Look out, ladies! Lionel is on the prowl and all the women of New York—yes, every single one of them—are powerless against his one-and-a-half gallons of cologne and suave small talk.

Person of Interest served up some lighter fare in “Wingman,” and even though I hadn’t yet seen the episode when I wrote this, it was the best. How can a Fusco episode NOT be the best? I bet Fusco fell on a grenade for Reese, Jersey Shore-style.

This episode really does belong to Fusco, and he is served best by it. Fusco is on-point with both the humor and the drama of the episode, and Kevin Chapman reminds us all of why I consistently find his character to be so valuable.

Fusco this week has to be the butt of more than one joke, as per usual, and his terrible attempts at picking up women are truly hysterical. But while Fusco consistently delivers on the sad-sack humor schtick he’s been rocking since the beginning of the show, this episode also highlights how much he’s grown. Indeed, his entire role in the story is a reflection of where he’s come from. He’s a man who was forced into doing the right thing and realized almost too late that he wanted to all along. But just as the Number, Andre, laments how hard it is to turn on friends, even when it is the right thing to do, we see how much Fusco understands that concept. We know how deeply that resonates with him, and how far he’s come that he can come off as the most mature person in this episode. He’s the guy who’s been there, seen that, and has done his time in purgatory. And after all that, Lionel has come out as a good man, and as a good cop.

And he really is the regular guy in our cast of superheroes. He isn’t glamorous or extraordinary. Even when he cleans up, it’s still just Fusco in cufflinks. But that’s what makes him so fantastic in this particular story. Andre spends so much time focusing on all the things Fusco has to change if he wants to attract women, but in the end Fusco attracts one by being himself, and saying something silly about art. He’s a funny guy, and genuinely nice, and in the end, that pays off the way no fancy suit would. And on top of that, Fusco saved the day, and got a lot of respect from everyone around him. And that’s been a long time coming.

That respect is especially reflected in his relationship with Reese. I had guessed that Fusco would chafe at Reese treating an occupation he sees as his purpose in life as little more than a cover story, and in this episode we finally see just that. Fusco’s heated reaction to Reese’s blasé attitude toward shooting a guy in the middle of time square is sincere enough that it actually makes Reese try harder to be a good cop, and that says something about how far they’ve come with one another. It also says something about how well Chapman delivers that scene, that Reese’s reaction that he would try harder seemed believable. I could have never seen them interacting line this in season 1, and the strides they’ve both made are delightful to see. So all kudos have to go to Kevin Chapman. It’s nice to see him and his character get their chance to shine.

Sameen Shaw

If Fusco is the lead in this episode, Shaw plays his main backup, spending most of her time tailing Fusco and helping out. I was initially excited by this. Their friendship is something I’ve really enjoyed seeing develop in this last season, and I was hoping to see more of that in ‘Wingman.’ The problem is that, while we do get to see some great hand-to-hand combat scenes, she doesn’t honestly get any stand-out moments. She almost never interacts with Fusco directly, and only has brief scenes with John and Harold. While those scenes are consistently good, and Sarah Shahi always delivers her lines with great relish, this still leaves her, ironically, with quite a bit of screen time and not much to do. She got a few good one-liners, but she didn’t get to further her storyline or her relationships. We learned that she’s juggling both her life of crime and her job at the makeup counter, but we see neither of them. She doesn’t even get a scene with Root, which usually brings out some intrigue for her character.

The other thing I noticed in this episode was how many fights she had outside, clearly running after Fusco. This season they have a god-like supercomputer watching their every move. They can’t draw attention. But her actions don’t fit at all with either of her cover stories. The thief certainly wouldn’t go out of her way to help two cops she apparently doesn’t know. Why wasn’t this flagged? Why didn’t we see the Nameless Blonde show up to investigate?

There is apparently some margin for error that Samaritan allows in the behavior of the surveilled, but that has yet to be defined, leaving me wondering why a too-neat drugs bust would flag as anomalous, but a thief saving two cops with unaccounted-for martial arts doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. I actually appreciated the scene where she chased after Fusco out of the gallery but didn’t steal the conveniently-placed motorcycle to go after them. That, for me, was the one moment that acknowledged the limits of what they can and can’t do in the new surveillance state. But her going after Fusco in the dockyards? Clearly teaming up with John? I get that the restrictions the writers placed on themselves are difficult this season, but that calls for greater creativity, not forgetting about the restrictions whenever it’s convenient.

