, the hypnotic quality of his droning whisper,  his bad-ass military ninja skills, and the fact that he’s the lead he’d have been in deep.  But all those are true so he gets out of his jam with just a minor, but telegenic, facial wound.  This week’s question:  How does he manage to get his face banged up and cut in almost every episode, but is never bruised or scarred?  Maybe he really is Jesus.

The episode ends very sadly and ambiguously and we get what little back story this episode provides for Reese in a brief but meaningful comment that casts him in a much darker vein.

Finch is woefully underused this episode, but does get off a few good lines and also clues us in on a little bit of his back story in conversation, Carter continues to build Reese’s police harassment case for him and conveniently includes Finch, and Fusco gets to finally use his moral relativism for good.

It was a pretty succinct and straightforward episode and I think the writing staff is getting tighter and finally has a clearer idea where they want to take the story.  Like I said, it may not hold up to intense scrutiny but it is building and creating at least compelling back stories for the two leads that I’m interested in.  Full recap will be up in a few days and I’ll flesh out details of both the procedural story and what I think were the new tidbits of information on our two (anti) heroes.