Person of Interest ramblings
Mar. 14th, 2013 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arduinnaSo as should be obvious from my (sadly few, so far) posts about Person of Interest, I'm in it for the Finch/Reese, which the show delivers in spades, and which makes me ridiculously happy. Watching John tell everyone he meets how much Harold means to him, while Harold is listening in, is just... ♥melts♥
But it does some other amazing stuff, too.
Like how it handles women. Other than Finch and Reese, almost every other powerful person in this universe is a woman. And more than that, they're women with their own agency, their own agendas, their own reasons for being in this universe entirely separate from Finch and Reese.
And that is just bizarre, given what tv and movies are usually like.
I mean, look at it: POI is nominally entirely about two men. Pretty much every episode focuses on one or both of them. Their backstories are hugely important; their relationship is the entire point of the show. They're flip sides of the same coin: two highly skilled specialists who broke in the face of 9/11 and responded by taking their skills to a new, terrifying level of ends justifying the means in a desperate attempt to keep it from happening again.
Both faced a terrible personal loss as a result of their choices -- neither caused the death of the person he loved, but their choices led directly to those deaths, and each knows it. Those losses broke them again, and turned them both away from the single-minded path they'd been on even as it drove them both into deeper isolation -- until Finch found Reese and started healing them both by focusing them on the needs of the one, rather than the many.
And they've each taken that desperate need to protect the country and turned it into a desperate need to protect each other, which, wow, makes me happy.
Usually in a show like that, women would be there to give them something to angst about or long for, and not much else. And that does exist, a bit -- both Jessica and Grace exist mainly to be vessels for John's and Harold's emotional pasts, echoing into their presents.
And yet, there are also all kinds of strong women everywhere, on every side of the equation. In fact, the more competent someone is, the more likely she is to be a woman.
Look at John and Harold's helpers: Fusco and Carter for day-to-day help; Leon and Zoe for occasional help with specific things.
Fusco's really good at what he does, and is actually a pretty good cop, aside from the ways in which he's been a pretty bad cop, and I love him. But he tends to be met with derision and distrust everywhere he goes; he does not have leadership qualities at all. He got dragged into helping John and Harold with threats held over his head. Those threats haven't been necessary in a long time; Fusco likes working with them, he likes being one of the good guys. But John has still never told him "look, don't worry, I slagged the gun that could send you to prison for the rest of your life, you're a free man." They want to keep leverage over Fusco. (... so hard not to type leverage with a capital L...) They trust him, but not 100%. He knows it, too; he doesn't dare rely on them to keep him safe.
Carter's not just a good cop, she's a good cop who could easily have made the leap to the FBI. (Can you imagine Fusco getting an offer like that?) She had a solid military career. She sees things faster and sharper than Fusco, usually. Everywhere she goes, people know who she is and pretty much respect her abilities, and no one blinks when she takes control of things, because she has genuine command presence. She's involved with John and Harold because she managed to make connections to figure out some of what was going on, and got herself invited in, at which point she made her own choice. It puts her on a much more equal footing; she gets to draw her own lines about what she's willing to do and not do. If she chooses to walk away, they'll let her.
Leon's a lot of annoying fun, but he's a complete fuckup, and he's part of the gang mostly because they don't dare let him loose on his own; if they have him on a short leash, at least maybe they can control him a little. They trust him far less than they trust Fusco, although they're willing to use him.
Zoe, otoh, is the epitome of confidence and competence, and I doubt she's fucked anything up in years. They don't control her at all; she's an equal whose help they can request, like Carter, and she can choose whether she wants to help them. And also like Carter, she got sort-of invited in after she figured stuff out on her own, and has the power to just walk away if she chooses.
More than that, all of the people who are Finch and Reese's opposites/equals are women: first Kara Stanton for Reese and Root for Finch, and then when Kara died, it wasn't the male agent who took her place as Reese's opposite, it was Sam Shaw.
