#character: boston arliss crab

[more--than--anything]

Episode review: "We just have to trust each other, like old times." [S05E9/10]

Wow. That was... a lot. How overwhelmed are you feeling after a double dose of our favorite show and knowing that there is only one episode left?

Y: What can I say... I’m usually left exhausted and a ball of anxiety and emotions after one episode of Blindspot. Hit me with two back to back, and I need a couple of days to recover and go back to being a semi-functioning human.

L: I mean, I feel less traumatized than last week? Slightly? But also pre-emptively overwhelmed thinking about what’s going to happen in that last hour. Maybe it’s good that we get this extra week in here...

Let’s take this in pieces. In the first hour, we see our team, after two seasons, finally get an edge over Madeline. How did they get there, and what does it cost them?

L: Our team starts this episode exactly where we left them: In Madeline’s custody in the NYO, grieving for Patterson (as we all were for the week leading up to this episode). In fact, the only people who aren’t grieving for Patterson are Madeline and, well, Patterson, who doesn’t have time for questions about how she survived, because she has a team to rescue. And preferably before Madeline convinces one of the team to confess to all her sins (in another superb bit of cross-cutting, from one interrogation room to another). Madeline is pretty persuasive, even threatening Tasha’s unborn child (how the hell did she find out about that?!), so it’s a good thing our team is pretty stubborn.

I’m not gonna lie, I really thought they’d stretch out the “Patterson is dead” thing longer than they did, but I am not going to complain that we got her back so quickly! Patterson starts by rescuing Boston, arriving just as Madeline’s thugs do, and then cooks up a plan to get Afreen to help her and Boston sneak into the NYO by exploiting the gender-bias on their facial recognition software. (And to cut the software some slack, I hardly recognized Patterson and Boston when they showed up. Josh Dean is fabulous as Boston in these two episodes, as always, but man, he sure makes one hell of a drag queen.) They cleverly send a message to Jane, who is about to confess to all of Madeline’s sins, via a morse code signal in the light on the camera Madeline is using to tape her confession. And then they rescue Tasha and Rich, in short order.

Weller is more heavily guarded, but fortunately Rich is no stranger to crawling through the ductwork at the NYO. And then we get another surprise, when Agent Rose walks in just as Rich reaches Weller. This is one of my favorite scenes in this episode, because it is one of the first that answers a question that’s been nagging at me all season: Does the rest of the NYO truly believe that the team is guilty of all of the crimes they’ve been accused of? Agent Rose has been around since season one. She’s worked under Mayfair, Weller, Reade... and now she’s working under Madeline. She knows what kind of person Weller is, and she knows dedicated this team is. She’s seen them put themselves in harm’s way to save others over and over again. And now she has to decide whose side she’s on. “Agent Rose, you know me. You know my team. We are not what Madeline says we are. You see that, don’t you?” And Weller-the-boss did not underestimate the loyalty of his former employee; she tells him to cuff her so it looks he overpowered her and got away.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this scene, and I think it might be good that some time has passed since the team was branded as criminals and Madeline took over. I am sure that life under Madeline’s reign has not been a party for the agents in the NYO. Even if they were persuaded to believe her about the team (or to follow Weitz’s lead) in the beginning, that confidence must have waned the longer they had to work with Madeline. I’m sure they wondered about the thugs that she brought in, and I doubt anyone was pleased about the draconian security measures she imposed upon them. If this particular scenario—the team locked up at the NYO—had happened right away, it’s possible that there wouldn’t have been as many people willing to stick their necks out for the team. But as it is... Madeline, like so many things, you brought it on yourself. And I can’t deny that it sure was fun watching her come unglued as she realized that the team was slipping through her fingers, right there under her nose.

In the meantime, Patterson has discovered that Madeline has covered her tracks very neatly, placing all the blame for her misdeeds on Weitz. Well, now we know why Madeline has been keeping him around; he’s a very useful fall guy. But fortunately for Weitz, William Patterson is in his corner, and she is able to obtain the original data, all the evidence they need to incriminate Madeline. But just having that information isn’t enough; they need to make it public, so that there is no way that Madeline can bury it. Tasha picks up her phone and calls Megan Butani, Reade’s former fiancée, who we remember is a reporter for “The New York Star.” I guess that answers the question of whether she got deported or was able to stay in the US. Tasha asks Megan to remember what kind of man Reade was and that there is no way he was guilty of the crimes Madeline pinned on him. Megan reminds Tasha that Reade dumped her because he was in love with Tasha, and Tasha tactfully doesn’t mention that she’s expecting his love child as she asks Megan to go public with all of the evidence they have on Madeline.

Ivy’s team is hustling Jane out of the NYO, so the team has to act fast. Madeline has put the whole NYO in lockdown, so the only way for them to get to Jane is to override the lockdown with an evacuation order. Unfortunately, that reveals to the goon squad that they’ve been hiding out in the server room, and the team is rounded up and taken on their second slo-mo walk through SIOC to face the music. We get two surprises then: First, that Weitz hasn’t quietly moved to Canada as he’d threatened, and second, that Agent Rose isn’t the only agent who has signed on to Team Rogue Agents. TRA emerges victorious from the shootout with Ivy’s goon squad, but Weitz is hit in the crossfire. And here we see illustrated the difference between him and the team; Jane took a similar hit, traveled back to the bunker, started searching for her husband, and then directed her own surgery without anesthetic. Sadly, Weitz, is not made of quite such resilient fiber, and passes away with a last dose of his signature snark.

