Oddly, the Machine wound up having less personality – or, at least, less gravitas – when it switched from figures on a screen, or odd coded messages via pay phone, to talking like Root. That Finch has to destroy his own creation in order to stop the bigger threat – and that the Machine herself had to nudge Finch into killing her to save the world – also didn't have the emotional kick I would have expected. Huge things happened last night, most notably Finch destroying Samaritan – and sacrificing the Machine itself in the process – but much of it felt rushed, or simply too easy, given how powerful Samaritan and its forces had been presented as for multiple seasons. “.Exe,” though – the conclusion of the war between Team Machine and Samaritan, and the penultimate episode of the entire series – definitely felt hampered by a lack of proper set-up time, and by having to squeeze too much story into the hour because there was no place else to put it. Until recently, PoI hadn't seemed too hampered by having only 13 episodes for its final season (and by having to fill several of those hours with Number of the Week stories).
A review of last night's Person of Interest coming up just as soon as I remember what happened to that fat German kid in Willy Wonka…