In all cases, their opposite number is that little bit more broken and damaged than they are, but other than that they're basically exactly the same: they're smart, they're strong, they're well-trained, they're flexible and fast, they're genuine threats. It could just be that making them women is a way to make it clearer that these are their opposites -- but man, who else does that? I don't think I've ever seen anything where women were presented this consistently and casually as holders of power to equal the powerful male protagonists.
The only man who's even come close to being on their level is Elias, but he's not the same single-person-power they are; head of a crime syndicate is a different kettle of fish. There's also whosie, Wilson?, the government guy aiming the killer at Reese, but Root is pretty much playing him at this point, so he's really not their level even though he thinks he is.
And all of these characters, women and men both, have lives outside of Finch and Reese's little world. Which is normal for men -- look at something like Grimm, and the difference between Monroe and Adalinde, and which has a more fully realized self as a character. Or Monroe and Juliette. Or hell, Adalinde and Bud the beaver dude.
On POI, not only do the women get to have lives, they get to have lives even if they're not related to or romantically/sexually involved with the male leads. (Grimm, once again I am looking at you, much though I love you.)
Like, say, we know more about Carter's relationship with her son than we do about Fusco's relationship with his son. We know more about Carter's background in the military than we do about Fusco's background as a cop. We know more about Carter's love life than we do about Fusco's, despite both of them having gone on dates during the show. She has, or at least had, career options that were completely her own, earned by her own skills; Fusco gets moved around at John and Harold's whim (or at the whim of HR) to be most useful to whoever's using him at the moment.
We know about Root's past - a bit. She was totally obsessed with Harold at first, which is pretty standard, but then it turns out it's not really Harold she wants, it's the Machine - Harold was just her entry point. That failed, so she's turned to other means now, because her agenda is entirely her own.
We know a whole lot less about Zoe than about Carter or even Root, because that's how Zoe likes it. And the implication may be that she and John are hooking up occasionally, but we've never actually seen it; what we've seen is them playing cards and sharing a drink and some banter. And more to the point, it never feels like the possible sexual relationship is the reason she helps them, or the reason they're comfortable asking for help, and thus the reason she exists in the universe: instead, she's a professional who enjoys working with these men on occasion, and if one of them happens to be fun in bed, hey, so much the better. It's sort of a mission perk, rather than the point of the relationship. She has her own life, which we've seen; we see her appear more casually, just doing her own job in the city because she works in the city, in ways that will sometimes intersect with John and Harold's.
Which is great not just in a characterization way, but in a universe-deepening way: things are happening in this universe that have absolutely nothing to do with John and Harold. Leading me directly into Booked Solid (2x15) and Relevance (2x16).
Booked Solid had struck me as very much a world-deepening ep, specifically with Zoe just happening to be in the same hotel doing her own thing, and the easy, casual implication that she and John have developed an easy, casual relationship, whether it's sexual or if they've discovered a mutual joy in parcheesi or cards. They just like each other, which is kind of awesome. And her life doesn't start and end with John and Harold; she has plenty to do, and loves doing it, and is going to keep on going her own way with absolutely no hard feelings anywhere, and in fact plenty of respect and affection all around.
Relevance took that world-deepening and ran with it, opening up an entirely new facet of the world, one we knew had to be happening but that had been just sort of vaguely theoretical. Suddenly all of that is a lot more real, and a lot more close. How many other blue assets are out there?
... okay, this stalled me out for a while because I'd tipped over into SG1-levels of obsessive detail-noticing, which I'm not going to do in POI, because it eats my brain to the exclusion of everything else when I let it run. I will simply note in passing that Shaw's ID in the Machine's records was "Catalyst.Indigo.5A", and that she was referred to verbally as "Indigo" -- so does the 5A mean that she and her partner were one of at least 5 active teams (I assume he was 5B, although there was no corroboration of that), or that they were the fifth Indigo team and there's a trail of dead agents leading up to them?
Okay one more thing -- Danny Aquino, the guy Shaw killed back in 2011 that set all of this in motion, had a yellow square. Which has been flipping me out since I noticed it -- the hell? Was he working with Harold? Was he working separately for the Machine? Why was he yellow!!
