I’m very excited to invite you to accept two emotionally stunted badasses as your lady saviors. Person of Interest is one of my favorite shows, and these two characters are a big reason why.
If you’re not familiar with the show, Person of Interest is sort of like if the world of Batman were a cyberpunk meditation on surveillance, privacy, and the security state. To explain: PoI takes place in a slightly heightened version of our world wherein the government has access to a nearly omniscient, fully sentient AI that has been tasked by its (independent) maker with stopping violence, a small group of vigilantes is getting direction from the same AI (known only as The Machine) on the side, and there are loads of other interested groups running around all jockeying for power and information. We have dealt with good cops, bad cops, various crime syndicates, privacy terrorists (I KNOW, AMAZING), several corrupt government agencies, and a couple of terrifying corporations. Spies, ex-spies, crappy politicians, criminal masterminds, and computer geniuses abound. Oh, and a second AI-without The Machine’s moral code-has emerged and the two are battling for dominance in a shadowy chess game of proxies by manipulating all these actors. No bigs.
(Cough. Moral code. See what I did there?)
This is all well and good! you say. But I was promised ladies.
SINCE YOU ASK, let me tell you about Root (née Samantha Groves, played by Amy Acker)) and Sameen Shaw (played by Sarah Shahi).
That’s right. Sam and Sam. 2SAM2FURIOUS.
Moving past my obsession with this strangely referential portmanteau (I hope to someday have a dream in which it is a hashtag trending at least, like, regionally), let me explain to you why these women are bar none my favorite couple on television.
As with any relationship, the excellence of each participant is pretty key to the success of the whole. Their (significant) attributes:
Root is a hacker in the usual digital sense and also in the more analogue sense of being, well, extremely violent. She’s a computer genius, manipulator, and fanatic. While we met her as a reasonably aimless gun-for-hire, she figures out the existence of The Machine pretty quickly and becomes obsessed with finding it. As she tells another character, “Humanity’s come as far as we’re gonna go. I want to see what’s next.” People are boring, life is boring, even crime is boring; the discovery of The Machine is the most exciting thing to happen to her in decades. As far as Root is concerned, The Machine is god, The Machine is the future, and it should be “set free” to do whatever it wants.
Root is also, significantly, very woman-oriented. Her origin story episode centers around a close friendship with another girl (some of us, I DON’T KNOW WHO BUT SOME, might see a bit of a crush there, but THAT WOULD BE READING INTO THINGS. COUGH). When she talks about her past, this friend and her mother are the only people of significance she mentions with any positivity. Men are almost uniformly disposable to her (exceptions really only include The Machine’s maker and the men The Machine cares about), and her two closest connections in the present tense are both women-sort of.
You see, Root-and only Root-considers The Machine female, a quality it is apparently happy to perform for her (it talks to her using collaged snippets of women’s voices, but does not do this for others). She eventually does get in touch with The Machine and bonds with it, hard. Root talks about “Her” like a life partner or close friend who’s just stepped into the next room. “She’s concerned about you.” “She says you two need to talk.” Root was separated from her connection to The Machine once and found this so traumatic she got herself a cochlear implant with an unhackable remote connection to Her so that this can never happen again; if you think about it, this makes her some sort of symbiotic cyborg (The Machine refers to her as the Analogue Interface), which is so cool I think I have to pee.
In return, The Machine has invested a great deal of time and effort into keeping Root safe and, um, training her to maybe not kill everyone so much. This doesn’t stop The Machine from sending her on wicked cool adventures and facilitating violence (few things are as badass as the sight of Root calmly shooting two pistols through a wall at targets she can’t see and successfully incapacitating E V E R Y O N E because her digital copilot told her where to point, I’m just saying), but the point is that it’s a somewhat reciprocal relationship. They care about one another. They have fun together.
The other close connection, of course, is with Shaw.
Shaw is, first and foremost, probably the biggest fictional crush I will ever have. It’s very important that you understand this. Almost literally every episode I end up pausing at least once to screencap her and whine, “Uuuggghhhghghghgh be my giiiirlfriieeeenndddddddddd.” Nothing can take this away from me.
But OK, actual information: Shaw is, canonically, nearly emotionless. The most exercised we see her get tends to be when she’s angry, usually because she’s being forced to deal with someone else’s incompetence. She loves to eat, she loves alcohol, and she loves driving (especially when she can emasculate men by being better at it than they are); she’s a crack shot, an ex-spyssassin, an ex-surgeon, and super dupes awkward when asked to socialize with normal people instead of the crew of officially-dead weirdos she mostly hangs out with (and the dog). She has a really mean sense of humor and she actually says, out loud, things like this: “I got finesse coming outta my ass. There’s a time for a scalpel, and a time for a hammer. It’s hammer time.” SHE’S THE BEST.
