No, but he's not unreadable, either, which is something I love about both the performance and the show. The same goes for Reese. Neither of them has anything resembling a normal affect. It doesn't mean you can't tell what they're thinking or feeling and it doesn't mean they don't feel. You wind up watching the characters with the same microexpressive attention they apply to each other—when they exceed their familiar parameters, we're really supposed to notice. So when Finch comes for Reese after the attempted assassination in "Number Crunch," the unhesitating way he puts an arm around his wounded partner to take his weight stands out because it's the first time we've seen him touch anyone of his own accord. (There was that scene they staged during the bank robbery where Reese grabbed him by the shirt front, but that was running with someone else's direction, not initiating contact himself. The ease with which he hugs Will Ingram in "Legacy" is still surprising, because Finch really doesn't come across as the hugging type; and if he isn't, then it really means something about how he views Nathan's son. Doesn't stop him from lying to the kid, of course.) He's much more normally emotional when he's zoned out of his skull on ecstasy, but his voice scales up anxiously like any worried parent after Leila jailbreaks her book-pile playpen—"Oh, God, I'll never forgive myself"—and in that same episode we see that the only thing that will break Reese for Elias is the danger to a six-month-old child. It's a testament to the show that neither of them feels out of character in moments like these, customary finely tuned deadpans notwithstanding. And their less demonstrative interactions are revealing more and more all the time.
I agree with you that Fusco and Carter are part of this dynamic, by the way. At this point we know almost nothing about Carter's past or personal life except that she was an Army interrogator and she has a teenage son, but we have a very clear idea of her capacities, her boundaries, her moral stances, and some of the dangers on her horizon. We got more than halfway through the first season before Fusco said anything to illuminate his own view of himself ("You try to go down doing something good. You wouldn't know about that, would you?"), but the actor had already anchored him as a sympathetic character through nothing more than expression, delivery, all the other physical detail that goes into making up a person.1 And now the question is not whether he's redeemable, but whether he's in a position that will allow him the chance. Reese is running him like the NYPD version of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and he should know that has a high likelihood of not ending well. We hope nonetheless that it will.
One of the biggest underlying themes to the show is what we can hide and what we can show.
I fully expect never to learn the names under which Harold Finch and John Reese were born and I am fine with that, because we know already that it's not the kind of information that would matter. What matters is what they do, who they reveal themselves to be through their actions.
1. Okay, and he got shot in the ass while protecting a fourteen-year-old suspect, which is a tremendously endearing thing. "I can already see the ass cake on my desk when I get back."
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No, but he's not unreadable, either, which is something I love about both the performance and the show. The same goes for Reese. Neither of them has anything resembling a normal affect. It doesn't mean you can't tell what they're thinking or feeling and it doesn't mean they don't feel. You wind up watching the characters with the same microexpressive attention they apply to each other—when they exceed their familiar parameters, we're really supposed to notice. So when Finch comes for Reese after the attempted assassination in "Number Crunch," the unhesitating way he puts an arm around his wounded partner to take his weight stands out because it's the first time we've seen him touch anyone of his own accord. (There was that scene they staged during the bank robbery where Reese grabbed him by the shirt front, but that was running with someone else's direction, not initiating contact himself. The ease with which he hugs Will Ingram in "Legacy" is still surprising, because Finch really doesn't come across as the hugging type; and if he isn't, then it really means something about how he views Nathan's son. Doesn't stop him from lying to the kid, of course.) He's much more normally emotional when he's zoned out of his skull on ecstasy, but his voice scales up anxiously like any worried parent after Leila jailbreaks her book-pile playpen—"Oh, God, I'll never forgive myself"—and in that same episode we see that the only thing that will break Reese for Elias is the danger to a six-month-old child. It's a testament to the show that neither of them feels out of character in moments like these, customary finely tuned deadpans notwithstanding. And their less demonstrative interactions are revealing more and more all the time.
I agree with you that Fusco and Carter are part of this dynamic, by the way. At this point we know almost nothing about Carter's past or personal life except that she was an Army interrogator and she has a teenage son, but we have a very clear idea of her capacities, her boundaries, her moral stances, and some of the dangers on her horizon. We got more than halfway through the first season before Fusco said anything to illuminate his own view of himself ("You try to go down doing something good. You wouldn't know about that, would you?"), but the actor had already anchored him as a sympathetic character through nothing more than expression, delivery, all the other physical detail that goes into making up a person.1 And now the question is not whether he's redeemable, but whether he's in a position that will allow him the chance. Reese is running him like the NYPD version of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and he should know that has a high likelihood of not ending well. We hope nonetheless that it will.
One of the biggest underlying themes to the show is what we can hide and what we can show.
I fully expect never to learn the names under which Harold Finch and John Reese were born and I am fine with that, because we know already that it's not the kind of information that would matter. What matters is what they do, who they reveal themselves to be through their actions.
1. Okay, and he got shot in the ass while protecting a fourteen-year-old suspect, which is a tremendously endearing thing. "I can already see the ass cake on my desk when I get back."