Without Weitz (or Madeline, who has flown the coop), there is a bit of a power vacuum at the FBI. Without a boss to give them orders, Weller seamlessly slips back into the fearless leader slot, and the team heads out to track down Madeline with help from an anonymous tip. Tasha catches up to her on her private plane, but before she can bring Madeline in, Madeline drinks her poisoned champagne and shuffles off this mortal coil. (I’m honestly a little disappointed that Tasha didn’t see that coming, knowing Maddie’s fondness for using poison to get rid of her problems.) The location of the ZIP bombs is still unknown, although Shirley has that information on an encrypted memory stick he tries to sell to Ivy, but all he gets in return is a bullet between the eyes.

I’m not going to lie: I am a little annoyed with the way that Madeline went out. Committing suicide seems like a pretty easy way out after all that she’s done. I really wanted to see her back in prison orange, regretting all of her life choices. Same with Shirley (although I thought the way he went out was pretty harsh, even for him!). But even more, I’m disappointed that this wasn’t really any kind of end of the systemic corruption that our team (and Shepherd, for that matter) have been fighting since day one. Yes, we still have one more episode, but we have to deal with Jane being zipped and apprehending Ivy, plus (hopefully) a few minutes to give the team some sort of resolution, so I don’t know how much time is left to unravel a big conspiracy plot. I will be disappointed if we don’t get a resolution to the questions this show has been posing since the pilot.

And there are still a lot of loose ends left in the Madeline story. What about all the corrupt individuals she put in place? Weitz seemed to take the view that they were all like him, basically decent people who Madeline had tricked into doing something incriminating, but it’s equally likely that some of them were legitimately corrupt and just didn’t cover their tracks well enough, which allowed Madeline to discover their misdeeds and use them for her own ends. Lucas Nash comes to mind here. He was definitely under Madeline’s control. We know Shepherd wanted to put Keaton at the head of the CIA, which would imply that the current director and other candidates were corrupt. Is Nash still in power? Being freed from Madeline’s control doesn’t necessarily mean that those individuals will become model citizens; freed from her oversight, they could do whatever they want, including exploiting the position she put them in for their own gain.

And I am a little worried. I think it would have been better for the team if they’d brought Madeline in to face trial, rather than letting her go out on her own terms. As Weitz would say, “the optics” would be better that way. As it is, if there is any question at all about the evidence they turned up (which might not be admissible in court, or at least, it wouldn’t be in the real world), it could look like the team was just covering their own tracks rather than exposing Madeline. And ultimately... they did run, and they did refuse to turn themselves in. And when they were taken into custody, they escaped, which resulted in yet another shootout at the NYO in which the Director of the FBI was mortally wounded. And then they refused a direct order by the new interim director. But we’ll get to that in a minute...

Y: So much to discuss! So little time!!

I’m sorry, but I’m a little overwhelmed by how much was packed into the first episode, how much of it was absolutely brilliant, and how much I have to say about it all. First of all, I have to say that I absolutely loved the premise of this episode. The way it was set up and how it played out was so reminiscent of 2.21—including the building lockdown, Patterson doing computer stuff stealthily, the team sneaking their way around the office, and of course the ultimate showdown in SIOC and the director’s demise—and that episode is by far one of my favorite Blindspot episodes ever. So all of this made me very happy.

The interrogation scene was fantastic. The editing and cutting made it so much better. But by far the best thing was the head to head between the team and Madeline and the team’s tenacity and stubbornness. The way they took Madeline’s taunting and her threats and just sat there so badass and defiant. We’re going to talk about the team later—and by talk I mean mostly gush and fangirl and make weird noises about how much we love them. But for now, let’s just say that those interrogation scenes were a thing of cinematic beauty.

The way the case played out was really fun as well. There were so many little games of cat and mouse, some were through the FBI servers, some were psychological mind games, and in Rich’s case they were all about crawling through the vents to save his favorite mumbling special agent. And it all led to Madeline standing in the middle of SIOC all alone as everything collapsed around her and then the ultimate showdown between the team, Weitz and his Team Rogue Agents, and Ivy’s men. And in between all those huge moments, we got to see Agent Rose make a comeback, and Megan make a comeback as well. And you would be 100% correct if you assumed that I cheered for both of those comebacks. First, Megan, while the way she was dumped wasn’t really great, at least the show respects her enough to show us that she’s not one to hold that kind of grudge or have that residual pettiness in her. And it’s also a testament to who Reade really was that Megan knows those accusations cannot be right and that the way to honor his memory is to do what’s right here. And at the same time, a testament to Megan, her professionalism and her pedigree as a journalist. I honestly really loved that scene and the conversation with she had with Tasha and Blindspot once again not falling into the horrible cliché of vengeful exes.