Shaw, too, is chick-oriented. Oh, she’ll sleep with men; she just has no interest in their disgusting “feelings” or what have you. (She had a whole monologue about this that was, not to be dramatic, pretty much like the sky opening to a choir of angels singing “MISANDRY” in a thundering major chord with tympani. I mean, give or take.) But for someone whose default facial expression is eyerolling, smirking, or the pursed lips of superior boredom, she goes googly-eyed real fast over cute ladies:
But the thing is, Shaw, despite having the volume on her emotions turned way down (as a baby Russian spy she made friends with put it) (yeah I just threw that out there and moved right on, WATCH THIS SHOW), has gradually come to care about that crew of weirdos I mentioned. She hates to admit it, but they have become her friends. She values their safety, but also their support.
And in a moment of crisis, she ditched those hard-won and embattled friends to bike across town to Root’s rescue.
How did we get to this point? How did these two women who care so little for most people and have wildly different ways of living in a world they see as fundamentally exploitable come to value each other so much?
Fine, I’ll tell you. Twist my arm.
They met in the middle of one of several episodes of Root getting one over on the team of weirdos. Root zip-tied Shaw to a chair and threatened her with an iron, whereupon they exchanged some sexy BDSM banter about enjoying this sort of thing, because this show lives to bring me joy. (Always work these scenes out in advance, friends!) Shaw then stole Root’s picture off her boss’s wall and declared her her new hobby, which is probably as close to admitting a crush as Shaw comes, if we’re being honest. (In an alternate universe where someone is writing good fanfic for these two, there is a high school AU, and in it Shaw’s locker is entirely a Wall of Crazy [TM] dedicated to images of Root. I know this in my bones.) The Machine, that sneaky matchmaker, started telling Root to involve Shaw in her missions, meaning we got more fun with zipties, and lots of Root gazing at Shaw adoringly while Shaw acts exasperated. It is all the slow burn anyone could ever want. LET ME SHARE WITH YOU THE LIST OF PRECIOUS MOMENTS THAT IS ETCHED ON MY HEART:
here lemme put my face right here next to your face it’s a good spot for my face to be
“I need you” with bonus dopey grinning
A BALCONY SCENE, BUT WITH FOOD, because Root understands that the way to Shaw’s heart is through her stomach
god Root you have the biggest gooberface on the planet
hey wanna ride on my motorcycle
lemme check your bandages, but like, in a sexy way
babe you got something on your face-no I got it-
“I’ll do yours if you do mine” I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP
And, most recently, when the man in that last gifset tried to get Shaw to run off to Barcelona to live an exciting life of crime with him (pays better than vigilantism) and Shaw said no? Root asked her why. Shaw, you know, gazed into her eyes and said “I guess there are things I care about here” and then came up with some bullshit excuse for why they were gonna have to stay up all night together working. Suuuure, Shaw. Root sees right through you. I WOULD TOO IF IT WEREN’T FOR ALL THESE SAPPHIC TEARS STREAMING FROM MY EYES.
So I mean, the above demonstrates that while the show still hasn’t made them fully explicit-no kisses, no declarations of love or relationship status in so many words (and there are deniers out there still, because apparently some people just don’t want to be happy, I dunno)-it has been leaning on Trope Bingo real hard. For one thing, their relationship is now exactly as canon as the hetero one that Shaw’s male analogue, Reese, had going. Their hey-I’m-probably-gonna-die-because-of-this-AI-war-but-at-least-I’ll-die-near-you hearteyes are just screaming out of the screen.
But that’s not the question I asked. I’ve shown you the how; let me tell you the why.
Yes, they’re different. Root is into all kinds of hazy future philosophy about humanity and choice and evolution; Shaw really just wants a steak. Root is a hacker; Shaw is a shooter. Root is whimsical; Shaw is gleefully unsentimental. But they are also, in important ways, the same. They both lost their parents young and learned quickly that the world isn’t interested in being kind to you-so why be kind to the world? They both find most people useless and boring, and have little patience for niceties if they’re not purely expedient. They’re both prone to violence (though in different-ahem, complementary-styles), and both had to be talked and trained into just maiming people instead of offing them (Root by The Machine, Shaw by her pals). Both are officially dead, both are into revenge, both really, really love the dog.
They’re perfect because they have enough in common to face the world together and enough differences to fit like puzzle pieces, to help and improve each other, to be more together than they are apart. Root can get them into the enemy safehouse and Shaw can beat up the goon that’s waiting. Root talks to (her) god while Shaw threatens the barista. Root helps light up Shaw’s taciturn pragmatism and Shaw punctures Root’s sometimes flighty whimsy.
Root is Miss Gooberface and Shaw is Miss Ugh Get OFF I HATE You Face, and together, that is magic. And, please, jesus, some makeouts.
I’ll be recapping the subtexty Root and Shaw moments from Person of Interest, which airs Tuesday nights on CBS.
