One Percent

Season	Episode
2	14
Air date	February 7, 2013
Running time	43:44
Production code	2J7214
Written by	Denise Thé; Melissa Scrivner-Love
Directed by	Chris Fisher
Viewers	14.88M
ID(s) from Intro	ID.214/0665.06
POI; Logan Pierce
	Flashbacks; Harold Finch & Nathan Ingram

Episode Overview

Summary

POI

Cast and Characters

Crew

← Season 1 Person of Interest — Season 2 (Flashbacks in parentheses) Season 3 →
201 “The Contingency” (Finch)	209 “C.O.D.”	217 “Proteus”
202 “Bad Code” (Root)	210 “Shadow Box”	218 “All In”
203 “Masquerade”	211 “2πR”	219 “Trojan Horse”
204 “Triggerman”	212 “Prisoner's Dilemma” (Reese)	220 “In Extremis” (Fusco)
205 “Bury the Lede”	213 “Dead Reckoning” (Stanton)	221 “Zero Day” (Finch/Ingram)
206 “The High Road” (Finch)	214 “One Percent” (Finch/Ingram)	222 “God Mode” (Finch/Hersh)
207 “Critical”	215 “Booked Solid”
208 “Til Death” (Finch)	216 “Relevance”

“	He's a one percenter who finds other one percenters tedious.	”
— Finch, referring to Logan Pierce

"One Percent" is the 14th episode of season 2, and the 37th produced hour of Person of Interest. It originally aired on February 7, 2013.

Synopsis[]

Reese and Finch must protect Logan Pierce, a self-made internet billionaire and playboy with a penchant for breaking rules and making enemies. For the first time Reese is unable to follow his number due to Pierce's wealth making him able to escape his tail by helicopter and by Pierce's unpredictable behavior. Reese decides to take the direct approach muscling his way into Pierce's office. But although allowing Reese to protect him, he wrecklessly tricks Reese to taking him to a party in St. Petersburg. Finch finds that Jeremy Campbell, Pierce's lawyer, is the one that tried to poison Pierce. Pierce's number comes up again and this time it is his long time friend and partner who tries to kill him because Pierce is going to compete against Friendczar by partnering with Emily Morton.

Origin of the Title[]

The title of this episode is a reference to the "one percent" of Americans, who control the majority of wealth and economic power. The recent Occupy Wall Street protests campaigned for more political representation of the 99% of Americans versus this one percent.

Main Plot Points[]

Carter continues her investigation into the disappearance of Ian Davidson and begins to wonder about the disappearance of James Stills.
Fusco attempts to tell Carter about his dirty past but she refuses to hear it, saying she trusts him but she won't cover for him if his past catches up to him.

Flashbacks[]

On September 11, 2001, a deeply upset Nathan Ingram visits Finch at IFT and shows him footage of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Nathan tells Finch they started IFT to change the world and suggests they do something to stop terrorist attacks from happening again.
In 2009, Nathan enters Finch's office to tell him that the Machine has been shipped out and will be in its facility in ten days. While Finch is ready to move on, Nathan is concerned about the irrelevant list but Finch tells him they can't play god. Nathan leaves Finch and begins working on saving the irrelevant numbers himself,
After getting the number of Anna Sanders, Nathan arms himself with a gun and prepares to save her.

Episode Notes[]

Logan Pierce may be partly based on Mark Zuckerberg, who developed Facebook along with his four college roommates. Similar to Pierce, Zuckerberg was accused of promising to help build an early social website, ConnectU, developed by three Harvard classmates, while stealing their ideas for Facebook. Pierce's rivalry with a competing social media site also mirrors Facebook's rivalry with earlier social media site MySpace, which dominated the market at the time of Facebook's public launch.
According to Finch, Logan Pierce attended Caltech. Caltech is the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, a private, highly-selective university which strongly emphasizes mathematics, science, engineering and technology. It has affiliations with NASA, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the U.S. Geological Survey, and hosts the nation's leading earthquake research program. Its campus is frequency used as a television location, and its rival is Finch's alma mater, MIT.
Pierce wears a Patek Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillon watch, valued at roughly $1.5 million.
Pierce's car is a 2012 McLaren MP4-12C, manufactured by McLaren Automotive of Woking, Surrey, England. A new 2012 model retailed for roughly $230,000.
Reese chases Logan on a Ducati Diavel AMG Special Edition motorcycle.
The Machine marks Pierce as someone to be monitored and he returns in the final season “Synecdoche”” as an asset working for the Machine.

Production Notes[]

Bloopers and Continuity Errors[]

In the flashback, on 9/11, Finch tells Nathan he is building a new heuristics algorithm, presumably for the Machine, which was built as a response to the 9/11 attacks.
The Patek Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillon is not actually accurate to a nanosecond as Reese mentioned, but rather, to +/- 3 seconds/day.
When Finch examines the watch, he's wearing a wedding ring.
The next morning after his car was sabotaged, Logan bought a brand new one with the vanity plate P1ERCE2. Even expedited service would take 10 to 14 days for vanity plates which normally take six weeks. Logan could have legally transferred the plates from his first car to his new one.

Music[]

"Ante Up (Robin Hoodz Theory)" by M.O.P. (During the basketball game)
"Ты мой герой" - Инфинити (playing in Russian bar)

Trivia[]

The "LAMP Stack" that Logan refers to when Sinclair reprimands him is an acronym for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySql database, and PHP programing language, which are of common use to host websites on the Internet.
The New York Journal makes several appearances in this episode.
Finch mentions another social networking site, "connectroid.com" which was devalued by half when Friendczar debuted. The website can be seen in the Season 3 episode “RAM””. Daniel Casey's friend Lester Strickland kept an account there.
The scene where Finch learns about the 9/11 attacks mirrors the scene in "Pilot" where Reese finds out about the attacks. In both scenes,Finch and Reese see the reports and ask "Is that a plane?" Nathan Ingram and Jessica respond to them saying "It was two planes."

Embedded Codes[]

Main article: One Percent/Embedded codes

On three occasions noticed so far, there has been one frame of code in the eye of the Machine, possibly relating to the virus or software that Greer and Stanton uploaded into the internet. ^{(“Dead Reckoning”)}

The first blue screen (00:00:39) contains text from Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
The second blue screen (00:20:51) contains text from the National Institutes of Health's bioterrorism page.
The third blue screen (00:40:16) contains text from the National Institutes of Health's Anthrax page.