Ahem. Anyway, back out to a more macro level:
Now we have a world where Stanton's threat to the Machine isn't just going to be affecting John and Harold getting new numbers; this is going to start affecting the Machine's ability to detect terrorism in time. Which shifts the entire perspective of the show, without ever changing its focus.
On a character level, they managed to tie Shaw and Stanton's personality types pretty closely together to keep Shaw as an opposite to Reese that "feels" right: both of them just want orders to follow, and don't care about the reasons for those orders. But that doesn't make them the same. Stanton pretty clearly saw her partnership with John as an easy way to get a sex partner as well, without necessarily liking him as a person or friend. Shaw didn't give me that impression at all; I doubt she was sleeping with Cole, but it was clear that she had a genuine emotional connection to him as a friend, at least as much as she's able. Their handler had to set up something to kill both of them at the same time, because telling them each to kill the other wouldn't have worked - they both would have balked. (Cole immediately; Shaw probably more like John, when push came to shove.)
On a more -- er, shallow, I guess? -- level, I loved the third-party view of John and Harold, and most especially I loved the "I think she may have backup. There's some other guy in here!" as Shaw walked past a row of moaning kneecapped men. Heeeeeee. I had to rewatch that a few times, I admit.
... I think I've lost the thread of this, having rambled too far. Oh well.
On a fandom-related rather than canon-related note: DeviantArt, which I find very hard to navigate other than completely randomly, turns out to have something called Groups, which I discovered when I saw links to some POI groups while randomly looking for fanart. So I joined! Then stared, baffled, at the total lack of any indication that I'd joined them, or what one does with them. Eventually I found a help page that said "you can add the Groups widget on your user page" and after some frustrated poking at Settings (completely useless for this purpose), I figured out that I needed to edit my profile page and add the Groups widget there. Then I could see the Groups I was in. Still don't know how they work, but hey. At least there are presumably collections of fanart there...
I put links to them on the Person of Interest page on Fanlore, which yes is a blatant plug to get people to go look at that page and maybe add more things to it while they're there. *g* Look, fanart! *tempts*
But it does some other amazing stuff, too.
Like how it handles women. Other than Finch and Reese, almost every other powerful person in this universe is a woman. And more than that, they're women with their own agency, their own agendas, their own reasons for being in this universe entirely separate from Finch and Reese.
And that is just bizarre, given what tv and movies are usually like.
I mean, look at it: POI is nominally entirely about two men. Pretty much every episode focuses on one or both of them. Their backstories are hugely important; their relationship is the entire point of the show. They're flip sides of the same coin: two highly skilled specialists who broke in the face of 9/11 and responded by taking their skills to a new, terrifying level of ends justifying the means in a desperate attempt to keep it from happening again.
Both faced a terrible personal loss as a result of their choices -- neither caused the death of the person he loved, but their choices led directly to those deaths, and each knows it. Those losses broke them again, and turned them both away from the single-minded path they'd been on even as it drove them both into deeper isolation -- until Finch found Reese and started healing them both by focusing them on the needs of the one, rather than the many.
And they've each taken that desperate need to protect the country and turned it into a desperate need to protect each other, which, wow, makes me happy.
Usually in a show like that, women would be there to give them something to angst about or long for, and not much else. And that does exist, a bit -- both Jessica and Grace exist mainly to be vessels for John's and Harold's emotional pasts, echoing into their presents.
And yet, there are also all kinds of strong women everywhere, on every side of the equation. In fact, the more competent someone is, the more likely she is to be a woman.
Look at John and Harold's helpers: Fusco and Carter for day-to-day help; Leon and Zoe for occasional help with specific things.