Shaw deserves better than a few decent action scenes and some quips. Hopefully next episode she’ll get a few scenes she can really sink her teeth into.

John Reese

Reese gets the bulk of the B-plot for this episode, revolving around him trying to be a better cop now that Lionel drove home how much the job actually means to some of them, and how closely they’re being watched by their new captain (more on her in a bit). As Reese himself put it: he spent years learning how to color outside the lines in the black ops. Functioning by-the-book is a skill that has laid dormant for a very long time in Reese, and he’s still working a lot of the kinks out. He’s clearly good at the job, of course. When he dedicates himself he clears multiple homicides in a day, albeit by bending the rules.

But the thing is that Reese isn’t a cop. I’m enjoying seeing how poorly he copes, and how he has to bend the rules, because this is a cover for him, no matter how much it matters to Lionel. I want to see him continue to have to tread the fine line between not being noticed and still being true to himself. This has been very clear in the past two episodes, in which Reese continually prioritizes the numbers above his cover, almost to disastrous effect. But in this episode we see him try to be a bit more of a team-player. And that’s fine, to a degree. To maintain his cover he has to at least seem like he’s coloring in the lines, so that he won’t be noticed when he hares off to do his real job.

What I don’t particularly like is him getting closer to the new captain. Given that he’s lying about everything, drawing her attention any more than his passion for kneecaps already does is probably not the best bet. Particularly not the sort of attention that involves giving her gifts of knock-off purses and nicotine patches.

Look, I can dig an off-sides love interest. I adore Zoe Morgan to the moon and back, mostly because the relationship between her and John built up slowly and always stayed in context: they were two professionals totally dedicated to their jobs, and they occasionally had a bit of fun together. It seemed perfectly in character for both of them, and they had great chemistry. Here, if they are headed in a love-interest direction, it seems a bit sudden, particularly given John’s tenuous position and the desk he’s sitting at. And he was definitely the one making the first move there. Even if it’s supposed to be a little bit of friendliness to get the new boss on his side, it comes on a bit strong.

This all comes down to the big problem I had with John in this episode. He has a purpose, like he told Harold two weeks ago. He doesn’t need a job. Hell, he was ready to blow everyone’s cover and get killed just to save the Number two weeks ago. He’s reckless, and desperate to serve the greater good that he’s found helping the Numbers. So having him get comfortable in his new job—enough so that he even bails on helping the latest number—doesn’t jive well with me, especially given how quickly it feels like it’s happening. Even if John did begin to enjoy his cover more than he thought, he would fight it tooth and nail, thinking he was betraying the cause. I could see Fusco really helping there, pointing out how their two jobs aren’t as far apart as they seem sometimes, that John could maybe do both and still do them justice. But the thing ‘Person of Interest’ has always been good at is the slow-boil, and this episode felt more like they dumped Reese in a deep fryer.

Which leads me to my final problem with Reese this week: letting Harold go off with Root and nearly get killed by Lithuanian mobsters. Now, there’s a good chance that he didn’t know about Harold’s little side-mission until after the dust settled, but if that was the case, he had to have found out as soon as he saw a whole bunch of kneecapped goons and realized Harold hadn’t been in contact with him for THE ENTIRE EPISODE (which is incredibly unusual for their ridiculous levels of co-dependence). There is no way he wouldn’t have had a mini-freakout. He shouldn’t have been nonchalant about all those Lithuanians. He should have been strangely tense in front of the captain, raising her suspicions that he really did have something to do with the situation. It feels like the writing sacrificed his character for a joke at that moment.

All of these criticisms can be summed up simply: removing John from the helping of the Numbers feels borderline out-of-character. We aren’t tuning in to see Law and Order: Detective Riley. We want to see John Reese be the badass he is, even while having to Clark Kent his way through the working day. Hopefully we get back to that next week. It certainly looks like we will, what with Reese’s cozy new job running smack-dab up against their newest pair of Numbers.

