Hello everyone, and welcome to Pop Culture Sociologist, the show where I analyze books, movies and TV shows for your enjoyment. I’m Marina Berlin, I’ve been a professional media and culture critic since 2011, and today I’m going to tell you about the most interesting queer romance on TV that, if you haven’t seen it already, you’ll probably never watch.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about a show called Person of Interest, and specifically about two female characters on that show and their romance. I’m going to tell you about the show in general, because these characters only come in in later seasons, and then I’ll talk about their story and why it was so amazing. And of course, there will be massive spoilers for the show past this point.
But first, let’s talk about what I said at the beginning, about how you’ll probably never watch this romance, if you haven’t already. The reason I say this is that, although I enjoyed this show and that pairing enormously, it ended with one of the two queer women involved dying, and not only that but she died in the way queer women usually die on TV, from a bullet.
I’ll tell you my thoughts on that later on in the episode, but up front I know that many of my friends – many of you – won’t want to watch a show with a queer pairing that ends that way. Which I completely understand and sympathize with. “Bury Your Gays” is a despicable trope, and even though it’s currently being reexamined, as more queer creators and openly queer characters exist in media, still this show kills off one of its two queer women protagonists, and most people who enjoy queer romances will probably not want to subject themselves to that.
But then, that’s exactly why I wanted to record this podcast. I think POI creates really, really interesting, unusual characters, and does really cool things with them, and instead of telling my friends “you should really watch this, even though it ends the way it does”, which I think is neither fair nor realistic, I can tell them – here, I recorded an episode that gives you all the best parts, without you having to watch the show. And if you want to watch only the highlights, I’ll give you a guide so you can watch only the best parts.
Person of Interest is an American show that aired from 2011 To 2016. It’s a science fiction crime procedural show, which means it has a science fictional premise but the show itself follows a pretty standard format of solving one mystery per episode and for most of its run most of the episodes are standalone and don’t require a lot of context to understand beyond knowing the basic premise of the show.
So, what is that premise?
Harold Finch is an eccentric billionaire who invented something called The Machine, an AI algorithm that can predict crimes before they happen. John Reese is the ex-CIA agent who helps him investigate those crimes and stop them before they happen.
For the first two seasons, the show is primarily about Finch and Reese. In season two we start to see more of the female characters this episode is about, Sameen Shaw and Samantha Groves, but in order to understand who they are, what roles they play and how their plots play out, it’s important to understand the core of the show through Finch and Reese first.
In its early seasons, Person of Interest was about computer genius Finch and ex-soldier and spy Reese catching bad guys, using a special tip they got from an AI Finch had built. The Machine, as it’s known, has access to every database and electronic surveillance method in the world, and using a sophisticated algorithm can predict many pre-medicated crimes, by piecing together various clues.
Finch built the Machine after being in Manhattan on 9/11 and, aside from being injured himself, also lost his best friend and business partner that day. Later, Finch comes to regret building the Machine, or at the very least giving it to the US government, but even when he constructed it originally he already had doubts about the moral implications of giving a government so much power.
I’m going to pause here to point out that FInch has a pattern of distancing himself, to the point of denial, from various violent things that are going on in the world, even as he’s a very strategic, control freak sort of person. when his ability to distance himself from violence is removed, he does very drastic things he later tends to regret. Building the Machine and giving it to the government is a perfect example.
So, back to the Machine. When Finch built it he anticipated two types of crimes that the Machine could predict. Things that would be relevant for the national security of the United States – its original purpose was to help prevent another attack like 9/11 – and more ordinary crimes, like one person murdering another, that wouldn’t be relevant for national security but would still be crimes that could be prevented.
Finch made a deal with the government that the Machine would be kept in absolute secrecy, even the agents who acted on its leads didn’t know where the information came from. He also locked it down, so it wasn’t a system the government could control, but a black box that spit out very specific, limited information, and couldn’t be changed or tampered with.
He feared that the benefits that would come with sharing the Machine with more agencies, would be outweighed by the harm of giving authorities such absolute power to surveil citizens.
But, he still felt like he had to do something about those “irrelevant” crimes, that didn’t pose a risk to national security, so he built a backdoor, where the Machine gave him the social security numbers of Americans that it had identified were in danger of either being a victim or a perpetrator of a serious crime.
This is the basic premise of the show. Finch has money and tech skills, he’s a reclusive billionaire who drinks green tea and works in a library, he has a disability that makes walking difficult, he refuses to ever carry or learn how to shoot a gun.