Fusco's really good at what he does, and is actually a pretty good cop, aside from the ways in which he's been a pretty bad cop, and I love him. But he tends to be met with derision and distrust everywhere he goes; he does not have leadership qualities at all. He got dragged into helping John and Harold with threats held over his head. Those threats haven't been necessary in a long time; Fusco likes working with them, he likes being one of the good guys. But John has still never told him "look, don't worry, I slagged the gun that could send you to prison for the rest of your life, you're a free man." They want to keep leverage over Fusco. (... so hard not to type leverage with a capital L...) They trust him, but not 100%. He knows it, too; he doesn't dare rely on them to keep him safe.
Carter's not just a good cop, she's a good cop who could easily have made the leap to the FBI. (Can you imagine Fusco getting an offer like that?) She had a solid military career. She sees things faster and sharper than Fusco, usually. Everywhere she goes, people know who she is and pretty much respect her abilities, and no one blinks when she takes control of things, because she has genuine command presence. She's involved with John and Harold because she managed to make connections to figure out some of what was going on, and got herself invited in, at which point she made her own choice. It puts her on a much more equal footing; she gets to draw her own lines about what she's willing to do and not do. If she chooses to walk away, they'll let her.
Leon's a lot of annoying fun, but he's a complete fuckup, and he's part of the gang mostly because they don't dare let him loose on his own; if they have him on a short leash, at least maybe they can control him a little. They trust him far less than they trust Fusco, although they're willing to use him.
Zoe, otoh, is the epitome of confidence and competence, and I doubt she's fucked anything up in years. They don't control her at all; she's an equal whose help they can request, like Carter, and she can choose whether she wants to help them. And also like Carter, she got sort-of invited in after she figured stuff out on her own, and has the power to just walk away if she chooses.
More than that, all of the people who are Finch and Reese's opposites/equals are women: first Kara Stanton for Reese and Root for Finch, and then when Kara died, it wasn't the male agent who took her place as Reese's opposite, it was Sam Shaw.
In all cases, their opposite number is that little bit more broken and damaged than they are, but other than that they're basically exactly the same: they're smart, they're strong, they're well-trained, they're flexible and fast, they're genuine threats. It could just be that making them women is a way to make it clearer that these are their opposites -- but man, who else does that? I don't think I've ever seen anything where women were presented this consistently and casually as holders of power to equal the powerful male protagonists.
The only man who's even come close to being on their level is Elias, but he's not the same single-person-power they are; head of a crime syndicate is a different kettle of fish. There's also whosie, Wilson?, the government guy aiming the killer at Reese, but Root is pretty much playing him at this point, so he's really not their level even though he thinks he is.
And all of these characters, women and men both, have lives outside of Finch and Reese's little world. Which is normal for men -- look at something like Grimm, and the difference between Monroe and Adalinde, and which has a more fully realized self as a character. Or Monroe and Juliette. Or hell, Adalinde and Bud the beaver dude.
On POI, not only do the women get to have lives, they get to have lives even if they're not related to or romantically/sexually involved with the male leads. (Grimm, once again I am looking at you, much though I love you.)
Like, say, we know more about Carter's relationship with her son than we do about Fusco's relationship with his son. We know more about Carter's background in the military than we do about Fusco's background as a cop. We know more about Carter's love life than we do about Fusco's, despite both of them having gone on dates during the show. She has, or at least had, career options that were completely her own, earned by her own skills; Fusco gets moved around at John and Harold's whim (or at the whim of HR) to be most useful to whoever's using him at the moment.
We know about Root's past - a bit. She was totally obsessed with Harold at first, which is pretty standard, but then it turns out it's not really Harold she wants, it's the Machine - Harold was just her entry point. That failed, so she's turned to other means now, because her agenda is entirely her own.
We know a whole lot less about Zoe than about Carter or even Root, because that's how Zoe likes it. And the implication may be that she and John are hooking up occasionally, but we've never actually seen it; what we've seen is them playing cards and sharing a drink and some banter. And more to the point, it never feels like the possible sexual relationship is the reason she helps them, or the reason they're comfortable asking for help, and thus the reason she exists in the universe: instead, she's a professional who enjoys working with these men on occasion, and if one of them happens to be fun in bed, hey, so much the better. It's sort of a mission perk, rather than the point of the relationship. She has her own life, which we've seen; we see her appear more casually, just doing her own job in the city because she works in the city, in ways that will sometimes intersect with John and Harold's.
