Fan favorite CBS show ‘Person of Interest’ is coming back midseason for a 13 episode run. We’ll pick up with Sarah Shahi’s character Shaw still missing and Amy Acker’s character of Root weighing the priorities for her next move.

Shahi and Acker, along with fellow cast members Michael Emerson, Jim Caviezel, and Kevin Chapman, recently met with Entertainment Weekly at New York Comic Con to talk about the fifth season of the drama. Shahi previewed the evolving relationship between her character and her castmate.

“There’s some really nice Root/Shaw stuff coming up. I think some things that the fans have been waiting for, I think some exploration that the fans deserve to see at this point, so that was a pretty big thing that we recently filmed.”

We’ve already seen Shaw’s interactions with Root go from wanting to kill her to playful teasing to an onscreen kiss. Some fans have the expectation for more and this quote implies that those fans will be rewarded. Acker went on to say:

“For Team Machine, we’ve all been searching for Shaw, so we have this real dynamic between, do we put our energy into finding Shaw, or saving the Machine. That’s where this season picks up, and it’s a real struggle for my character.”

Root has traditionally put the machine first serving it as her god. Now this attraction to Shaw is competing with the machine’s needs. Michael Emerson’s character Harold faked his own death to remove such a competing relationship from his life. However, his other motivation was to  keep the person he cared most about out of danger. To Root, Shaw is already in danger. I imagine that will play into how she moves forward.

Emerson pointed out that this short fifth season would likely be the show’s last. ‘Person of Interest’ deals with high stakes that can only be partially explored without accelerating the story to a conclusion. If this season is to be the last, expect it to be the most thrilling yet. This is evident in Emerson’s parting words to EW:

“I think something that is exciting to look forward to is this may be the last 13 episodes of the show ever. So there’s going to be some climaxes, there’s going to be some wrapping up, [and] I assume casualties, transformations, endings of all sorts.”

Source: Entertainment Weekly