But he has these numbers coming in, and he needs someone who can act on them, prevent crimes and save people.
That person is Reese, an ex special forces soldier and ex CIA agent, who actually used to be part of the department that handled leads from the Machine, without knowing it of course. Reese is a homeless veteran when Finch finds him, whose trauma both from his career and from his personal life has made him, by his own admission, give up on life and wait to die.
Finch and Reese team up and solve cases, where they have a social security number given to them by the Machine, and they have to figure out whether the person is a victim or perpetrator and stop the would be crime before it happens.
I’m personally not a fan of episodical mystery solving shows, but POI worked for me much better than most. I think mostly, in the first and somewhat in the second season, I liked that the episodic plots were about subverting the expectations of a stereotypical viewer who roughly fit Finch and Reese’s own profiles. Meaning, a straight white man over 40.
As an example, there’s an episode where Finch and Reese get the SSN of a woman and find out that she has an ex-boyfriend who occasionally follows her around without her knowing it. Reese says – well, he’s just following her around, that’s not a violent crime, surely? It must be someone else in her life who’ll try to kill or harm her. But Finch corrects him – over 75% of women murdered by a partner are stalked before they’re murdered. So, there’s a very good chance this is in fact our perp.
This in itself is a really interesting attitude – having these two men talk about aspects of rape culture, of violence against women, that may not be immediately visible to them. I found that a lot of the episodes were like that, focusing on incorrect assumptions Reese or Finch had about the experiences of various marginalized people.
This is not to say that the show was perfect, of course, as one example it had Taraji P. Hanson as a lead for a while and absolutely wasted her as a character and then killed her. The only upside was that Hanson went on to get Empire right after this, a show that was a huge success, but I’m still angry about how her character was treated.
Anyway, let’s get back to the things I liked, and that you’re listening to this podcast for: Root and Shaw.
So, let’s talk about Sameen Shaw.
We first meet her in episode 16 of season 2, an episode written entirely from Shaw’s POV, even though the audience has never met her before. This episode is so good, and is completely standalone, that you can easily watch it just to get a sense of who Shaw is, and you don’t need to know anything about the show to enjoy it. Finch and Reese, the main characters, only have brief cameos in this episode.
We’re first introduced to Shaw as a soldier, someone who works for the same unit Reese did, acting on intelligence the government gets from the Machine. Shaw, played by Sarah Shahi, is of Iranian heritage, and joined the military after a failed career in medicine.
This is where we get into what to me is the most interesting aspect of Shaw’s character. She doesn’t have the ability to feel sympathy for other human beings. The show describes this as an “axis 2 personality disorder”, but that’s a very, very broad category of things. The show also calls Shaw a “sociopath”, but the bottom line is, Shaw is someone who has enormous difficulty identifying with other people, feeling compassion, or even having any emotional reactions at all.
We first see this in a flashback, when Shaw is a little girl, and her father dies in a car accident, with her in the car, and she struggles to have any super emotional reaction to his death. She’s sad he died, but she’s not crying hysterically, she just feels… blank. To herself, that’s her first sign that she’s profoundly different than most people, and the beginning of her understanding that others will see her “wrong” or “inhuman” for this.
When she grows up, Shaw goes into medicine. Despite not having an emotional connection to people, Shaw still has a very distinct and logical moral compass. She wants to help people, save people, because that’s a positive thing to do in the world and she wants to be part of it.
Shaw excels at medical school, she’s very smart and determined and hard working. But then during her residency to become a surgeon she’s actually taken aside by the head doctor and told she won’t be a good fit for the program and needs to quit.
She protests, of course, since she’s a very good surgeon and it’s a profession where her shallow affect is actually an advantage, she doesn’t get attached to patients, doesn’t get emotional about her decisions. But the doctor claims he personally doesn’t think someone who doesn’t care in the slightest about whether her patient lives or dies, who doesn’t have a fundamental emotional sympathy towards other people, as he’s noticed Shaw doesn’t have, can be a good surgeon. It’s too weird, too dangerous, he won’t sign off on someone with her disorder operating on people.
So, Shaw leaves the medical field. It’s interesting that she doesn’t tell people the details of how and why she left, she actually only tells them she was in med school, not mentioning that she went on to do the residency.