And then there’s Agent Rose. Oh, Agent Rose. For five seasons now, I have singlehandedly held on to the hope that she will someday make a return. That sassy agent in that random scene with Fischer all the way back in season one made like one or two random background appearances, and I’ve stood here alone in my crusade to want her back. I am not going to lie. I never in a million years thought they would bring her back. I mean, even I—the founder and only member of the Agent Rose Fan Club—didn’t expect them to bring her back. But they did! And okay, my excitement doesn’t only stem from this weird niche obsession with her but like L said, her return and the role she played was bigger than just her, and it answered so many questions we’ve had all season, and it validated the faith we have in the team. Except for Weitz, Afreen and for a brief moment Briana, we never really got to see the rest of the agents at the NYO react to the news that the team are all traitors. Most of these people have been working with our team for years and a part of us knew they couldn’t have all just fallen for Madeline’s lies. But of course, we never really had a chance to peek into their private conversations so this episode provided the perfect opportunity to show us just how much they’ve been waiting for a chance to stand up for the team—whether it’s Agent Rose or Agent Woods or Agent Shayla or any of the other agents who proudly and confidently joined Team Rogue Agents. So it was great to see the NYO still full of these good people we’ve come to know and that their loyalty to the team is still strong.

And if I may take another moment here to just flail at how completely epic that moment was! Hands down one of the most badass moments on the show for a single character—Weitz—and one of the most badass group entrances by the Rogue Agents.

And speaking of rogue agents, I love that the little underdog resistance that Afreen and Weitz had going, never knowing if they were doing more good than evil, managed to have such a tremendous payoff. If only they knew they had so many others willing to help… And I also hope we get to see Afreen one last time in the finale because this episode and review don’t really do her enough justice for me to flail about how much I love her. I need the finale to give me some Afreen so I can justifiably spend ten hours talking about her. Or else I will have to have an independent Afreen is Awesome post. You’ve been warned.

But for now, let’s talk about Madeline. Watching her stand all alone in the middle of SIOC as everything she built collapsed around her was the first moment this season we felt the team actually win something. After everything they’ve been through, destroying all that Madeline has built felt good. But the disappointing thing about it is that in Madeline’s eyes, in some ways, it didn’t matter. She had set out to destroy the FBI and even though now she stands there defeated, in so many ways, she has already achieved what she had set out to do. The damage she has caused at the moment looks almost insurmountable. The team has put at an end to her reign of terror but the damage she has done is already catastrophic. And while this part of her story is a plot line I do enjoy, I don’t enjoy the next part of it. Setting up the finale and the next chapter in the universe with the task of rebuilding the FBI and rooting out the corruption once and for all is actually a very hopeful note to end on and maybe Madeline inadvertently did the FBI a favor. And like L, I do wonder if this opens the door to getting rid of all corruption and allows us to finally go back to what started everything and come full circle to the mysteries from season one.

I think it’s poetic that Madeline ultimately died by the same poison she used on most of her enemies, but it is frustrating that she gets to go out on her own terms, that she does not pay for her crimes and that the team don’t get the revenge they deserve. Tasha should have seen it coming. I think we all did when she sat there with a glass in from of her. But dammit, I wanted her to suffer for what she did to the team and not dictate her own fate. But I suppose that is quite a true reflection on how most monsters in this world get to go?

One person who didn’t really have things go his way was Shirley. After cutting ties with Madeline, claiming he wants to do what’s best for his family, Shirley proved he’s nothing more than a bottom feeding leech and went to Ivy seeing as she’s the boat that hasn’t sunk yet. But Ivy was lucky to be the person to do the one thing we’ve all wanted to do for almost a year now. She put a bullet between his eyes. And I know that’s cruel, but he was just unbearable. Some characters you hate to love and others you love to hate, but Shirley was just… ugh. I mean, amazing performances by Raoul Bhaneja every single time, but still. It’s interesting that this episode saw the end of two characters who for most of what we’ve seen from them have always been self-serving and good at attaching themselves to “winning projects”—Shirley and Weitz—but ultimately they went down on opposite extremes of the spectrum.

And finally, there is one more thing I want to touch upon in this section, and that is the way this season set up its villain—or villains. Essentially, it looked like the season’s ultimate villain would be Madeline and that Ivy was just the muscle she hired to get her dirty work done. But as the season progressed, we watched as Ivy and Madeline became more on equal footing in terms of who was in charge, even if Madeline thought she was the one in charge, Ivy clearly didn’t see the agreement between them as such. The power struggle was a really fun one to watch—especially with Shirley in the middle, serving Madeline for the most part but ultimately showing his true colors as only serving himself. The more things got complicated between the two women, the more the cracks showed between them and the disparity in their endgames widened the gap between them and made their agreement less amiable.

Blindspot’s never really done that before—had more than one villain at the same time—and I think in this shorter season, it gave it a little something extra and definitely made things harder on our team, especially going into the finale. It’s going to be an intense finale, but I have to admit I loved the way the antagonist was set up this season as a two-headed monster that in the end had to be split up.

L: I both agree and disagree. I liked that Madeline wasn’t the only bad guy that needed to be taken down, but I also want the final case to be more than just stopping a bomb-toting terrorist (in other words, just another Thursday for this team). I really hope there is a much bigger resolution and payoff coming—not just a case of the day, but a sewing up of the thread that somehow ties all of their cases over the past five seasons together.

