Okay, rewatching the pilot and… wow, Harold really softens up over the course of the series. He goes at John so hard in the pilot. Tying him to a bed and tricking him into thinking he’s listening to someone being murdered in the next room in order to convince him to start working the Numbers? Wow. Damn, Harold, wow. “I never will (lie to you)” but I’ll emotionally manipulate the fuck out of you.
Or, you know, softens up really isn’t right, because we do see Harold doing things like this later on in the series, especially when situations are urgent or particularly dire. He just stops doing them to Reese, I guess, is the right way to put it. I will curious to see how quickly (or slowly) that change happens in their relationship, because after I watched the pilot for the first time, I skipped right to "Root Cause”, where the Finch & Reese partnership had already become a pretty solid thing. Also, it may be less that Finch stops being inclined to do things like that than it is that Reese is going to do what Finch wants anyway, so there’s no need to go to drastic emotional measures like that once Finch has Reese on his side. I will see!
There are several things in the pilot that I appreciate a lot more on rewatch than I did on the first airing:
a) John Reese’s tragedy that brought him to where he was in the episode when Finch met him – since I know a lot more about Jessica and about the situation back then, I feel more than I did when we just had those tiny glimpses. I appreciate Reese more in general, character-wise.
b) I think I appreciated this the first time around, but I definitely loved in the rewatch that the first case we set up Hansen as a potential ‘damsel’ for Reese to save (as a symbol/redemption for not saving Jessica) but she was the perpetrator all along. Reese makes a few snap judgments in this episode that are proven wrong in the long run – about the prosecutor, and about Finch – and I like that, while Reese is shown to be observant and intelligent, he’s not at all infallible.
c. Reese feels, to me, to absolutely be the main character of the pilot. In later episodes, I feel like that scope widens out to encompass more of the cast, but here in the pilot, everyone is defined, really, by how they relate to Reese. They all have a different piece of the puzzle – Carter relates to his more distant past (time in the military; the trauma he suffered), Fusco is his recent past (doing terrible things while with the CIA; the trauma he inflicted on others), Finch is present and possible future (offering him a purpose; a way to prevent trauma and protect people).
But none of them are, at the moment, particularly warm and fuzzy – Carter is investigating him right from the start, Fusco is a corrupt cop that has to be blackmailed into helping, and Finch is… a little cold and manipulative.
The show does a good job setting up long games. Everything that Pope tells us about HR gets born out in later episodes. They seed in a lot of other small hints that pay off later, too. It really makes me wonder how much they worked out in advance vs figuring out what would work best as they went along. We have the Machine as the framing device (and low-key PoV character tbh) right from the very beginning as well.
I haven’t seen Jim Caviezel in anything else, so I’m not sure if the voice he uses for Reese is his regular voice or if he adjusted it for the role, but he really does give some great and unexpected line deliveries that work really well and give his character a sense of wry amusement when that doesn’t necessarily need to have been the intention of the line originally. Actually in that way and in some others, Reese reminds me a bit of John Sheppard from Stargate: Atlantis.
Finch taking a risk here and telling Reese about the Machine really resonates even more powerfully after seeing RAM and seeing what happened with Dillinger. And Finch glosses over a lot with that “it was only later that I realized my mistake” line.
The Machine’s morality is interesting to think about – the way Finch created it, the focus and the priority is entirely on life. Saving lives, not judging them. And we see both here with Reese and later with Root (and Shaw in her criminal cover), that the Machine has no apparent moral issues with stealing or many of the other things that humans consider crimes. The Machine’s morality didn’t develop slowly inside a society of peers, it was programmed into place and it is deeply focused around one thing.
And I did not remember at all that we got given a glimpse into the Machine’s mind (basically) at the end of the episode! Coupled with the great music cue, it literally gave me goosebumps, so well-done there.
All-in-all, I give the pilot a high rewatchability score. Very strong opening.
Original Post:
POI 1x01
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