So many of the stand alone episodes (which have been getting fewer and fewer) usually have a nice hook to them, and more than a few of them have reoccuring characters or events (Elias, Zoe, Leon, Rylatech, Vigilance). Even small time characters reappear, or are mentioned. The show just feels "connected" throughout it's run, even the stand alone episodes. It's not Law and Order, where 95% of the episodes might as well exist in parallel universes, because there's no growth or connection to the other episodes.
Where I felt the show "got it" in the connectiveness, is Zoe's intro episode in season 1. The bad guy in that episode was a pharmaceutical company that more or less was "done for" at the end of the episode. Most of the times on procedurals, you'll never hear of that company/perpetrator again.
Except, 10 episodes later, on a totally different mission, there appeared on a TV set, a report about the main guy at that company, being convicted of the crimes the police caught him for 10 episodes prior.
See:
The Fix
See: Robert Keller
There are a few other similar things that go on. I feel other things will eventually come back in some fashion (The PI student, Alistair Westley, the Hacker from the 911 episode, The McPoyle Brother
)
The show has too many connected tissue, to make me think of it as just "another procedural show"
Even Reese's bag of Guns from the Pilot is a reoccuring thing (he grabs it when they left the library in the last episode). It's even got a wiki page, calling it "
Plan B"
Edit: for anyone that's visited that POI Wiki page, notice they've changed the look, from a blue background and The Machine-type functions, to a White background with Samaritan imagery (Red Triangles)
