Recap / Person Of Interest S 04 E 07

Season 4, Episode 7

Honor Among Thieves

I'm not sure what we're becoming, Ms. Groves, and it does make me wonder: How much wrong are we willing to do in the name of right?

—Finch

The latest Number, Tomas Koroa, is a professional thief specializing in removing high-value items from high-security places. Shaw infiltrates his crew just in time for his latest score, in which he's being paid to steal what he thinks is jewelry from a hotel vault. The "jewelry" turns out to be samples of an Ebola-like virus, Tomas and Shaw find themselves caught between Tomas' double-crossing employer and a pair of assassins from the government's resurrected "Relevant numbers" operation.

In the meantime, The Machine tasks Root and Finch with sabotaging one of the new governor's pet projects, one that Samaritan is behind.

• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Shaw, oh yes.
• Amazon Chaser: Tomas, and apparently Romeo too — he gives a good recommendation for Shaw even after she knocks him out and throws the bag of gold bars he just stole into the river.
• Ambiguously Evil: Samaritan was funding a project to give every child in New York a personal computer tablet. Was this an Evil Plan to brainwash children or increase its surveillance cover, or is Samaritan just being the well-intentioned dictator it was meant to be?
• Cacophony Cover Up: Yanking a safe out of a hotel vault is timed for when the fireworks go off for Veterans Day.
• Call-Back:
  • To "Mors Praematura". It seems that Shaw and Root had ten hours to kill in the CIA safe-house when infiltrating the prisoner pick-up.
  • Finch comments that Team Machine can add another grand larceny to their list of crimes.
• Camera Spoofing
• Casual Kink: Reese gives Shaw a funny look when she talks about spanking Tomas for being a bad boy.
• Cliffhanger: Samaritan gets close to identifying Shaw and contacts Greer about it.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: When the relevant numbers came from the Machine, the codenames of the agents assigned to deal with them followed the pattern of Indigo.[designation] (e.g. Shaw was 5A). Now that the government is getting its intel from Samaritan, the color designation of the agents has switched to 'Crimson'.
• Complexity Addiction: Samaritan seems to be getting a taste for this, appearing to be running several schemes at once. Then again, it is a computer, so multi-tasking would be second nature.
• Double Entendre:
  • Shaw and Tomas lay it on thick during their first meeting.
  • Shaw asks Root for help in making sure the virus is destroyed. Root responds suggestively that a full decontamination procedure could take them all night.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  Tomas: "I'm not a saint, but some things are too far, even for a man like me."
• Evil Twin: In an unusual variation on this trope, Root calls the Marburg virus this to ebola.
• Faking the Dead: Apparently that drug you use to stop your heart hurts a lot.
• Fanservice: Root doing her French nanny thing and Shaw in her cleavage-bomb black dress.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Root has a bit of this toward Shaw and Tomas's flirting.
• Hero of Another Story: The government operatives tracking down Relevant threats identified by Samaritan.
• I Don't Pay You to Think
• Imposter Forgot One Detail: Root Dresses the Same as a secretary, but Samaritan's analysis detects GAIT MISMATCH.
• Ironic Echo: "Nothing good comes out of asking questions."
• Kinda Busy Here: Finch calls Shaw as she's waiting as getaway driver for a heist.
• Just Following Orders: One of the Relevant agents notes how he hates that they have turned into this. He even gets clearly frustrated when the orders were changed from destroying the virus to securing it and the person would not tell him why.
• Kick the Dog: Finch acknowledges that he and Root thoroughly did this and he does not like it. Despite attacking one of Samaritan's projects, he notes that the man in charge of the project was completely unaware of Samaritan and truly just wanted to do good.
• Lesbian Subtext: Root/Shaw. Which is rapidly becoming text.
• Ms. Fanservice: Root's "French Mary Poppins Barbie" cover identity.
• Nostalgia Filter: Grice has this for Northern Lights, longing for the "good old days" when they would actually investigate and think for themselves, rather than just follow the instructions of "Research 2.0."
• No-Sell: Try to delete the footage of an old colleague who you were inadvertently tasked with hunting down? Samaritan has other ideas, being able to recover and reconstruct the data ISA operator Delvin tried to delete, potentially spotting Shaw.
• Not Quite Dead: Marko
• Pet the Dog:
  • Samaritan might be trying to take over the world, but it is made clear in this episode it still is a program designed to protect people.
  • Finch also thinks this is what Samaritan was trying to do with the tablets, even comparing it to Castro building good schools after he came into power so people would love him.
• Revealing Cover-Up: Devon erases the footage of him letting Shaw go, but that only draws Samaritan's attention.
• Removing the Earpiece: Shaw flicks off her earpiece when Root gets too snarky.
• Ripped from the Headlines:
  • The real-life Ebola outbreak in West Africa is mentioned, and is the catalyst for the virus being placed in the hotel safe.
  • Also schools secretly spying on students via the webcams in their school-issued laptops.
• Safecracking: Tomas breaks into the hotel safe by stealing the entire safe and then cutting the back off with a blowtorch once he got it back to their hideout.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness
  Shaw: I need you to translate Finch's instructions on how to destroy the virus. Dude never met a five-syllable word he didn't like.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Shaw does not like being Surrounded by Idiots, particularly when it almost leads to her getting caught by the police and by extension Samaritan, and so ditches Romeo's crew.
• Ship Tease: In our first sign that the Root/Shaw Les Yay is mutual, Shaw declines running off with Tomas to Barcelona because she has "things I care about" in New York.
  • This is also shown in a more subtle way. Shaw goes to Root and asks for help in translating Finch's instructions about how to destroy the virus. This makes sense until you remember that Shaw was actually a doctor before she was an assassin, and so she should have had no problem knowing what to do. She just wanted an excuse to see Root.
• Shout-Out:
  • At one point in the episode, Reese basically grabs the outfit Aiden Pearce, the protagonist of Watch_Dogs, wears.
  • The name "Tomas Koroa" alludes to the main character of the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. "Tomas" is the Spanish equivalent of Thomas, and "Koroa" is the Basque word for crown.
  • During her "job interview" with Tomas, Shaw mentions that she worked for "McCauley's crew in L.A."—a reference to the film Heat.
  • Tomas' thief ring is dubbed The Hole in the Wall Gang.
• Show Some Leg: Shaw in a cleavage-revealing black dress gets the hotel manager to show her the vault.
• Shown Their Work: The Marburg virus really exists, and it's as nasty as they say it is.
• Spanner in the Works: Despite his best efforts at covering her trail, Grice spotting Shaw draws the attention of Samaritan.
• The Unreveal: Tomas was double-crossed by Marko, who had a buyer for the virus. The buyer was never identified.
• Wall of Weapons
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Finch wonders to Root if they're starting to become this.
• Wham Shot: After Grice deletes the footage of him letting Shaw go, Samaritan restores it, and pans around to where Shaw was standing, where it begins extrapolating to construct a picture of her.
  • Culminating with the Wham Line:
  Samaritan: Contacting Admin...
• Wig, Dress, Accent: Root as a nanny.
• Yandere: Root is one for Shaw.
  Root: He's a dangerous criminal, after all, and I just couldn't bear it if someone hurt you. [beat, smiles] I mean, besides me.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: How Tomas' employer intends to "pay" him and his crew, possibly almost to Joker levels: Tomas is to be killed by his compatriots, who are killed by their employer Marko, who is in turn killed by the Relevant side under orders from Samaritan to steal the virus. It's anyone's guess whether they would have lived after fulfilling their orders.

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