Person of Interest Season One: Finch and Reese

But who are Harold Finch and John Reese? “”I should tell you, I’m a really private person,” Finch explains to his counterpart early in Person of Interest. Reese, meanwhile, is a heavily-bearded, drunken homeless man when the series begins. “I know about the work you used to do for the government,” Harold Finch says to Reese during the pilot episode. “I know about the doubts you came to have about that work. I know that the government, along with everybody else, thinks you’re dead. I know you spent the last couple of months trying to drink yourself to death.” While these small snippets of insight into the two main characters are enough to drive the standalone installments of the show, Person of Interest also contains flashbacks that further flesh out Harold Finch and John Reese, offering a deeper understanding into their psyche and motivations.

The events of 9/11 played a key role in the lives of both men. “When the Towers came down, you were in a hotel in Mexico,” Finch tells Reese. “I was here. I was working. Didn’t even know about the attacks until that evening. You see Mr. Reese, until that day I had spent the better part of my life making myself very rich. Somehow that money didn’t seem to amount to much.” While there were numerous real-world companies that made small fortunes following 9/11 by selling their products and services to such counterintelligence agencies as the National Security Agency, the corporation owned by Harold Finch and his business partner Nathan Ingram did not partake in this windfall of cash. Instead, Finch’s motivation appears to have been purely patriotic. “Mr. Ingram felt that this project was his duty as a citizen, not a businessman,” governmental liaison Alicia Corwin tells her NSA superior. “He’s building the machine for one US dollar.”

While Harold Finch is the brains behind their company and the reason for its success, it is Nathan Ingram who serves as the “face” of the corporation. “Look, I know our deal,” he says to Finch in an early flashback sequence. “I schmooze the board, I cash out the checks, I pick up the awards. You do most of the work.” Apparently his statement to John Reese about being a “private person” extends to complete anonymity in the case of Harold Finch. Not only is the NSA kept in the dark about the man’s existence, but the employees who work under him are unaware as well. Nathan Ingram died in 2010 under mysterious circumstances, an event which no doubt led to Harold Finch’s current vocation. “I have my reasons,” is all he offers to John Reese in regards to his vigilante efforts. Like John Reese, meanwhile, the world-at-large believes Harold Finch to be dead as well. Does this revelation—as well as Finch’s current physical disabilities—stem from the same event that took Nathan Ingram’s life? The mystery is one of many that the first season of Person of Interest fails to resolve.

“It was only later that I realized my mistake,” Harold Finch tells Johns Reese in regards to programming the machine to disregard information not directly related to national security. “That irrelevant list was eating away at me.” In actuality, however, it is Nathan Ingram who built a backdoor into the machine and had difficulty compartmentalizing the irrelevant list that it generates. “When were you going to tell me?” Ingram asks Finch when he discovers that the machine sees more than acts of terror. “All these people, and this damn machine. You knew someone wanted to harm them, kill them, and you did nothing. How are we supposed to live with this, knowing that someone out there needs help?”

Just like the events of 9/11 brought out the “patriot” in Harold Finch, the same holds true for John Reese. As previously mentioned by Finch, Reese was in Mexico on that fateful day with a woman named Jessica. While the two are romantically linked, Reese’s service as an Army Ranger hinders the relationship to move forward, so Reese informs Jessica that he has “quit” the military. Unfortunately the revelation comes moments before local news reports on the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, compelling Reese to reenlist and fulfill his own nationalistic duty.

His time in the military ends shortly thereafter, however, and Reese instead enrolls for undercover work with a female handler named Kara Stanton. “In your old job, you were behind enemy lines for six, twelve months?” she rhetorically asks during their first assignment together. “In this job, you never go back because there is no line to cross back over. We know about the ex-girlfriend. Like I told you, you never go back.”

Despite being warned to distance himself from the past, John Reese is unable to let go of Jessica. While on assignment in Morocco, a now-married Jessica reaches out to Reese in a lonely act of desperation. Reese tells her that he will be there in twenty four hours but the United States intelligence community has different plans for him, as well as his handler Kara Stanton. “You’ve been reassigned,” CIA operative Mark Snow informs them. “You head out tonight. China.” Apparently someone in the Pentagon has sold a laptop containing a government-made computer virus, and the mission is to retrieve the item. When alone with Reese, however, Snow gives him an additional assignment. “Once you’ve acquired the package, you’re to retire Agent Stanton,” he tells him. “She’s been compromised.”

Reese and Stanton are able to effectively infiltrate the deserted town in question and retrieve the briefcase containing the laptop. When their rendezvous time approaches, Kara Stanton sets the infra-red chem-light to mark their location while John Reese prepares to fulfill the final part of his assignment. Second thoughts get the best of him, however, and it is Stanton who shoots Reese instead. “Sorry John, nothing personal,” she explains. “They told me you’ve been compromised. Said as your partner, it was my mess to clean up.” Reese just laughs, as he understands the implications of her words. “I got the same orders as you,” he replies. “Whoever sent us here doesn’t want us to retrieve the package. They want to confirm it’s destroyed. They want everyone who had contact to it destroyed.”

John Reese is able to escape with his life—although the rest of the world now believes him to be dead—and finally makes his way to New Rochelle in order to find Jessica. He is two months too late, however, as the love of his life was killed in a car accident. Or was she? Reese is smart enough to see though deception and discovers that Jessica’s husband Peter Arndt is both a wife beater and the unintentional murderer of her as well, staging the car accident to cover up his actions. The New Rochelle Police Department later finds blood in Arndt’s house, but not the body of Peter Arndt, shortly after Reese confronts him. As for John Reese himself, he is next seen as a heavily-bearded, drunken homeless man in the opening moments of Person of Interest.

While in New Rochelle, John Reese visits the hospital in which Jessica worked as a nurse. As he leaves, Reese bumps into a man in a wheelchair that turns out to be Harold Finch. Although Reese does not realize it at the time, his life is about to find a new purpose when Finch approaches Reese a few months later with a “job offer” in which he can help people like Jessica before any harm actually befalls them. Both Harold Finch and John Reese have secrets that they attempt to keep from each other during the course of the first season, but those secrets have a direct impact on the events of Person of Interest nonetheless. The flashback sequences of the show slowly reveal the trauma and tragedy that both men have experienced, meanwhile, adding depth to the characters—as well as the series—in the process.

Anthony Letizia (September 24, 2012)

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