‘Person of Interest’ season 5, episode 10 reaction: The Root of all evil

Remember when the 100th episode of shows was meant to be some sort of fantastic celebration of a show’s history? Well, “Person of Interest” on Tuesday night decided to pop all of the balloons … and did so really early.

We knew that we were likely going to be losing a character over the course of the hour, and that character (at first) turned out to be Elias. In some ways, this was expected given where we were in the story, coupled with the notion that the show wasn’t going to kill someone considered to be a top-lining star of the series … or were they?

Well, there was then the issue of Root, who was starting to figure out in her head the precise way in which the Machine operated. She made it clear that in some ways, the Machine now knows and controls everyone. They may have misinterpreted it the whole time. The moment she seemed to take a bullet during what was a hell of a car chase, it was fairly easy to assume that she was dead. Yet, at the same time this is prime-time TV, and it has a thing for making us believe something is true when it is not. We really wanted to believe that she found a way to make it out of here alive.

Alas, it doesn’t seem to be the case. Root seems to be gone, and in her place comes the Machine. She has chosen a voice, and it only makes sense that it would be this voice, shocking as it is to understand. This is going to be an extremely polarizing decision for the show to make, especially in the wake of all of the deaths of lesbian characters on TV over the past several months. This was written far before that movement started, but we feel like it’d be a mistake to completely ignore its existence now. We loved Root a lot, and Amy Acker has done a great job for the character. Did she go out in an amazing way? Yes, but it’s hard to picture the end of the story without her.