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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

For 'Person of Interest' Season 3 Premiere Day: the John Reese Family Tree

Tuesday, September 24, 2013: the season premiere of Person of Interest, going into its third season.

When we left off at the end of season 2, The Machine had been set free, Root was recovering from a gunshot wound in what appeared to be a mental health hospital, Sam Shaw appeared to have joined Finch and Reese, and Carter had, for some reason, saved the life of Carl Elias. Kara Stanton's virus has wreaked its havoc, and it's unclear at this point how Finch and Reese will continue to save lives.

This family tree isn't originally my idea. Like so many great things in life, it started with Tumblr. Specifically, with this post posted by the blogger whose blog is Obsesiones Mias. (I feel like I should know her name, but I don't.) The contention of this post is that John Reese seems like he's a little superhuman because, perhaps, his distant ancestor was Kainan - a character in the film Outlander*, also played by Jim Caviezel. The character is an extraterrestrial. Kainan crash-landed on Earth in an Iron Age Viking settlement and, after defeating the space dragon he'd brought with him, he became king of the Viking clan.

At a later time, the Obsesiones Mias blogger said something about adding to the Reese family tree, which got me thinking, until at last I came up with:


It was surprisingly hard to find a way to make fictional family trees online. I gave up the search and instead used a scrapbooking website, CropMom. It's not the most elegant scrapbook page ever - I made it in a bit of a rush.

Let me break down the line of descent:

We can begin the John Reese family tree with Mary.



Her son, Jesus...



...married Mary Magdalene (well, that's one possible scenario, isn't it?)...



...who was pregnant at the time of Jesus' death. Different versions of folklore disagree as to whether the couple had a daughter or a son, but let's say, hypothetically, they had a daughter. This is actually an image said to represent Mary Magdalene, but it could be how the daughter of Jesus and Mary looked. (Some people say her name was Sara. I can't remember if her name is mentioned in The Da Vinci Code or not.)



Now let's say that Sara has many generations of descendants - hundreds of years go by. Some say that the Merovingian kings of France were her descendants. Imagining that she was the ancestress of a royal line, let us speculate that some of her royal descendants migrated northward, to the Viking regions. Let's say that one of her descendants was the warrior-king Hrothgar.



Hrothgar is on the viewer's left, portrayed by John Hurt. You may remember John Hurt best as Mr. Ollivander from the Harry Potter movies; I do too, but I also like to think of him as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. You may also remember that Hrothgar is the name of the king whose realm is under attack from Grendel in Beowulf, but I don't think the Outlander movie is meant to imply that this is the same Hrothgar.

Hrothgar's daughter, Freya - a warrior princess - marries Kainan, the outlander.



Presumably, they have children who have both royal DNA and Kainan's extraterrestrial DNA. We'll just assume Kainan's DNA is close enough to that of Homo sapiens that he and Freya can interbreed without difficulty. Their princes and princesses have descendants, some of whom may end up in France (or back in France, if that's where we imagine Mary Magdalene and her offspring ended up).

Hundreds of years later, one of their descendants may have been Edmond Dantes.



Dantes, after many long years of suffering, married Mercedes.



I imagine they had several children together (at the end of the movie, Mercedes rests her hand on her belly, which I always think means she's already pregnant again), but their oldest was Albert. If Albert resembles Superman, it's probably because of the Kainan DNA. Superman is an alien, too.



Albert Dantes, born in the early 1800s, had descendants who, several generations later, included John Reese.



Maybe Reese is the last of this bloodline. But maybe there's a baby Carter-Reese in his future.


*Not to be confused with the 2014 movie based on Diana Gabaldon's time-travel romance novel also called Outlander.

If you need me, I'll be counting down the hours until 10 p.m. Eastern.


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