Person of Interest Season 3, Episode 3: “Lady Killer”
Directed by Omar Madha
Written by Amanda Segel
Airs on Tuesdays at 10 PM on CBS
When Person of Interest first started, it had a simple cast of Reese and Finch (Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson, respectively) being hunted every week by Taraji P. Henson. This has now transformed to a full roster of characters (assets)-many of them women- that the show has its disposal. “Lady Killer” drives this point home time and time again when Reese and Finch receive a number from a regular Casanova, a real “lady killer” (get it, guys?) who they suspect might be a stalker/serial killer. To find out for themselves, they bait the waters with Carter, Shaw (Sarah Shahi), and political fixer Zoe Morgan (Paige Turco). While Reese and Finch are focused on the new number, Root (Amy Acker) is continuing her crazy-person-athon at the mental institution she’s attempting to escape from while avoiding being discovered by government types.
As mentioned, the episode excels at showing us all how impressively dangerous all of these women are, from Carter, Shaw, and Zoe showing each other their special ways of dealing with unwanted circumstances to Root simply being a dangerous and unstable person by nature. Even though it’s more than likely that we’ll not see Zoe again for many episodes to come, it’s nice to see that the potential for this cast still exists.
“Lady Killer”’s number this week is a great improvement on last week’s particularly hated “person of interest”, being a character that could easily be likable or not. “Nothing to Hide” was a case that was so undoubtedly someone that you were going to despise. With “Lady Killer”, it’s the other side of the coin. Even then, while it’s nice to have a character every week that is in need of protecting, one has to wonder when the show is going to switch things up again with a number that actually wants to kill someone. Just simply protecting someone week-by-week is starting to wear thin.
One interesting way that “Lady Killer” tries to shake thinks up this week is the plot point of parental ownership. Normally the show just beats someone and sets them up for the police, Batman-style. This time there is actual espionage work to locate a birth certificate to prove that our number, Ian Murphy, is in fact a father and subsequently nail his son’s grandfather who took his son from him. It’d be nice to see more of this different way of tackling a case going forward. Also, the paranoia at the beginning of the episode that Murphy might want to stalk and kill Carter is at least entertaining.
After three seasons, Person of Interest understands that it has a cool cast of characters, especially very intriguing female ones, that it can now do very interesting things with. It’s not often that audiences get to see a group of women do something together on screen that doesn’t devolve into a soap opera-type plot and Person of Interest needs to be applauded for not only not going anywhere near that, but also having its females be totally kick-butt at the same time.