Captain Felicia Moreno

It’s hard to say much about her at this point. We know she’s trying to quit smoking. We know she’s a hardass—except she isn’t. Reese has been discharging his weapon left, right and center. Not fatally, but he should still be the biggest paperwork-sink and pain in her ass in the department. Instead, she seems to either be entirely okay and trusting of John’s methods to the point of being overtly friendly to him for the bulk of the episode, or, even worse, potentially flirty. She’s his superior officer. She’s in charge of the entire task-force. That means that professional distance and a critical eye on her officers is vital not only in maintaining her authority (particularly over an obvious loose cannon like John), but also in keeping her task force working.

Let’s look at some context for the NYPD at this point in the series. It’s only been a few months since a massive corruption scandal rocked the entire organization. A terrorist bombing killed a ton of people even more recently. The NYPD, and her task force in particular, has to be under intense scrutiny, and she has to feel that pressure every day. That’s a hell of a position to be in, and could fuel a hell of an interesting character. But I don’t get that stressed-out feeling from her. She says it, and she wears the nicotine patches, but I’m not getting permanently-frazzled, sleep-deprived, waiting-for-my-entire-team-to-collapse-at-any-minute from her. I get friendly. And flirty. And apparently really willing to bend rules to get results, as she all but sent Reese out to intimidate a witness.

I can’t say this is an altogether positive first impression, but she does have the disservice of being introduced in a particularly lackluster episode in which the writing felt sort of off for a lot of the characters. It’s very possible that next week we’ll get a much more interesting Captain for Reese and Fusco to foil. I’m honestly hoping for it. I’ve missed the team having to dodge law-enforcement, and having to do it under the nose of a very clever new character could be especially fun.

Maybe next week she’ll get the strong introduction and interesting personality I hope she’ll have. Maybe we’ll really see the stress she’s under and the toll that takes on the person in charge. Maybe we’ll see the real-time ramifications the big picture has had on the NYPD. I hope so.

Andre

Not the worst Number, certainly. He had several likeable moments, and seems genuinely torn about doing the right thing or staying true to his friends. But much like his episode, he’s just not that memorable. I feel about him the same way I felt about the Number from ‘Liberty’: he was there. He fulfilled the role. In this case, he gave Fusco several great moments to shine. The actor did a fine job. Altogether, nothing spectacular, but nothing terrible either.

Root

Root’s back to being cryptic Root from season 3. She admits that the Machine isn’t telling her as much as it used to, and is having to communicate in new ways, but Root’s still running missions for it without any apparent hitch. How? How is Samaritan not picking up her wandering? There has to be a way, but I’m not seeing it yet, and it’s starting to bother me. Even if we knew what the hell her cover is supposed to be it might help, but right now I’m just left very confused, and feeling a little jarred by how quickly Root went from at-loose-ends the past two weeks to being Terminator!Root again this week. Did something change? Did the Machine find a better way to talk to her, so it’s in her head enough to bring back the personality we saw when she was permanently hooked into it? We aren’t given these answers, and I think it’s time we at least got a few.

Root’s relationship with Harold continues to be the bratty little sister he never wanted. The interesting thing here is that she seems to be on a mission from the Machine to try and win Harold’s trust back, but the way they go about doing it seems entirely backward to me. Harold’s issue with the Machine is an ethical one. He doesn’t trust it after it tried to get them to kill a congressman. How, then, would sending him into danger with very little information, only to have him help Root obtain money and ordinance for the team, actually solve that problem? Yes, it gets them resources they badly need, and Harold is far too much of a pragmatist to not accept that. But it doesn’t make him trust the Machine any more, because it hasn’t addressed the root issue, pardon the pun.

Of course, Root might not have been the best choice of peacemaker. She is, at her heart, an agitator. She likes stirring up trouble. She likes seeing what people do when she pushes them. So perhaps she did think that this would work. After all, for her, material proof that the Machine is still taking care of them, that it is still her friend, would be more than enough to mend any broken fences. So, if she fundamentally doesn’t understand Harold’s problem with the Machine (and her words to him in ‘Panopticon’ certainly indicate that she either doesn’t understand or greatly underestimates his concerns, diminishing them with terms like ‘being precious’ and ‘indecision’ rather than the massive loss of faith he truly seems to be experiencing), perhaps Root really did think this would patch everything up.

