The more I've thought about this episode over the past day, the less I've liked it. When you consider especially that Person of Interest has already had an episode largely based in simulation with If-Then-Else, this one really paled in comparison to me. I think the fact that the working nature of Samaritan's simulation is never explained really hurts the believability of the whole thing, even beyond the whole "nothing actually happens in this episode" argument. I'm left with two questions which, taken in conjunction, kind of break the episode for me: How much of the simulation is Samaritan's design vs. what Shaw's mind takes and runs with, and what exactly is Greer/Samaritan's intent with running the simulations at all?
Greer's conversation at the very end of the episode implies that the goal of this exercise is to mine into Shaw's mind for information about the team and the location of their base. If that's the case, then why is so much of the simulation's time spent running with the notion of Greer attempting to "turn" Shaw entirely and going through issues of multiple implants and brainwashing and her struggling with killing her teammates or not? The whole thing starts to turn in the coffee shop, when Shaw gets sick of fake-Root and fake-Reese secretly wondering whether they can trust her...but that suspicion is largely brought on by Shaw's actions and the weird "flashes" she goes through, with or without the chip. Without that ambiguity, that conflict, the rest of the team would be more likely to trust her and presumably get her back "home" sooner. Or are we to assume that the interference Shaw experienced was actually her own mind lashing back against the narrative the simulation was trying to construct? Why would fake-Greer take credit for it in the church, then? It feels like no matter what, somewhere along the line there's something that doesn't add up to explain just how it all played out vs. what Samaritan was hoping to get out of it. And for that, ultimately we don't even know just how much of a real glimpse this gives us into Shaw's psyche, or if this is just Greer's guess of how Shaw thinks in order to try and move the simulation along. We're just left to speculate, and it feels like speculation that will ultimately never be properly addressed.