Which is great not just in a characterization way, but in a universe-deepening way: things are happening in this universe that have absolutely nothing to do with John and Harold. Leading me directly into Booked Solid (2x15) and Relevance (2x16).
Booked Solid had struck me as very much a world-deepening ep, specifically with Zoe just happening to be in the same hotel doing her own thing, and the easy, casual implication that she and John have developed an easy, casual relationship, whether it's sexual or if they've discovered a mutual joy in parcheesi or cards. They just like each other, which is kind of awesome. And her life doesn't start and end with John and Harold; she has plenty to do, and loves doing it, and is going to keep on going her own way with absolutely no hard feelings anywhere, and in fact plenty of respect and affection all around.
Relevance took that world-deepening and ran with it, opening up an entirely new facet of the world, one we knew had to be happening but that had been just sort of vaguely theoretical. Suddenly all of that is a lot more real, and a lot more close. How many other blue assets are out there?
... okay, this stalled me out for a while because I'd tipped over into SG1-levels of obsessive detail-noticing, which I'm not going to do in POI, because it eats my brain to the exclusion of everything else when I let it run. I will simply note in passing that Shaw's ID in the Machine's records was "Catalyst.Indigo.5A", and that she was referred to verbally as "Indigo" -- so does the 5A mean that she and her partner were one of at least 5 active teams (I assume he was 5B, although there was no corroboration of that), or that they were the fifth Indigo team and there's a trail of dead agents leading up to them?
Okay one more thing -- Danny Aquino, the guy Shaw killed back in 2011 that set all of this in motion, had a yellow square. Which has been flipping me out since I noticed it -- the hell? Was he working with Harold? Was he working separately for the Machine? Why was he yellow!!
Ahem. Anyway, back out to a more macro level:
Now we have a world where Stanton's threat to the Machine isn't just going to be affecting John and Harold getting new numbers; this is going to start affecting the Machine's ability to detect terrorism in time. Which shifts the entire perspective of the show, without ever changing its focus.
On a character level, they managed to tie Shaw and Stanton's personality types pretty closely together to keep Shaw as an opposite to Reese that "feels" right: both of them just want orders to follow, and don't care about the reasons for those orders. But that doesn't make them the same. Stanton pretty clearly saw her partnership with John as an easy way to get a sex partner as well, without necessarily liking him as a person or friend. Shaw didn't give me that impression at all; I doubt she was sleeping with Cole, but it was clear that she had a genuine emotional connection to him as a friend, at least as much as she's able. Their handler had to set up something to kill both of them at the same time, because telling them each to kill the other wouldn't have worked - they both would have balked. (Cole immediately; Shaw probably more like John, when push came to shove.)
On a more -- er, shallow, I guess? -- level, I loved the third-party view of John and Harold, and most especially I loved the "I think she may have backup. There's some other guy in here!" as Shaw walked past a row of moaning kneecapped men. Heeeeeee. I had to rewatch that a few times, I admit.
... I think I've lost the thread of this, having rambled too far. Oh well.
On a fandom-related rather than canon-related note: DeviantArt, which I find very hard to navigate other than completely randomly, turns out to have something called Groups, which I discovered when I saw links to some POI groups while randomly looking for fanart. So I joined! Then stared, baffled, at the total lack of any indication that I'd joined them, or what one does with them. Eventually I found a help page that said "you can add the Groups widget on your user page" and after some frustrated poking at Settings (completely useless for this purpose), I figured out that I needed to edit my profile page and add the Groups widget there. Then I could see the Groups I was in. Still don't know how they work, but hey. At least there are presumably collections of fanart there...
I put links to them on the Person of Interest page on Fanlore, which yes is a blatant plug to get people to go look at that page and maybe add more things to it while they're there. *g* Look, fanart! *tempts*