So, Shaw becomes a soldier, going into a profession where she believes she’ll be able to help people, but where caring profoundly about people who are not her teammates will not be required. Shaw is a very good soldier, and later a very good agent. In fact, we see Reese go through a very similar arc as Shaw does, but where Reese ends up quitting the profession and eventually ends up homeless and suicidal, Shaw copes with the same hardships much better, deciding that she’ll deal with the organization on her own terms rather than leaving because they’ve betrayed her.
Eventually, Shaw becomes closer to Finch and Reese and goes from being an occasional guest star to a permanent part of the team. Again, if you’d like a viewing guide of her episodes, there’s one up on my website.
I’m not qualified to say whether Shaw is a good representation of personality disorders, but I think in a way her portrayal is in dialogue with the trope we’ve all seen many times over, of the sociopath or psychopath who can’t feel empathy or identify with others. Traditionally, those sorts of characters are villains.
More recently, in shows like Dexter or the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes adaptation, they can be antiheroes or even heroes, but only when they’re played by white men. I’ve never seen a woman of Iranian descent portrayed as an unequivocal hero despite having absolutely no ability to emotionally connect with anyone, to feel compassion, to understand morality as anything but a cold, logical calculation of what will work better for the world.
I particularly love that, while the show does treat Shaw as somewhat of a weirdo, Shaw herself never expresses regret or angst about who she is.
Alright, now let’s talk about the second half of this equation and, to quote one of my good friends, the woman who made many straight women slightly less straight, Samantha Groves, or as she prefers to be known, Root.
Root, unlike Shaw, starts out as a villain. A brilliant hacker, she first appears in the first season as an antagonist that Reese and Finch have to defeat. They do so, but barely, and Root takes notice of them.
Root starts digging, and eventually, because she’s brilliant, figures out who Finch is and that he must have built some kind of amazing AI that Root wants to have access to. In order to accomplish this, in the second season she infiltrates Finch and Reese’s lives and eventually kidnaps Finch and uses him to get to the Machine.
The team manage to outsmart her but again, barely. In the culmination of that storyline Shaw shoots Root in the shoulder, and Finch then commits Root to a psychiatric hospital, which is the best place where she can be contained, in his opinion. However, it’s much too late, because by this point Root has established a relationship with the Machine, and the Machine now talks directly to Root, in a way it’s never talked to Finch.
Root becomes, in essence, the Machine’s voice. In the show it’s called “analog interface”, while Finch is the Machine’s admin.
The show leans heavier and heavier into this as the seasons go by, but Root essentially considers the Machine a god, referring to her with she and her pronouns. Which, to be fair, the Machine is in fact indistinguishable from an all-knowing deity.
Root’s relationship with the Machine is like that of a Biblical prophet. God speaks through her, to affect things in the world. The Machine speaks to Root in partial messages, signs and wonders, to use a biblical phrase, sometimes God gives Root orders she doesn’t understand or that go against Root’s wishes, and sometimes, rarely, she even disobeys God, though we’ll get to that later.
And so, that’s ultimately Root’s strongest and most important relationship on the show, always. Her relationship with God, who is an all-knowing AI. Finch, who actually created this AI, looks at all of this with barely disguised horror. He desperately wants Root to be wrong, to be delusional, but she isn’t. The Machine does use her, and speak to her, like she does with no one else.
But if that didn’t sound like an interesting enough character, let’s talk about Root’s origins story. When we meet her she’s a hacker and assassin for hire. She doesn’t have Shaw’s training, but she’s very handy with a gun, she’s a good actress, and essentially an entire spy agency in one person.
But how did Root get started on this path? When the team tries to find a way to defeat her, they dig through her past trying to find anything to use against her, or even explain to them who she is and what her deal is.
They find she’s from a small town in Texas, where there’s an old story about a girl Root’s age who disappeared one day, never to be heard from again. Of course, the team assumes this was Root herself, who wiped her identity and ran away.
But in fact, Root, then Samantha, was the girl’s best friend. They went to school together, in the 80s, where Root was a solitary child, obsessed with computers. One day, Root’s best friend disappeared.
Root knew what had happened to her: she saw the girl get into an older man’s car, and she knew the man must have done something very bad to her, probably killed her and hid the body. As a child, Root couldn’t solve the case herself, so she told authority figures. She told someone at the school, she tried to tell the police. But no one wanted to take her seriously, and everyone wanted to protect that nice man who’d clearly done nothing wrong.
That was Root’s origin story. It proved to her that for some crimes, and for some perpetrators, the law was never going to give victims justice. She realized that the lives of little girls were forfeit in this system that prioritized the words of grown men.
