Season 1, Episode 11:
Super
Harold: Ssh. It can hear you.
In the aftermath of "Number Crunch", Finch brings Reese to an out-of-work surgeon to be patched up.
A month later, Finch brings a wheelchair-bound Reese to an apartment building in Manhattan to investigate the latest person of interest: Trask, the building's landlord.
With Reese out of commission, Finch is forced to do the fieldwork and break into Trask's apartment. They learn that Trask is obsessed with one of the female tenants and theorize that he's likely the perpetrator, with either the woman or her boyfriend who lives in the penthouse as his intended victim.
Reese narrowly stops Trask from killing the boyfriend by activating the fire alarm, while the Machine intercepts phone calls from the woman where she talks about being terrified by a stalker who's broken into her apartment.
Reese decides to intervene and threatens Trask at gunpoint, only to discover he's not the stalker: the supposed "boyfriend" is the one threatening the woman, and Trask is trying to stop him. With Reese and Finch's help, he saves the woman and the "boyfriend" is tossed out a window.
Meanwhile, Carter is being trailed by Agent Snow and a CIA field team who are still determined to find Reese; Snow wants to interrogate him and find out "what happened in Ordos", but is happy to kill Reese if it comes to that. She gives the CIA the slip and follows her only lead — Harold Burdett's contact information — to track down Finch, so she can find out exactly what he and Reese do.
Finch tells Carter that one of the people in the bar, Derek Watson, will soon be involved in a violent crime. Trailing Derek, she intervenes in time to stop him killing the banker who foreclosed his house, and Finch calls to answer her earlier question that "this is what we do".
And Finch sends Fusco an empty bottle of painkillers with Reese's fingerprints on them, for Fusco to plant the bottle in a vet's office in Connecticut. When the bottle is found by local police and the CIA find out, they call off the hunt for Reese in New York and leave Carter alone.
In flashbacks to 2005, Nathan Ingram continues the ruse of pretending he's the sole creator of the Machine, keeping Finch's identity a secret from the government. When asked to demonstrate the Machine's capabilities, Nathan delivers a single social security number to Alicia Corwin, the government liaison.
Corwin returns with Denton Weeks, the Deputy Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), and news that the social security number lead them to a traitor. Weeks demands to know how the Machine spotted the traitor, but Nathan says it's a Black Box system that no one can access, meaning no one's rights are being violated and it can't be aimed at particular targets (it already watches all potential targets).
Weeks threatens to cut the government funding if Nathan doesn't comply, and Alicia informs him that in exchange for building the Machine, Nathan is being paid exactly $1.00.note
Finch watches the conversation via the Machine's feeds. The Machine flags Weeks as a threat to the system. Later, Nathan congratulates Finch for the Machine's performance and asks him to briefly "pop the hood": Finch walks Nathan through how the Machine spotted patterns and made connections to pick out the number as a person of interest.
Nathan finds the whole thing terrifying, which is why Finch plans to encrypt the operating system so heavily that no one will ever be able to crack it. Finch doesn't mind his role in the Machine's creation being a total secret because it's the only way to ensure it won't be misused by Weeks and others like him.
As Finch comments on the Machine's "instinct for self-preservation", Nathan points out that Finch acts like the Machine is alive. Then the audience sees the Machine flagging Nathan as a threat to the system.
Tropes present in this episode include:
- Back-Alley Doctor: The doctor is skilled, just unqualified in the US.
- Black Box: Referred to by name.
- Blatant Lies:
- Subverted with Trask. His stories of nightclubs and tigers are quickly disproved by Finch's background check until they discover Trask is a former nightclub owner from Miami, now in witness protection.
- The story Finch tells Carter about his brothers teaching him how to swim, since later flashbacks suggest he was an only child.
- Cabin Fever: A mild case with Reese.Finch: Use...the cushion.
- Chekhov's Gun: The Machine can act to protect itself and can flag individuals as such, as demonstrated with Weeks. At the end of the episode, the Machine flags Nathan as another threat.
- Comically Small Bribe: Inverted with the price the NSA paid for The Machine.
- Destination Defenestration: The villain ends up going out the window.
- Fish out of Water:
- With Reese out of action, Finch is forced to do the legwork.
- Also for Reese. With him unable to get around he has to be Mission Control.