Our team won the day—or at least, they finally brought Madeline down—but it was not without cost. I am not going to lie: Weitz’s death made me cry. We had a feeling that he wouldn’t make it through the season, and we were right. He finally discovered his convictions, only to die for them. But there’s no question that he died a hero. As Rich says, “When we needed you the most, you were here for us.” His resolve might have wavered like a flag in the breeze, but when it really counted, he made the right call. When we first met him, he was self-absorbed and snarky, and for the most part, he remained true to that image. But somewhere, deep down inside, he discovered a conviction and courage that no one, least of all him, suspected he had.

And it’s important to note that if he and Afreen hadn’t been able to get rid of the blackmail files on Shirley’s laptop, the team wouldn’t have been able to take her down. The editor of “The New York Star” would have killed the story before it ever saw the light of day. Not only did they destroy Madeline’s hold over him, but Weitz must also have contacted him to tell him that Madeline no longer had any leverage over him, or else the editor would have simply assumed that the blackmail was still in place. And we can’t forget his phone call to warn the team about the drone strike. Rich is right; Weitz may have driven the team crazy over the seasons, but in the moments when it mattered the most, he had their backs.

Rest in peace, Matthew. I never would have thought I’d say this, but I am really gonna miss you.

Y: Oh Matthew Weitz… what can I say to do your character and your journey justice? This was the final chapter in Weitz’s story, and like everything else in his story so far, it was an uphill battle. His instincts were screaming at him to go full ostrich, to pack up and head to Canada, but in the end he remained true to the path he’s been put on for a while, a path that Afreen—out of nowhere—helped him stay on when things got really really tough this season, and he saw it all through. It did cost him his life, but he went out completely redeemed and a true hero.

And his last words were appropriately about his hair.

It was heartbreaking to learn that the only reason Madeline kept him around for so long was to pin everything on him, but that came back to bite her because in his time staying alive, he played a huge part in destroying her blackmail material and in taking her down. I think Madeline hugely underestimated him, and I’m glad he was there to see her defeated.

That scene in SIOC when the rogue agents walked in, armed and ready to fight for him—well, for the team but also for him—brought tears to my eyes. It was an epic scene, and as Matthew’s last stand, it was as heroic as it can get.

Would I have preferred him go full ostrich? He would’ve survived which would have made me happy but very disappointed so ultimately not so happy. This is how it was meant to be. I am heartbroken but so damn proud.

Rest In Peace, Matthew. You did good. You did good.

 In the second hour, our team has to face the fact that stopping Madeline doesn’t stop the threat she posed, and it doesn’t guarantee that they will ever get their old lives back. What does that mean for their present and their future?

L: Madeline’s gone, but Ivy is still out there and so are the ZIP bombs. As much as the team would like to focus on clearing their names and getting their lives back (or in Rich’s case, making a clean getaway with a new identity), or even on getting a shower and a change of clothes, first they need to stop a terror attack. You know, business as usual at the NYO? Not quite. The team doesn’t work there anymore. They have no authority to call any shots (and probably don’t even have the clearance to walk through SIOC). So Kurt, showing us exactly why he’s always been the true leader of this team, leaves it up to the people who still work there: “We are not here to take over. We’re here to help. If you’ll have us.” And the agents at the NYO, of course, take them up on his offer, because the FBI doesn’t hire dummies. (Or at least, they didn’t when Mayfair, Weller, or Reade was in charge of the NYO. I’m guessing Madeline vastly preferred dummies she controlled as opposed to the rebels who helped take her down.)

Finding Ivy isn’t going to be easy. The only clue that they have is that Madeline had a good hacker on her team. Someone who could doctor all the documents to point to Weitz and build a puzzle that would trick Patterson and lead Madeline to the bunker. Someone very quirky, kooky even. Someone like their old pal Kathy “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” Gustafson, the third blind mouse, who disappeared after she set loose all manner of chaos in Iceland. The team is moving out to track her down when she walks into the NYO and turns herself in. Patterson and Rich try to “good cop/bad cop” her but are entertainingly blindsided by her offer to help them in exchange for the “good” deal. “The one where you ignore all the bad stuff I did and put me on the team full-time. I want the Rich Dotcom deal.” And frankly, you gotta love a show that can laugh at itself like that. Because, yes, it really is kind of ridiculous that Rich is in the position that he’s in. He should be in jail, or at the very least, not on the FBI payroll. But he is, and of course we wouldn’t have it any other way.

For all of Kathy’s craziness, she’s actually pretty straightforward about this. Ivy wants her to hack Madeline’s Darkcloud server, so she can find out where Madeline stored the ZIP bombs. But Kathy doesn’t want to be on Ivy’s team. “I’m not an evil person. Ivy is and so is her plan. I don’t want people to lose their memories. They’re all we have.” So she’s come to the FBI instead to tell them what she didn’t tell Ivy: She doesn’t need to hack Madeline’s Darkcloud key, because she built it and left herself a backdoor. Of course. If this show has taught us nothing at all, it is that programmers always, always leave themselves a backdoor, whether it’s a videogame, a secure messaging service, or a cloud server solution.

Rich and Patterson squabble for a bit about whether they can trust Kathy, until Patterson finally tells the whole team off: “You are all being hypocrites. We are asking... for a second chance, and we can’t even give Kathy one?” Which is a valid point, no matter how little we trust Kathy. Rich attempts to bluff Kathy, but Patterson delivers her second truth bomb of the day, “We can’t give you a deal because we don’t even have a deal. Stopping Ivy is our best chance at getting one. And if we can get a deal, I will do everything I can to make sure that you get one, too.” It’s not the offer Kathy was hoping for, but it’s the best she’s gonna get—especially once she realizes that the alternative is being arrested for taking down the power grid for Madeline—so she accepts.

