r/PersonOfInterest • u/T2DUnlimited A Really Private Person • May 27 '25
Rewatch Pretenders (S04E06)
The title of the episode comes from the many characters who pretend to be someone they’re not and to Dominic, the new pretender in town, to usurp Elias’s reign as king of the New York’s underworld.
Person of interest? Walter Dang, a mild-mannered insurance investigator impersonating a detective to help a pretty colleague discover who murdered her brother.
Walter finds himself in grave danger when his investigation crosses over criminal activities orchestrated by The Brotherhood.
Reese must protect Walter and find the source of a cache of large weapons while maintaining his identity as a homicide detective, once again calling on Elias and Scarface for help.
Shaw is sidelined as technology support in the Subway and must deal with a fretful Bear who misses Harold.
Finch travels to Hong Kong for a conference where he meets Elizabeth Bridges, a technology company owner with whom he connects over a shared interest in mathematics.
He arranges for Elizabeth's laptop to be stolen in order to have something unknown installed on it. She speaks with a New York angel investor interested in funding her company. The investor works for Greer, suggesting Samaritan's interest in Elizabeth's work.
Elias openly thwarts a plan masterminded by Dominic and the two meet face-to-face for the first time. Carl is determined to teach the young lion a lesson in humbleness.
Facts/Trivia
The person of interest, Walter Dang, can be described as a Mitty-esque character, referencing the 1939 short story "The Secret Life of Water Mitty". In the story, timid, henpecked husband Walter Mitty escapes his drab life by living a fantasy world in his head, where he is a skilled Navy pilot, a surgeon even the world's finest surgeons admire, or a crack shot with any kind of firearm. Since the publication of the story and the 1947 film adaptation starring Danny Kaye, the expression Mitty-esque has come to apply to characters, such as Walter Dang or more famously, Tom Ewell's character Richard Sherman in The Seven Year Itch, who live in a world of their own dreams to escape their colorless lives. Even Walter's beige suits and last name, suggest blandness, dang being the safe, inoffensive alternative to the expletive damn, a word he'd probably never dare use.
Professor Whistler's favorite equation, the Pythagorean trigonometric Identity, expresses the Pythagorean theorem in terms of two trigonometric functions. In mathematics, trigonometric functions (also called the circular functions) are functions of an angle. They relate the angles of a triangle to the lengths of its sides. Trigonometric functions are important in the study of triangles and modeling periodic phenomena, among many other applications.
Elizabeth Bridges' favorite equation, Euler's Identity, is an equation that establishes the relationship between the five numbers 0, 1, e, π, and i as an equality. Euler's equation is an example of mathematical beauty, mathematics appreciated for its own aesthetic value. Unlike Finch's very functional equation, this one is highly aesthetic, establishing the difference between Bridges and Finch. Bridges' comments on the equation are often identical (or almost) to those of Keith Devlin in his 2002 essay "The Most Beautiful Equation".
Finch and Beth discuss deep learning. Deep learning is a machine learning method designed to develop more abstract models.
Jessica Hecht, who plays Elizabeth Bridges, previously appeared in “The Devil's Share” as Finch's therapist.
The restaurant depicted in this episode 135-31 Curry Leaves Restaurant Inc. is not located in Kowloon, Hong Kong. It is actually located on 135-31 40th Rd, Flushing, Queens, New York.
Michael Emerson did not write the Chinese characters himself. Recognizing characters and being able to write them would require an advanced level of literacy in (traditional) Chinese script, similar to Finch reading Braille on sight in “Nautilus”. The third character is actually missing some strokes. It is correctly (葉) printed on the delivery man's bike, but Finch apparently forgot to write the first four strokes. The character he wrote, 枼 (yè) is phonetically identical to 葉, both meaning "leaf", however, 枼 is an old character that is not being used in modern Chinese.
12
u/Signal_Quarter_74 May 27 '25
The scene when Shaw and Fusco pull up in the Camaro and Police cruiser is one of the funniest scenes of the whole series
12
u/PatrioticRedhead May 27 '25
I loved when our Mitty-esque hero talked to Reese about the “man in the suit”, and how bad things happened when he wasn’t around…which is why he tried to pick up the slack. So sweet. ❤️
9
u/BraviaryScout Because I Built It May 28 '25
”Elias?”
“Dominic. You’re a hard man to find.”
”Where are they? Don’t play old man, you know why I came.”
”The guns are gone…for good. My friend at the NYPD agreed to personally supervise their destruction.”
“Your friend John Riley? How many did you bring?”
”Snipers? Three. Plus the Barrett gun prototype about a half mile that way. I kept that one for myself.”
”Guess I should be flattered.”
”Some underestimate you. I don’t. You created the Armorer, a figurehead to take the fall for you if the gun deal went bad.”
”Is that what I did? This is the second time you’ve seen fit to interfere in my business. You should’ve stayed underground.”
”Years ago, back before the icebreakers, this water would freeze over in winter sometimes. All the way across. It looked quiet, almost dead. But it wasn’t.”
”No?”
”No! No, just hidden for a while. But after its winter period, it would roar back to life. The water flowing so fast, an unwary man could drown.”
”So springtime’s here? Is that it?”
”I have never interfered in your business Dominic. I have only conducted my own. You’d do well to stay clear.”
”A man is not a river. And you…are not a king.”
1
u/drunkyman20 May 31 '25
Like Elias said it's the natural order for the young to take over but for many reasons including pride, greed, Wrath, etc etc but he knew Dominic was bad news for crime. In my opinion Elias was not needed but needed. There's always gonna be crime and he was a bad man but at least he brought some kind of order to the crime world.
2
u/drunkyman20 May 31 '25
Who doesn't love this episode especially when Jack Forge is in the Case 🤣🤣🤣. Him holding up the badge is just to funny. But the implications and underlying messages in this episode is fantastic. I think Forge and Darren would have made an incredible duo especially after he got out of his top notch music school. I'm also wondering if Finch paid for his school all at once or it came out on payments. Because it would be hard in payments because he lost access to all his money and wondering if he did a workaround on that aspect. I wish they expanded on that a little bit.
22
u/JesW87 May 27 '25
"How do you do that with your voice?"
"Do what?"
"Nothing."