4x13 M.I.A.

You appreciate the little things on a rewatch. Like Root's "Remember, one false move and you're dead... So have fun!". The absolute swing of her this episode was entertaining and painful. Esp the ending.

Also her comment that "Monsters love small towns". No doubt a callback to her own childhood experience with her friend Hannah's disappearance.

So, the search for Shaw leads Root and Reese to a creepy little town whose population Samaritan uses for experiments.

It's really marvelous how pretty much every protagonist has grown on me, though Root's quickly become one of my favourites, especially her interaction with Finch, and somehow it's her transformation from ruthless killer who disregards humans to the woman grieving for Shaw that highlights who important the human angle is inbetween all that rational, target-oriented machine code.

That brief moment of Root wondering what Samaritan was doing with the town made me realize just how much she's changed, from the early Root who thought people were bad code and needed. Right now, sure, she's single-minded about finding and worrying about Shaw, but in other circumstances, she likely would have genuinely cared about what was being done to those people.

I also wasn't aware we were going to get a glimpse of Shaw at all after If-Then-Else, so that was great. I was starting to wonder what it would have been like for the live viewers that the show was playing this out, and I thought we were going to be left wondering if she was actually alive. (Also, despite this having aired 6 years ago, I genuinely thought that episode was where she was gonna bite the dust (Googling after watching it told me otherwise, welp). So yehey for more Shaw!)