Unfortunately, by the time Kathy gets to work, she discovers that she’s too late. Another hacker has beaten her to the punch. Another hacker with a very familiar coding style. Another hacker named Boston Arliss Crab. They need to find him, and fast, because Ivy is going to kill him as soon as she gets what she wants. Or she’ll kill him if he doesn’t get her what she wants. Either way, the outcome for Boston is very very not good. And just to make sure that he grasps the gravity of the situation, Ivy cuts off one of his fingers. And eeek, as much as I should have expected Ivy to do something horrible, I did not see that one coming. Boston puts his remaining nine digits to work doing Ivy’s bidding, and his first order of business is locking Kathy, Patterson, and Rich out of the darkcloud server.

As it turns out, our Three Blind Mice do not, in fact, appreciate being blind. Since they can’t get the information Ivy is after, they figure out how to remotely enable the webcam on Boston’s machine and try to locate him that way. They can only narrow his location to a neighborhood, so they have to resort to old school sound triangulation to find him, which means that Weller, Jane, and Tasha are in one SUV, and poor Patterson gets to drive with Rich and Kathy bickering in the backseat. I think Patterson might reconsider the whole adoption thing, after her “driving mom” experience. It’s really not for the faint of heart, and I can attest that being good at math is really no help at all.

By the time the team arrives, Ivy and her team are long gone, leaving poor Boston standing on a pressure-plate bomb, a distraction to keep the team busy while Ivy goes to get the ZIP. Weller, Jane, and Tasha head out after Ivy while Rich and Kathy and Boston bicker incessantly and Patterson works on defusing the bomb. (And I am not gonna lie, listening to them all throw shade at each other’s coding skills totally cracks me up.) Unfortunately, instead of disabling the bomb, they engage a timer which gives them five minutes to figure a way out. Boston tries to send them all away, but Rich recognizes what he’s doing (in much the same way that Patterson realized that Rich was plagiarizing Harry Potter when he told them that Boston was dead). “I always thought we’d all end up together. All of us. Like some really good looking modern family,” Boston says, and he is not at all alone there. Trust us, Boston, that is what this entire fandom wants!

Kathy insists the only way she can defuse the bomb is by switching places with Boston, so they pile some weights on her as Boston attempts to be honest about his weight (a struggle that everyone who has been eating their way through quarantine and mainlining chocolate during this final season can relate to). The two of them trade places, and then Kathy tells them that there really isn’t any way to stop the timer. “Look, I created this mess. The attack on the power grid. Framing you guys and your friends. Helping Madeline find you... I just need to make it right.” She shoos them away, and they run and take cover, only to discover that the bomb has been disarmed and Kathy is gone.

And at the end of the day, Patterson and Rich were both right. Kathy did help them, and yes, she also played them. But can you really blame her for escaping at the end? She’s already been to prison, and she doesn’t want to go back. Yeah, her obsession with Rich and Patterson is a little weird, but it’s not all that different from Rich’s fascination with Jane and Weller, and he turned out okay. For all Kathy’s kookiness, she was honest about what she wanted. And in the end, Boston does pretty much exactly the same thing as Kathy does; he takes off instead of waiting around to see what the new director decides to do with them. Rich is our only convicted felon who is brave enough to stick around and hope for clemency.

Arla Grigoryan, the new Interim Director of the FBI has arrived in the NYO and her first order of business is to recall Weller et al from the field, where they are closing in on Ivy and the ZIP bombs. But the backup is too far out to get there in time, and so our heroes make the call to go after Ivy instead of following orders. I really want to believe that this decision won’t doom them at the FBI, but honestly, this season has been a lot more grim and loss-filled than we’re used to on this show, and my optimism is really running low.

Weller takes out Ivy’s thugs as Jane finds Ivy, loading the ZIP into the bombs. Ivy escapes through a door which locks behind her, trapping Jane in the room just as the ZIP bomb goes off. Knowing she has already been exposed, she does the only thing she can to protect Kurt and seals the airlock door. And for the second time in two weeks, the music swells as we watch someone mouth “I’m sorry” through a door before being obscured, and frankly, that is two times too damn many for my poor, broken heart.

So if those were the only bombs that Ivy had, the team just won, but nothing has ever felt less like a win. We know that Patterson has the antidote for ZIP, so it’s a good bet that she’s gonna be able to serve up a cure for Jane, but damn.

Everything hurts and I need more chocolate.

Y: I’m going to say this here and no one take it the wrong way. Nothing ever good has happened that has involved Kathy Gustafson! I was completely team Rich on this throughout the episode and was screaming at Patterson to not trust her and yes, I know she ultimately saved Boston’s life, but was it all worth it?!

Yes, Boston’s life is worth it, but I am sure the team would’ve saved him some other way, and they would’ve found the ZIP some other way too. Oh, and speaking of finding the ZIP, we all know how that ended so maybe not finding it would’ve been better? I’m sorry, but I am just very very upset and even with all the chocolate I’ve consumed, it has not helped, and I just want to team up with Rich and rant about Kathy for the next fifteen years.

