Warning: Fullfor Person of Interest Season 4...

Looking back at what may in fact be the final full 22-episode season of Person of Interest, I'm filled with both sadness and satisfaction. I don't exactly want Season 5 to be the show's final run, nor do I want the show to run for too long. One yearns for that sweet spot where a great series gets to end things at the perfect moment on its own terms.But we, as viewers, also want/need to know when that end will be. Up until a few weeks ago, Person of Interest's fate was never really in question. Now its fifth season has been pushed to midseason, with a reduced episode order, and CBS is refusing to commit to it being the end. An optimistic omen, but also a frustrating one. Still, it'll be interesting to see how the next 13 episodes play out regardless. End or not. Because, essentially, the reduced order makes way for a POI that's just might be fully serialized. Especially when you consider that the Season 4 finale left the series without its "case of the week" mechanism.

Person of Interest EPs Break Down Season 4's Finale and Preview Season 5

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POI's gripping, twisting Season 4 saw our heroes struggle to save people under the ever-growing sinister watch of Samaritan. Forced to adopt "secret identities" for the sake of survival, Reese, Root, Shaw, and Finch scrambled to protect New York citizens in a manner that wouldn't draw attention to themselves or blow their cover. All while Samaritan made big maneuvers to take over as humanity's prevailing overlord. Moves that our heroes were more or less helpless to prevent as they themselves could barely align themselves properly to prevent rudimentary murders. Adding to their troubles was a brewing gang war between reclusive mainstay Elias and deceptively clever upstart Dominic.It was only when Samaritan itself actively tried to draw out The Machine that our heroes finally got tragically caught between the two warring "Gods" and lost Shaw in the resulting scuffle. "If-Then-Else," of course, stands out as the true gem of the year, delivering an episode-long battle filled with multiple false futures and a simple-but-fascinating flashback sequence to the time Finch taught The Machine to treat all human life the same. "The lesson is that anyone who looks on to the world as if it is a game of chess deserves to lose." A perfect summation of the feud between Samaritan and The Machine, for all its shades of grey."If-Then-Else," the middle chapter in POI's strong wintertime "Samaritan Trilogy" (which really became a four-parter) also wonderfully, and harrowingly, paid off the long running Root/Shaw flirtation by not only giving us a Machine-imagined moment where Root died trying to get Shaw to admit her feelings (getting a "maybe someday" in the process) but then crushed our hearts with a kiss and a self-sacrifice that left Root (and legions of fans) in shambles.It's weird how much I'm lamenting the loss of episodes for Season 5 when there's no argument over the fact that the serialized chapters of Season 4 were the best episodes. "Nautilus," "Prophets," the Samaritan Trilogy (plus "M.I.A."), "Asylum," and the finale were all exceptional TV. Plus, the Carter-driven "Terra Incognita," while not rooted in Samaritan soil, provided superb emotional closure with regards to Season 3's big fall.But that's not to say that the non-Samaritan episodes were filler. POI makes the most of its "case of the week" structure, often using it to introduce new, intriguing wild card characters into the mix. If things weren't focused on Dominic and the Brotherhood's big violent play for the void left by HR, we were often meeting many kickass female characters like Annie Ilonzeh's Harper, Quinn Shephard's Claire, Katheryn Winnick's Frankie, and Adria Arjona's Dani - proving that capable, gun-toting women like Root and Shaw weren't outliers in this world.During the Samaritan arc, things got a little wonky when it came to the use of a young boy named Gabriel as an A.I. avatar. At times, sure, he felt like a natural extension of Samaritan, but nothing really tops having no face. No physical presence. I just remember the hairs on my arm standing up in "Nautilus" when Finch realized that Samaritan was behind the big scavenger hunt because it started speedily, and scarily, hacking into his computer. It's a presence/force that just can be beat with an actor, no matter the age.And to that end, the Machine's own last gasp in the season finale totally worked because it was all just words on a screen. It would have lost a lot of its heaviness if there'd been an actor, or even a voice, speaking the words.