Reese is captivated by their newest POI, a beautiful, shrewd and remarkably resourceful woman. Meanwhile, Detective Carter continues investigating the Carl Elias case and begins to learn more about him.
Origin of the Title[]
The tile of the episode refers to Zoe's job as a "fixer"
Main Plot Points[]
Person of Interest: Zoe Morgan, a professional "fixer" who discovers a pharmaceutical company has suppressed evidence of patient deaths during drug trials.
Carl Elias's past is touched upon - his mother Marlene Elias was murdered by Vincent DeLuca and he decided to kill in revenge. He arranged to kill Bernie Sullivan in order to prevent Carter from learning the information.
Finch gets justice for a number he was unable to save.
Episode Notes[]
This episode introduces Zoe Morgan, a professional "fixer" on whom the team will call when her particular skills are needed. She will also become Reese's occasional, and casual, lover.
Finch describes his method of taking money from Keller by "shorting" 500,000,000 shares of Virtanen stock. Short selling is the process of selling a stock at a high price just prior to an anticipated drop in price, then quickly repurchasing it when the stock price drops. This is a risky investment strategy that can yield sizable profits when it works (and equally sizable losses when it doesn't), but depends on an event causing a stock's price to take a sudden, dramatic drop. Many successful short sales have been the result of illegal insider knowledge, resulting in prosecutions. Finch's "insider" knowledge of Virtanen's upcoming legal problems would have positioned him to make such a sale successfully.
The Virtanen Pharmaceuticals case features again in “Risk”, when the principal figures involved go on trial, as will the short selling strategy Finch uses.
At the DeLuca crime scene, Carter reads in DeLuca's rap sheet about the M. Elias murder. The notes say that Marlene Elias was stabbed in the back. In the next scene she tells Detective Terney that the victim was stabbed multiple times in the chest.
Even though Elias is using a silencer, the sound effects used in the shoot out with Carter are of a non-silenced weapon.
When Reese and Zoe sneak into Mark Lawson's office and use Finch's recovery software on Lawson's computer, the clinical trial report of Sylocet is already displayed on the monitor. However, in the next scene, the report disappears and Reese re-opens the file.
After Zoe and Reese are captured, in the first shot that shows them handcuffed to chairs, Reese has no handcuffs. His hands are just clasped together.
The patient list for the drug trials reads like a Brazilian phone book, suggesting that the drug trials took place in Brazil -- and indeed, three of the obituaries Finch found mentions the patient as a São Paulo resident. Yet all the obituaries are in English. One could assume machine translation... except that some (particularly the second one) clearly look like scanned images, not online articles.
The next-to-last obituary has two significant errors: first, it describes the victim both as a doctor and a nurse; and second, it has repeated paragraphs.
Trivia[]
Finch uses the alias "Partridge," another last name based on a bird.
In the scene where Sullivan hands Carter the picture of young Elias, the hand that takes the file is a stand-in and not Taraji P. Hensen.
According to the signage and advertising present in the shot of Times Square during the opening scene, the footage was shot in 2003.
At the end of the episode, through the MPOV is seen that the Machine is marking every object like person, vehicle etc. with a white box. This may be because the Machine is retasking itself to find new numbers.
Quotes[]
"I didn't know static had a vintage…" (Reese to Finch)
"I know you don't care who you hurt to get what you want. I know the only thing you do care about is money. So that's what I'm going to take from you. Your money. All of it. You were right, Mr Keller. Thanks to you, I never will have to invest in another company. (Finch)
Clips[]
Person of Interest - Person of Interest - Preview 'The Fix'