I think I am mostly upset, also, that this being the penultimate episode, Tasha, Kurt and Jane got so little time because we were focused on the A Plot of the episode, and I was hoping we’d see more of them. There I said it. It’s all Kathy’s fault and I hate Kathy. In fact, everybody should hate Kathy. Maybe this could have been called Everybody Hates Kathy Part Two?

Okay, now that I have gotten this off my chest, I can relax—not really—and talk about something else. All the bantering and bickering and the shouting and the nerding aside, this episode provided an interesting character juxtaposition by including both Boston and Kathy along with Rich. These three in many ways fit in the same category, and Kathy really was trying to fit into the Rich Dotcom mold—if we’re going to believe her claim that she wanted to work with the FBI and get a similar deal. In many ways those three represent that category in its different phases, and they’ve been allowed evolve within it surrounded by different circumstances.

For Kathy, I think, she put it perfectly when she mentioned how lonely she is. We know that one of the main reasons Rich has been allowed to grow and develop is the fact that he was welcomed into this family and was surrounded by these people. Kathy has a lot of issues, not necessarily the same issues as Rich, but issues nonetheless. And maybe had she had the same nurturing environment that was allowed for Rich she could find a way to change and become better. The question is, does she want to? It seems that the concept of it is something that appeals to her, but then again, when she talks to Patterson after escaping, she tells them that they’re delusional.

Who knows what could be next for Kathy Gustafson, whether her love for chaos would overpower her inkling for good, if she’ll find the right environment to allow one to outgrow the other, or if she will continue to sway in the middle—one minute lending a hand to the good guys and the other minute dancing over the ashes of the city with the Madelines and Dominics of the world.

 Our team has been through so much, and they still haven’t gotten their lives back. But they just never, ever give up, especially not on each other. How are they staying strong, both individually and together, through this journey?

Y: All you need to know is that Patterson is not dead and she saves the world. Again.

Okay, maybe that’s not all you need to know, but it is at the core of what you need to know because William Patterson is alive! And if you think we’re happy about it, you should’ve seen how happy the team were! And if there was ever any doubt of how loyal this team are to each other, how supportive they are of each other, how far they’re willing to go to save each other, and how much stronger they are as a team, this episode denounces all those doubts.

First of all, the first of the double bill episodes gave us what will go down as two of the best reunions ever on Blindspot.

Maybe even three, because Afreen and Weitz’s discovery that Patterson is alive was just absolutely precious. Okay, maybe precious on Afreen’s end and absolutely adorably panicked on Weitz’s.

And then there are the reactions of both Tasha and Rich to Patterson being alive and nothing in the world could ever be so pure and also so heartbreaking. Tasha’s reaction made me smile and cry all the happy tears. But it was Rich’s quiet somber reaction that absolutely destroyed me. This man has come such a long way, and this relationship has grown to become one of the most honest and loving and genuine relationships on the show, and I am an emotional wreck.

Watching Patterson take full control to save her friends and to clear their names was a thing of magic. We know just how good she is. She has spent the last years proving day in and day out that she is the best. Simply the best. But it never ceases to amaze me when I watch her do her thing on screen. Seriously, my love for Patterson in this episode was almost all consuming that I cannot even bring myself to talk about things, you know, intellectually.

Patterson was her beautiful Patterson self. In the first episode she was everything we know she is. She survived the bunker explosion, found her way back to the US, saved Boston and then spent the day as the true leader that she is to get her friends out of lockdown and bring Madeline down. In the second episode, she again showed the true leader in her, and while I personally was on team Rich with regards to Kathy, I know Patterson did the right thing and that her decisions led to saving Boston and locating the ZIP. She displayed true leadership qualities, unparalleled empathy, and genuine belief in other people, in the concept that people can change and deserve second chances.

And at that she’s a much bigger person than I am.

L: Patterson isn’t our LeBron for nothing. She figured out how to survive the bunker explosion, rescue Boston, sneak into the FBI, save the team, and get the evidence they needed to stop Madeline. I’d appreciate her feats even more if I could stop crying for joy that she’s alive.

I am not going to lie; the reunions of the team members—especially when they realize Patterson is alive and well—are my favorite moments in these two episodes. And I honestly can’t decide which I loved more: Tasha’s “You are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen” or Rich’s heartfelt “Promise me you won’t ever do that again.” This team is a family, and there is nothing more painful than believing you’ve lost a member of your family. This team has been through so much and lost so much, and this week I am crying tears of joy right along with them that they didn’t lose Patterson, too. For the first (and only) time, I’m glad that this season is so short, because if it was longer, there probably would have been a Patterson-free episode in the middle of this arc, and honestly, I don’t know if my heart could have taken that.

I think the thing that struck me most about Patterson in these two episodes is how all-around smart she is. She’s computer smart, we all know that. And she’s pretty damn good at disguises. But she’s also people smart, as we see in her decision to trust Kathy. She refuses to lie to her, she yells at Rich when she realizes he is deliberately slowing Kathy down. Okay, maybe she should have known that Kathy was lying about the bomb at the end, but also... maybe she did know, and went with it anyway.