So Root made it her mission to destroy this man in any way she could. She became a good enough hacker that she managed to orchestrate his death, and from there she just kept going. Money came easily to her, and she didn’t have to feel powerless ever again.
I think it’s fascinating that Root’s origin story is essentially being radicalized by rape culture and misogyny, and that none of that turns her into a villain. I mean, she’s an adversary, and she definitely murders people, dispensing her own brand of vigilante justice, but so do Reese and Shaw, in their lives before meeting Finch. The difference is that they do it on the orders or a government organization, and Root does it when she knows or thinks someone has done wrong, because she doesn’t believe the system is good at arbitrating who is and isn’t a criminal.
Alright, now let’s talk about Root and Shaw. I hope it’s clear by now, why I think both of these characters are enormously cool and interesting, and why the idea of a romance between the two of them is just beyond amazing, and something I and many fans of the show were so into.
I think, and of course I have no proof of this, that the romance between Root and Shaw was something that made it into the show almost accidentally, but when there was more and more support for it the show spent more time developing that story.
So, Root starts hitting on Shaw basically from the moment they meet. Specifically, from the time when they’re still at odds and Root manages to knock out Shaw and tie her to a chair to begin torturing her. [sound clip of “I’m into this sort of thing”]
Like we just heard in the clip, Root and Shaw both flirt while attacking each other and threatening each other with violence. This coy relationship continues, while each of them is kind of a guest on the team, Shaw shows up sometimes, Root shows up sometimes. Eventually there’s one particular episode where Shaw yet again wakes up from being knocked out to realize Root has kidnapped her and tied her hands with zip ties to the wheel of a car.
Root apologizes, says she was acting on orders from the Machine, and unties Shaw, who of course immediately pulls a knife on her.
Instead, they go on an adventure together, because God told them so essentially, while Root continues to flirt with Shaw the entire time, and Shaw acts somewhere between awkward and angry that any of this is happening to her.
I think it’s interesting to note that while Root deliberately takes on the more aggressive role of pursuing Shaw, and while Root is always very sarcastic and exaggerated in doing it, Root is also very genuine in accepting Shaw and the way she works. She acknowledges and accepts that Shaw can’t really form emotional attachments like most people, that she doesn’t see other people the same way, and Root affirms that she’s fine with it. She loves Shaw as she is, she doesn’t want to change her. They’re both weirdos, and they can be weirdos together.
It’s also interesting to point out, I think, that Root and Shaw function as sort of deviant versions of Finch and Reese. Finch is a computer genius who lives a reclusive life, doesn’t trust anyone, is a control freak, keeps everything about his identity a secret. But next to Root he appears practically “normal”. At least he’s not out here killing people in the name of vigilante justice? At least he’s a calm, rational person who doesn’t live all over the place?
In the same way, Reese can barely function when he meets Finch, he has enormous amounts of trauma, he’s been severely depressed, and he finds it difficult to connect with people, to act emotionally, to form lasting romantic relationships. He’s extremely reserved and not a very good actor, unless Finch is guiding him through it.
In the same way, Shaw is an even more extreme version of Reese, in that she doesn’t process attachments and emotions the way most people do, and she’s even farther from society’s ideal of who she should be. At least with Reese, his stoic behavior isn’t too far off from his assigned gender role, but with Shaw, the show loves pointing out that she finds it strange and preposterous to function in spaces of traditional femininity, because everything about her runs counter to those norms.
So, Root is an exaggeration of Finch, and Shaw is an exaggeration of Reese, and while Finch and Reese live in an EXTREMELY emotionally intimate relationship, they are still canonically two straight men. Root and Shaw, on the other hand, have a romantic relationship, that’s again an exaggeration or amplification of what Reese and Finch have.
So, to get back to our story. Root and Shaw flirt on and off, with Shaw’s objections going from “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten foot pole” to “we can’t be together Root, we’d feed off each other and it would be a disaster!”
Until finally there’s a mission in season 3 where the team is fairly certain they have no way out of. They’ve fallen for a trap set by the evil AI, and now there’s no way out. Thankfully, Shaw shows up at the last minute and saves them! But to truly save them, Shaw has to sacrifice herself.
Before she does this, she decides to tell Root that she’s over her objections, and actually, yes, she’s into Root. They share a kiss, and Shaw throws herself to the wolves, and pushes Root away, to be saved with the rest of the team.
However, it’s pretty clear at this point that shaw is alive. Behind the scenes, this was also a season when Shaw’s actress, Sarah Shahi, was pregnant and needed time off, so the fans knew Shahi was only temporarily gone from the show.
