‘Person of Interest’ season 4: Boss on new stakes for Michael Emerson, Amy Acker, cast
Now that you’ve had a couple of days here to breathe (and potentially cheer up) following the season 3 finale for “Person of Interest,” we can shift the focus of this article to another big question: What is going to happen from here? Clearly, the likes of Reese, Finch, Shaw, and Root are not in a good place, given that there is another machine online that is an instruction manual for death, and they have to realize that in order to win now, they may have to do some particularly troubling things.
This somber twist to the season, one that already included the death of Carter (Taraji P. Henson), was not something that was cultivated in the writers’ room a number of weeks ago. Instead, it has been a plan for a very long time. Executive producer Jonathan Nolan confirms as much in a new interview with Zap2It, and goes on to talk about some of the tough choices that Michael Emerson, Amy Acker, and the rest of the cast are going to face moving forward as they are no longer so outside the system:
“We like being reckless, but always with a plan. That was our pact with the audience, was that we would be reckless with them a little bit in terms of the risks that we take with the characters and the storylines, but that this was always going somewhere. This show has always been headed towards this season’s finale, and headed out of it, we know exactly where we’re going. There will be some fun surprises along the way. But one of the things that we were most excited about three seasons in is we had these superhero-like figures, but for Reese and Shaw and Root and Finch, their lives have been somewhat simple until this point because they just get to do the cool part. They just get to be the heroes.
“They haven’t, until this point, been saddled with being real people. In superhero terms, they haven’t had to have their secret identity. Finch has dabbled in it over the years, they’ve all had fun playing at being one person or another, but they’ve never been locked into those identities. As Root put it in her closing voiceover last night, in a world in which everyone is watched, stamped, indexed, numbered, the only outliers are the people who don’t fit that mold. So our characters now, in addition to figuring out how to save the world and save someone’s world in New York every week, will have to figure out how to masquerade as real people. That, I think, proved irresistible to us as a writing challenge — and hopefully as an acting challenge for our amazing cast in terms of adding that new dimension to their roles.”
While we understand the criticism of those who say that the finale for this show was perhaps a little too sad, we will continually applaud them on the fact that they were brave enough to take this story to such a place to begin with. This is a dark show, but we still like to old on to the belief that there is light somewhere on the other side.
What do you want to see on the third season of “Person of Interest”? Share below, and head over here if you’re interested in getting our full take on the finale now. Also, sign up if you want to get a score of TV updates of interest now via our CarterMatt Newsletter.
Photo: CBS