I think Patterson understands Kathy better than anyone else. As we saw in the conversation between Rich and Patterson in last week’s episode, it’s not always easy to be the smartest person in the room. It might make people respect you, but it doesn’t always win you a lot of friends. Being part of the FBI team gave both Patterson and Rich (and Boston) a circle of close friends who look out for them and love them for their eccentricities, not in spite of them. Kathy has never had that, and it has been clear in all of their interactions that she’s been desperately trying to find that same kind of family of her own. And Patterson knows that Madeline and Dominic played on Kathy’s loneliness to reel her into their nefarious plans. Patterson was manipulated by Borden in the same way that Kathy was manipulated by Dominic, so of all of them, she is the one most likely to understand Kathy’s perspective.

So in summary... Patterson is smart, but she’s also got a really big heart. And that’s one of the reasons why we love her so damn much.

Y: These guys have been through hell this season. It’s true that no season has been easy, but this year has just felt like it’s been so much harder. With the loss of Reade, the endless string of losses to Madeline, and all the bad luck they’ve faced, it’s a true testament to who they are that they’re still hanging in there, still fighting, refusing to give up and determined to do the right thing.

And no one has had a rougher season than Tasha. She’s really had to dig very deep to continue to find strength and purpose to push forward. She hasn’t found it easy to open up to her teammates, but still she’s leaned on them when she’s needed them, and not once did they abandon her or let her down.

But Tasha has really shined in the moments where she’s been on her own and in a head to head confrontation with someone else. And she has done especially good when she’s come up against Madeline. In the brief scenes of the interrogation that we did see, Tasha once again was just fantastic, resilient, strong, fearless and the perfect antithesis to Madeline, as much as Madeline would want to believe that she and Tasha are the same.

And as much as that last scene on the plane with Madeline frustrated me for how it ended with Madeline, it was great for Tasha in that she finally got to finish the case that has taken so much from her over the past two seasons and to finally stand victorious in front of the woman who has literally destroyed her life in so many ways.

I don’t know how much Madeline taking her own life will feel like a victory for Tasha or if she too will take it as a cop out—like everything she had gone through has gone to waste. But I also hope that Tasha can find some peace after all of this and feel like she’s been on the right side of this whole thing all this time and that her sacrifices have not gone to waste.

L: Oh, Tasha. There’s no surprise that Tasha was the first one on the scene to capture Madeline. Facing down Madeline might be Tasha’s most powerful moment in this entire series. Madeline took literally everything from Tasha. Her professional reputation, her career at the CIA, her friend and mentor in Keaton, even her best friend and the man she loved. And Madeline knew that and gloated about it. I am sure there is nothing more Tasha wanted than to slap the cuffs around Madeline’s wrists, and I’m angry again at Madeline that she did not get that moment.

And I’m not going to lie, I’m worried about where Tasha goes from here. I think she’s been able to avoid really thinking about Reade’s death or the fact that she’s carrying his baby by focusing on taking Madeline down. Now that she has... what’s ahead of her now? She’s lost Keaton, too, and any chance of returning to the CIA. Is there a place for her at the FBI? And if so, can she still fit in there, if she even wants to be in a place where everything reminds her of Reade?

When they were on the run, the team was just focused on stopping Madeline and magically getting their lives back. But now they are finally admitting that it might not be that simple. As Kurt says, “We didn’t do what Madeline framed us for, but we did do a lot of other things. And... Grigoryan, she doesn’t know us. And on paper, we don’t look so good.” Tasha isn’t the only one to worry about their future, but she’s the one I’m most worried about, because her place is the least clear of all of them. Patterson is back in the lab, where she belongs, and if Grigoryan isn’t smart enough to do everything in her power to keep her there, then she’s not smart enough to run the FBI. Kurt and Jane will be with Bethany and Allie and Conor, either in NYC or in Colorado. Whatever is ahead of them, they’ll face together. And I think Rich and Boston will be much the same, even if they do it from the flirty distance they usually do. But Tasha? Stay with your family, Tasha. You know they will be there for you. And really... kids are a lot of work, and it’s hard to find babysitters you can trust.

Y: If season five should be remembered for one thing, it should be how we got to see Rich Dotcom finally become the best version of himself. He’s found his purpose, found his heart, found his family, found his strengths, found his light, learned how to balance it with his dark and embrace all the parts of himself.

I’ve talked about this before, and I am going to do it again, and it’s how season five has more than once brought back people from Rich’s past and put them side by side with Rich to compare the two. These people have presented who Rich was and who he would have been now had he not found this team, and it’s been really great seeing that comparison and appreciating Rich’s journey more and more.

The second episode in the double episode did that with two people—Boston and Kathy. In some ways, Kathy represents the other extreme to what Rich has become. The taste for chaos and anarchy that is left unchecked and giving in to every impulse that Kathy displays versus how Rich has evolved until—much to his annoyance—he often finds himself the voice of reason.

And with Boston, the phone call between them in the beginning of the episode provides insight as to how Boston, while trying to find that path that led Rich to where he is, isn’t there yet. If Kathy is on one end of the spectrum, Boston still finds himself in the middle, struggling to give up some of his older habits as he tells Rich “we have to take care of ourselves.” To which Rich replies, “Yeah, but that’s all we’ve ever done,” indicating that for Rich, these older habits are things they have to learn to move on from.

Boston is still stuck in that mindset, while Rich has moved on and is in a place where he would never abandon his team even if he knows it will lead to something horrible.