This leads me to what I suspect might well be a major question for Root this season: what if she lost her faith too? Harold never gave his life over to the Machine the way Root did. What would Root do if the Machine did something or asked her to do something that she fundamentally disagreed with? It’s hard to imagine what that might be, so deep is her fanaticism, but even she has to have a limit. And as the Machine becomes a greyer and greyer entity, still clearly working for its own self-interest as much as anything else, Root may well find herself at an impasse. And what would she do then? That, I think, may well be one of the most interesting things to see this season.

Harold Finch/The Machine

We round the episode out with a slightly brighter note. Harold got some genuinely good moments. Although I object to John not being upset that Root put Harold in the line of fire without him there to help, Harold has stepped into danger on his own enough times that not contacting John about Root’s incredibly suspicious plan seemed in-character for him.

We also get to see Harold react on his feet to being thrown into a new persona. As I’ve mentioned before, I am endlessly fascinated by issues of Harold and identity, and we see his ability to slip into someone else come to the fore here. Egret is by far the biggest stretch we’ve seen from Harold: an ex-black ops agent who seems legendary in certain circles. And, amusingly enough, we see him do more than a little channeling of John at his scariest for his role as the heavy in this episode. Michael Emerson has always done good turns as scary people, and we really see how intimidating a short guy with glasses and a limp can be when he turns on his iciest attitude with the various low-lifes he and Root encounter. Occasionally it goes a bit over the top (the “I have two modes” bit was amusing, but also ridiculous), but that makes sense given how much he’s having to improvise. And to be fair, that was definitely something John might say.

His subplot culminates in his refusal to sell the missile to the Lithuanian mobsters, and Root taking them out. This was all according to the Machine’s plan, which knew Harold would refuse to hand a weapon like that over to people of that nature. And perhaps that was the olive branch it wanted to extend, misinterpreted or ignored by Root, who would never need or want such a message from the Machine. Perhaps it really wanted to communicate that it always knew Harold would do the right thing, as it had known during the incident with the congressman. See, that’s what I’ve been suspecting: the Machine didn’t order them to kill, it asked a question. It didn’t know what to do, so it turned to the one person it trusted to make that decision. Root said it last week: humans must make their own decisions. For that monumental choice, it couldn’t send Root because she would just blindly follow orders. It needed Harold, who would be willing to refuse. Perhaps in this episode, it’s showing him again that it wanted him to choose. That it trusted him.

And then it offered him a bribe, and Root put the emphasis on the gear rather than the gesture, which makes its impact far less, and its motives far more suspect. The Machine is highly intelligent, but it also seems to be making some pretty glaring errors in judgment in its approach to this whole situation. Perhaps one of the biggest errors is that it seems to be trying to handle Harold like it handles Root: sending him blindly on a mission and giving direction as it goes. For Root, this works. She worships the Machine. She finds the missions enjoyable, and she gets to tote around a missile in this episode as an added bonus. But for Harold, this is a blind expedition with someone he doesn’t entirely trust, only to be given things rather than the answers and reasons he needs so badly to start trusting the Machine again. In the end, I believe their impasse is only going to get resolved when Harold and the Machine sit down and have an earnest, long-overdue discussion. Harold, as we have seen time and again, isn’t one to trust easily. And once his trust is broken it’s going to be incredibly difficult to get that trust back. But a discussion might help. Showing him that it trusts him, even if he doesn’t trust it, would also go quite a distance toward bridging the gap. But this needs to be a slow process, through which we discover a great deal more about the Machine and about Harold. Not just a bribe and then done.

Conclusions:

There are certainly some fun character beats and some funny moments, but on the whole, this episode will not go down as one of the show’s great efforts. It doesn’t serve any of the characters but Fusco particularly well, doesn’t do the new captain much service at all, has a middling Number with a story that isn’t terribly interesting, seems to have tossed caution and the looming threat of Samaritan out a window, and the Machine itself seems to have had a serious lapse in its reasoning capabilities. The fact that they added back the Machine POV without any particular reason—making what should have been a triumphant return of that black background and square reticules after some sort of major event into something I literally didn’t notice until halfway through the episode—was just the disappointing icing on a very unsatisfactory cake. Damn. I expected better out of our first Fusco episode in ages.

Next week, things seem to be looking up. John’s newfound love of his job is going to get a great big smack across the face. Sounds good to me.

(Source:http://centaurianthropology.tumblr.com/post/99468569420/person-of-interest-wingman-s04e03-analysis-and)