WARNING: Big spoilers ahead for the Person of Interest series finale. If you still need to catch up, just hop over to one of our other lovely articles.
Well, folks, the ride is finally over. Finch, Reese, Shaw and The Machine have finished their adventures as of tonight's Person of Interest series finale. Now, thanks to showrunner Greg Plageman, we know why the show decided to throw that major death at us.
We talked about every permutation, and this one felt the most poetic, in terms of what Reese was initially hired to do, and him understanding that this was what it would come down to, what he'd have to do to save Harold Finch.
Greg Plageman and his co-showrunner Jonah Nolan spoke to TVLine about the series finale, and revealed that, despite their efforts to keep John Reese safe in the finale, he pretty much had a big, sacrificial death coming no matter what. Reese is a soldier through and through, and having Finch rescue him from a life of vagrancy and give him a purpose again, combined with the friendship that developed between the two men after five years of fighting crime together, meant that Finch was always going to try save Reese and that Reese was always going to try to save Finch. By the end of the series, though, Reese was just a little bit better at playing savior than Finch.
Team Machine was tasked with finishing off Samaritan once and for all in the finale. When the surviving copy of Samaritan escaped the gold vault that it had been trapped in and headed to a satellite dish, Finch locked Reese inside the vault so that he could destroy Samaritan by striking that satellite with a hijacked missile, which would have killed Finch in the process. Unbeknownst to Finch, however, Reese and The Machine had a previous arrangement, meaning that Finch was sent to the wrong rooftop, and Reese was the one in the path of the missile. And, unfortunately, the man who had made a living out of getting out of danger couldn't get himself out of this.
While it's sad to see another one of our heroes perish in the fight against Samaritan, it makes sense that Resse would be able to pull one over on Finch, even after all their crimefighting time together. Finch might be a genius, but Reese was a former Green Beret, Delta Force and CIA operative, and you don't get to play with groups like that if you don't constantly have something cool up your sleeve. Reese was clearly prepared to take the final bullet for Finch and the team quite a while ago, but he knew he'd have to be sneaky about it for things to go according to his plan.
Well, just maybe, if Person of Interest ever gets a spinoff, we'll end up finding out that Reese also made a deal with The Machine that would have his badass consciousness uploaded into the program so he could keep solving crimes. I'm sure someone's already thought of a way to make that work.
