What do you enjoy about PoI? What got you into the series? What characters do you like the most and why?

theivorytowercrumbles:

I’m running on like five hours of sleep and it’s early so I apologize if this answer isn’t as detailed as it could be but: @aresmarked got me into the series, first and foremost, mostly because they reblogged a lot of gifsets and commentary. 

The Root/Shaw relationship stuff definitely caught my attention, but what made me finally start watching was all the really thoughtful posts I saw regarding The Machine (if you don’t know what that is, you will by the pilot episode) that convinced me there was an aspect to Person of Interest I’d been missing this whole time.

Like, PoI honestly does look like the most whitebread procedural from the outside at the beginning and it takes a season and a half for some of the best characters – the ladies – to start showing up with regularity. But even Finch and Reese are Surprisingly Watchable White Dudes, and I love Fusco despite never expecting to.

My favorite character is Shaw, hands down (followed in quick succession by Carter and Root). And it’s just…having a bisexual woman with a personality disorder that isn’t fetishized onscreen is unique enough, but PoI frames Shaw as so important. Just her appearance literally makes survival chances skyrocket, and her full swing around from uncaring assassin to someone on the Machine’s side is a sight to see, and also kudos to Sarah Shahi for portraying it with a lot of subtlety. 

What I enjoy about Person of Interest is that a lot of modern action-heavy shows (especially American ones) that deal with crime or terrorism or anything else sets up the main characters as the Unmistakable Good Guys, no matter what horrible things they do. Procedure can be violated left and right as long as you shoot the bad guy at the end, right? 

Well, PoI’s cast is not filled with good guys coddled endlessly by the narrative (Carter is arguably the one character who is defined as Good, and she meets a hundred complications for it despite being a fantastic heroine): it’s full of people who have made really terrible mistakes and decisions that they’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to fix – while trying not to make those mistakes worse in the process – and just try to do better even with the deck heavily stacked against them. I appreciate flawed humans trying to make a difference in the world far more than the perfect hero who turns things right with a touch of their hand.