Person of Interest/Recap/S01/E02

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Season 1, Episode 2:

Ghost

The newest number corresponds to Teresa Whitaker, a teenage girl who has supposedly been dead for two years, the victim of a massacre when her father went crazy on a houseboat and killed the entire family. Digging deeper reveals that the murders were carried out by a hitman who refused to kill a child, and now the people who hired him are determined to finish the job. Meanwhile, Detective Carter keeps tracking the appearances of the Badass in a Nice Suit, determined to arrest him.

In a flashback to 2002, Finch works on building the Machine in absolutely secret while his business partner, Nathan Ingram, acts as the public face of the company and deals with the government, who believe Nathan built the Machine and don't know that Finch exists. In 2007, after the Machine has been taught to track people and spot terrorists, Nathan discovers the existance of the "irrelevant" list and is horrified that so many people in danger have been ignored; Finch defends his decision to delete the irrelevant list because the Machine wasn't built to save "somebody", but rather to save "everybody".


Tropes present in this episode include