Person of Interest 1.14: "Wolf and Cub"

“In other words, the idea of letting a fourteen-year-old hire you to avenge his brother has backfired?”
- Finch

Since the New Year, we’ve gotten more things from the Machine’s perspective and this week is no different. It is filtering through 911 calls when it picks up on this week’s person of interest. His name is Darren McGrady and he’s 14. Reese gets his number after sweeping the library and finding no one in it. Finch is going to be spending most of the episode rebuilding his systems. Reese heads out to Darren’s last known address to find out his older brother Travis had been shot in a home invasion about a week earlier. Reese gets the file from Carter and he’s going to try to hunt down Darren while she follows up with the cop who is investigating the case. Turns out Travis defended a co-worker when three guys started harassing her and they probably followed Travis home. Darren showed up right after it happened and said one of the guys stole his brother’s work hat.

Reese manages to get a little information out of the waitress that Travis stood up for and finds one of the guys leaving a comic book shop a few blocks away. He follows the guy only to find Darren with a gun. Carter pulls up before things can get too hairy and arrests Brick (the guy who stole Travis’s hat). She arrests Brick but Reese makes off with Darren and Carter’s car before she can do much else. It was rather funny. Even funnier is when Reese drops Darren off at a youth shelter with Lionel and calls Lionel his friend. He really struggled with that one. He’s going to return Carter’s car so he needs Lionel to watch Darren until he gets back. Over at the precinct, Carter is talking with Brick in interrogation. He’s not too worried as he spouts back stuff about police procedure and the length of time it takes for DNA results to get back. So Carter just leaves him there. Meanwhile, Reese has found Brick’s compatriots and snaps a few photos. They’ve got expensive cars and cash in envelopes. They aren’t just your common street thugs.

Finch tells Reese he can’t run the plates for a few hours as he had to make a hardware run. In truth, he’s meeting Will. Will says he’s nearly done sorting through his dad’s things but found something that’s odd. A champagne cork and a napkin with a reference to the Machine and a date. He managed to track down the government liaison (Alicia) but it wasn’t easy. She moved the only place in the country with no cell phones or wireless internet. I guess she got spooked after the demonstration of what the Machine could pull together from disparate bits of information. Anyway, Finch and Will head out for lunch and Lionel is dutifully photographing them when he gets a call. Darren’s run off from the group home. He calls Reese with the information and Reese is obviously not thrilled. He’s got a book of Darren’s drawings and figures out where Darren went. He saves the kid from a beat down in a bar and ends up letting Darren hire him for a quarter (and a promise of no killing). This isn’t going to be good.

Now that Reese is working for Darren, they’re trying to figure out how to hurt the guys that killed Travis. Darren isn’t too keen on waiting around but Reese makes quick work of things. He observes the two remaining thugs on the street shaking down business owners for the money they make selling lotto tickets and then steals their car to shake them up. He gets Finch to track the GPS on their phones and they overhear that they need to get a ride to Andre’s for a big money run that night. They follow the guys back to the comic book store where it turns out the guy who owns the shop is actually Andre. Of course they had to make the seemingly nice guy who is trying to show kids right from wrong into a jerk and a thief. Carter is trying to hold Brick as long as she can but her Captain tells her to cut him loose if he isn’t arraigned by 5pm.

Reese’s plan continues to get increasingly violent even without killing people. He slams the stolen car into the beat up one the thugs are driving (with $500,000 of Andre’s money in it) and leaves one of the guys in the back of s quad car at the precinct surrounded by bottles and naked. He’s got the other guy tied up with the money and goes all kinds of crazy ass creepy with a blow torch. Carter calls him to rip him a new one about ramming the car even though he says Darren wasn’t there. She tells him that she still has Brick even though her Captain thinks she cut him loose already. Reese is pretty damn convincing by burning piles of cash to get his captive to spill about the murder.

Meanwhile, Finch follows Will to his meeting with Alicia. Luckily she doesn’t share anything about the Machine. She convinces Will that the stuff about the Machine and the contract for $1 were about patents held by his dad’s company. Finch is clearly relieved that she kept the secret. I really do have to wonder what happened to Nathan. Will brings up Finch (as Harold) and Alicia kind of bolts. There’s definitely something going on there. That night, Andre meets with the corrupt Captain to try and sort things out about his missing money and couriers. Carter’s superior gets a reprimand for not actually cutting Brick loose. Reese and Darren are on the roof of one of the couriers’ grandma’s building. They find the gun and Reese realizes that Darren wants to go after everyone who is corrupt and linked to Andre and the thugs. And of course, Darren slips away while Reese is on the phone with Carter.

Things get dicey when Carter, Lionel and Reese all show up at the comic book store after Darren. He’s got the gun used in his brother’s murder and he’s looking for some revenge. But he can’t do it. Reese busts in with night vision goggles (he had Finch bring his “Plan B” bag and had Finch cut the power to the building) and shoots some of the guys with beanbag rounds. Carter tries to take Andre out while he’s using Darren as a shield but Darren manages to get away and Lionel takes a bullet in the butt to save the kid. Reese of course hits Andre with like four rounds in rapid succession. Guess he had a point to make.

Finch sees Will off. It appears he’s satisfied with what he’s discovered about his father and he’s going off to explore the world a bit. I guess that’s a good way to wrap up that bit of storyline, even if I would like more backstory on Finch and what he and Nathan were doing that led to Nathan’s death. Reese ends up meeting with Lionel later on and learns that Finch has lots of aliases and the one that goes back the farthest was Harold Wren at MIT in the late 70s. But even that is clearly an alias as he didn’t exist before the late 1970s. Maybe he was in WITSEC? Anyway, it seems that storyline is concluded for now as well. And Darren seems fairly happy with the foster care placement. Plus he’s got a trumpet and a scholarship to the music school his brother wanted him to attend. So things turned out okay.