User Reviews

Greetings from Lithuania.

"Witness" is probably the best episode of this truly great, realistic and gritty TV show, although i've really liked "Mission Creep" as well. Acting here is strong as always and Jim Caviezel steels the show as always. And this episode is soooo intense, action starts from the first second and keeps going till the end.

And what a great twist at the, didn't really saw that coming.

Really looking forward to the next episode of this extremely good TV show and actually, the best TV show in 2011.Jonathan Nolan and J.J.Abrams have created a truly original show.

We finally got it. The reveal about the mysterious Elias was awesome. I'm not going to talk about spoilers but I loved it. He is definitely going to pop up in future episodes now and Finch/Reese will see him again.

I'm really liking this show so far. Very intense action and I really like Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel working together.

Witness.

This episode name was also a bit suspicious. Elias acting was strangely calm from the start.but we didn't see that coming in the end.

When the Russian mob leader Benny D'Agostino is executed in a convenience store at Brighton Beach, Carter, Fusco and other police officers investigate the crime scene. Detective Bill Szymanski explains the war between the Russian Mobsters and the Italian Mafia led by the mysterious Elias and the hit was a retaliation and shows the surveillance tape to Carter and Fusco. Carter notes that there a witness, an ordinary bald man, who fled after the killing. Meanwhile, Reese is investigating the schoolteacher Charlie Burton, whose number was provided to Finch by the machine. When Det. Fusco calls Reese asking him to find the witness, Reese tells Fusco that he is watching Burton. He sees the Russian mobsters arriving at Burton's building, but Reese protects and flees with him. Burton is wounded and Reese escapes with him to a building controlled by the Bulgarian mob to escape from the Russians. But their leader contacts the Bulgarian leader and make an arrangement to hunt down Reese and Burton. Meanwhile, Reese's cellular breaks and he is not able to contact Finch, who discovers a rogue police officer from the mob.

"Witness" is an excellent episode of "Person of Interest", with a surprising plot point in the end of the show. This twist would be enough to say that this is an excellent episode, but the plot has many betrayals, surprises and wonderful conclusion. This time, Reese and Finch are lured and misinterpret the output from the machine. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "Witness"

There is nothing worse than when something made to look serious turns out to look like comedy. That is the case with this episode. I didn't know whether to laugh or cringe out of collective embarrassment that we humans are prone to. The episode is written by someone who has never been to New York, or maybe has been here in the 1970s. In one shot, we're shown a building near Brighton Beach, and told that "even locals don't go there, it belongs to Bulgarian drug dealers" or something along these lines. That building is actually home to $700,000-$900,000 apartments in reality. But it gets better, inside we see people making or using drugs on the stairs, holes in the walls, guys walking around with guns, etc. I don't know if people that have never been to NYC in their lives think that this is a plausible representation of any neighborhood of our city, but it's not. Even the worst buildings in the Bronx are not like that, let alone Brighton Beach, which has gotten quite affluent in the last two decades.

Brighton Beach isn't beautiful, because it's boring, not because it's dangerous. There is no mafia; no Italian, no Russian, no mafia of any kind like the one pictured in this episode. And what would an Italian mobster be doing in a cheap Russian supermarket as shown in the beginning of the show?

It's sad that people from the outside watch these kind of episodes about New York and think that this is even remotely a realistic portrayal of the city. This isn't the 1979 anymore and there are no buildings or streets where "even the locals don't go" - that's just ridiculous. If you're going to write a script for a show that's going to be on TV, why not at least leave your Hollywood villa and visit the city you're writing about?