We don’t see Shaw’s body, although when we leave her she’s injured and in the hands of the team’s enemies.
This moment is actually Root’s biggest crisis of faith. Root assumes that the Machine is going to throw all of her efforts into finding Shaw, but instead the Machine keeps sending Root on unrelated missions, that advance the cause of fighting the AI, but don’t bring any leads about Shaw.
Eventually Root demands answers, begs the Machine to help her. Instead, the Machine sends her a message: stop looking for Shaw. Let it go.
Root can’t believe it, but God’s word is not to be argued with. Root can’t accept that she’s supposed to just let Shaw go, so she leaves the team, and it takes her a long while to come back fully. And each time we see her, she’s severely affected not only by Shaw’s absence, and by the fact that Finch believes Shaw must be dead, but by the Machine giving up on the search.
Eventually we get Shaw’s POV as well. Shaw is being tortured by agents of the evil AI, but because she’s not the sort of person to break under torture, she has too much training and too little she cares about, they use a different tactic.
They use simulations in her head, that make her think she’s escaped the facility and met up with her team again. They hope this way Shaw will lead them to crucial information about the Machine. To do this, in each simulation all of Shaw’s team mates slowly turn on her.
In every simulation, she faces the choice of either letting her team members kill her, or killing them instead. So, Finch tries to kill her and Shaw kills him instead. Reese tries to kill her and Shaw kills him instead.
But every time Root tries to kill her, in thousands of simulations, all Shaw does is turn the gun on herself. She tells the fictional Root – you were my safe space, the place I returned to when I was being tortured.
Each time Shaw kills herself, wakes up, and the simulation starts again.
Eventually, when Root and Shaw are reunited, the team faces down the evil AI. As we’ve established, Root’s primary relationship on the show is with God. So, in a way, I find it thematically appropriate that she dies while on the run with Finch, because the Machine ran the calculations and Root’s life was expendable in that moment.
There, now we’ve covered the worst part of this arc. Of course, afterwards Shaw tracks down the man who shot Root and kills him, and in a show of uncharacteristic sentimentality visits Root’s grave.
The show also tries to imply that while the Machine lives – which it does, in the end of the show – Root will never be truly dead, and the Machine in fact takes on Root’s voice and starts speaking directly to us, the viewers. Of the two male leads, Reese also dies, sacrificing himself for Finch and for the cause, like Root did.
But none of that makes it any better. Root and Shaw were glorious and amazing, apart and together, and then the show went and killed one of them, with a bullet nonetheless, in a horrible cliche, and many of my friends who weren’t watching along very rightly refuse to do so now.
So, there you go, now you know about the best parts of this arc and these characters. If you want to watch the show, you can, if you want to watch only Root and Shaw’s episodes, you can do so using the guide on my website, and if you don’t want to watch the show, now you know what you’re missing.
I think seeing different stories gives us ideas about our own work, and also trains us as viewers to want and seek out and demand different stories. I hope you enjoyed me telling you about this one. Also, you gave me a chance to talk to you about POI for 30 minutes, which as a media critic, is really my dream, so thanks for that.
Alright, if you enjoyed this episode of Pop Culture Sociologist I hope you’ll share it with your friends who might also find it interesting. I’m just one person who spends most of her time writing fiction, so any help spreading the word about Pop Culture Sociologist is greatly appreciated.
A huge, huge thank you to everyone who supports me on Patreon, for helping make Pop Cultire Sociologist possible! While the podcast will always be available for free for anyone to listen to, if you enjoyed this episode I’d be grateful if you considered supporting me on Patreon and helping me offset the costs of creating it. Patrons get cool perks like knowing ahead of everyone what the topic of the next episode will be, submitting questions for a special Q&A episode, early access to bonus content and more
There will be new episodes of Pop Culture Sociologist once a month, until August, and then the podcast will go on hiatus until 2022. So, if you do decide to support me on Patreon, you’ll only be charged on months when there’s a new episode.
You can subscribe to Pop Culture Sociologist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and every other platform, and if you want to talk to me about the episode I’m on twitter at berlin_marina or popsocpodcast. In addition to being a media critic I’m also a published author and poet of science fiction and fantasy, so if you’re interested in that you can read about it on my website, marinaberlin.org. Thank you for listening, thank you for letting me tell you my thoughts, I’m Marina Berlin and I’ll see you on the next episode of Pop Culture Sociologist.