- Flexibility Equals Sex Ability: Reese and Finch hack into the Wi-Fi of everyone in an apartment building so they can access the webcams and both get distracted when they see an attractive young woman doing yoga in full view of her webcam and she's apparently so flexible it gets a Head-Tiltingly Kinky reaction from them.
- Foreshadowing: The joke about the Machine being alive doesn't sound like a joke anymore.Nathan: You talk about that thing like it's alive.
Finch: Shh. It can hear you.
Machine:: Possible threat detected. Subject: Ingram, Nathan C. - Go for the Eye: Reese's self-defense tip for Finch when he's in the field. Sure enough, it comes in handy.
- Handicapped Badass: Reese is laid up in a wheelchair for the entire episode. It doesn't stop him from taking down the villain at the end though.
- Head-Tiltingly Kinky: Finch doesn't settle for tilting only his head either.
- Hero Stole My Bike: Carter requisitions a long coat to dodge the CIA agents, much to the bemusement of the man who owns it.
- Incredibly Obvious Tail: Justified as the CIA is trying to pressure Carter.
- The Man Behind the Curtain: Reese thinks there is no Machine, and that Finch is simply good at data-mining. He's wrong.
- Mission Control: Reese plays this role for most of the episode.
- No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Deliberately invoked by Finch, who also kept his role in the Machine's creation a secret so that no one could recreate and then abuse the technology.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish":
- Seriously averted in Fusco's case. The password for his work computer is a (likely department-assigned) random string of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Unfortunately, that means he can't remember it, and so he keeps it written on a Post-It in his desk drawer.
- Finch notes that most people don't change their WiFi password from the one the phone company gives them, which is their phone number. Lily, however, changes her WiFi password every day, using alphanumeric passwords. It would seem excessive if she didn't know she was being stalked.
- Power Perversion Potential: After gaining access to all the security feeds in the apartment building, Reese and Finch can't help but stop and look at one woman doing yoga. She's... healthy.
- Previously on…: Done via Machine-captured CCTV camera views of Reese getting shot by the CIA (even though the CIA killed the cameras before Reese got shot).
- Prophecy Twist: As is usually the case, when it appears that Trask is the perpetrator it turns out that while he was going to kill someone it was to save an innocent woman.
- "Rear Window" Homage: One of the rare variants that doesn't start with a "Rear Window" Witness, thanks to the Machine. There's definitely a "Rear Window" Investigation, though, with Finch in the role of Grace Kelly, and, like Jimmy Stewart, Reese is forced to confront the perpetrator while still hobbled by his injured leg.
- Running Gag: A subtle one, but Mark Snow is holding a cup of coffee every time we see him throughout the episode.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: How Finch gets Reese the medical care he needs.
- Shout-Out: Snow refused to give Evans coffee for failing to kill Reese last episode.Snow: Coffee's for closers.
- Sink or Swim Mentor: Finch notes that his brothers were literally this to him. Also in flashbacks, to demonstrate the Machine to federal intelligence agents, he (through Nathan) gives them a Number and tells them to figure out what it means themselves. In the present, he gives Carter a little more, the Number's name and background, but still leaves her to solve the case herself.
- Spies In a Van: The bread delivery van outside Carter's home.
- Swapped Roles: Reese is in a wheelchair because of his injuries from the previous episode, so Finch does most of the field work while Reese does most of the computer work.
- Sympathetic Murderer: Trask, who is correctly identified as the perpetrator but is acting to protect one of the tenants.
- Too Much Information: Finch is thoroughly squicked out by Reese's impromptu self-defense lesson. Which naturally ends up coming in handy later.
- Understatement: Reese's response to why he's in a wheelchair. To put this in perspective, the night he's referring to involved him being shot in the abdomen and leg by a CIA sniper, nearly bleeding out in a stairwell while trying to escape, and then being operated on by an unlicensed surgeon in a morgue because he couldn't risk going to a hospital.Reese: I had a rough night.
- Wham Line:The Machine: Possible threat detected. Subject: Ingram, Nathan C.
- Worthless Foreign Degree: The doctor Finch takes Reese to is a very talented surgeon, who's working as a medical examiner because he isn't licensed to practice in America; he can't afford to get certified as he sends most of his paycheck back to his family. Finch's Briefcase Full of Money solves that problem.
- Possible Threat Detected. Website: TV Tropes.