Finally, one last thing… I think what made me the proudest I have ever been of Rich is how he’d forgiven Matthew. I cried, people, I totally cried.

L: Yeah, that scene got me right in the feels. And I think it’s significant, because, like Weitz, Rich certainly vacillated between being out for himself and being a team player. It makes sense that he is the hardest on Weitz, not just because he got sent to a blacksite, but also because he is measuring Weitz by the yardstick he uses to measure himself. We are always the least tolerant of the flaws in others that we struggle with in ourselves. It’s safe to say that no matter what happens in the finale, Rich Dotcom has officially completed his amazing character arc. He’s successfully transitioned from self-serving criminal to full-on FBI team player. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy being Rich DotTwo, with all this new self-awareness and a highly developed conscience.

I loved Rich’s speech to the team at the start of 5.10. “Sorry, just before anyone else says anything heroic, may I remind you that we’re still wanted criminals.” One part of Rich’s evolution is this new, adult way of looking at things. “Best case scenario, we get fired. Worst case? I’ve been there before, and I don’t exactly plan to go back.” He understands what’s at stake, and he knows that—of all of them—he’s the least likely to get a deal at the end of all of this. So honestly, I couldn’t blame him if he wanted to run. But the thing is, he doesn’t, because the second part of Rich’s evolution is his newly-discovered skill of self-sacrifice (which, yes, he totally picked this up from the team as Madeline describes, “These people have made falling on their swords into an art form.”). He can’t leave the team to see this through on their own, knowing that he could help, even when it means giving up on the idea of a future with Boston. When Boston tells him that they need to look out for themselves, Rich tells him, “Yeah, but that’s all we’ve ever done.” Being a part of this team is the first time he’s been part of something bigger than himself, and it’s the first time he’s gone out of his way to do the right thing just because it’s the right thing—and it’s even more poignant because of what he is giving up—the chance to run away and build a new life with Boston. And even if you’re not Rich, it’s a tough call—save the world or save your future with the person you love? But in this context, knowing how far Rich has come and how hard he’s worked to get to this point... It’s an impossible call, and I’m all the more proud of him for making it.

Y: One last, probably completely unnecessary note, but I cannot be the only one who freaked out when Ivy grabbed Boston’s hand to cut off his finger, right? Forget hacking, the man is an artist, and he needs those fingers!! Fortunately, she left him with nine so his art career isn’t ruined.

And I know I was a bit tough on Boston in my review, but I do love me some Boston Arliss Crab. Since his days of bantering with Patterson are over, I am glad we got to see some with Kathy. Josh Dean is really good at that. And he’s also good at many other things. His humor is fantastic, he has amazing chemistry with Ennis and with Ashley, and in these two episodes he really got to shine. It’s hard to believe that Boston is only a recurring character. It feels like he’s been part of the show for so long and such an integral part of it.

I just love them all so much and I am very emotional—and yes, I am writing this on the day of the finale, just hours before it airs, so I am extra emotional. If that is even possible.

 Like the rest of their team, Kurt and Jane go through a lot in these two hours of television, only to finish on a terrifying note. How do they tackle these challenges, both together and alone, and what do we think this means for their future?

Y: Was it just me or was Kurt extra barky in the second hour of this double episode? He just seemed a bit more growly than usual. And yes, I am talking about this to avoid talking about the… other thing.

There are other things I’m willing to talk about as well. Mainly all the awesome Kurt things that happened this week. Like the rest of the team, Kurt during the interrogation was as badass as we’ve known Kurt Weller to be. He was absolute fire, stubborn as hell, defiant, and so confident in his team. Honestly, that sequence was close to the most badass we have ever seen the team—all of them.

But I think the most badass Kurt scene is—not just in this episode but maybe in the history of badass Kurt moments—is him taking out six armed mercenaries on his way to rescue Jane. Excuse me, but what was that? I don’t know about you, but I cannot stop watching this scene, watching this man do literally the impossible to save his wife and become an entire army himself to get to her.

The Jeller reunion was quintessentially Jeller. It involved some badass fighting, trademark Jeller softness, and of course the adorable flirting during a life and death situation. This is our ship. This is the ship we’ve loved for five years.

And then there was Kurt’s reunion with Bethany. Sigh… that was just the purest thing ever and Little Bee is the most precious little girl ever. That scene melted my heart and soul and Bethany telling her dad to hurry back to her absolutely destroyed me. So I can only imagine what it did to poor Kurt.

L: One of my favorite Kurt Weller scenes in these two episodes is at the start of 5.10, when he stands in the middle of SIOC and basically announces that he doesn’t have any authority there anymore. He tells the gathered agents that the team is not there to take over. They are there to help... if they’re wanted. And he leaves the choice up to them. We’ve talked a lot about how different members of the team have shown leadership this season, and those examples have frequently contrasted with Madeline’s dictatorial style. And this moment showed us so much about what kind of a leader Kurt is. He doesn’t tell them what they should do. He lets them make that call. As we’ve mentioned before: Kurt Weller never asks anyone to take a risk that he wouldn’t take. And he respects the people who look to him for leadership. He asks for their input, he respects their opinions (even when they disagree with his own), and he gives them the choice of doing what their consciences dictate. In short, he is the exact opposite of Madeline and is the best leader that any of them could ask for.

And yeah, he’s also a devoted husband and father. We just really love Kurt Weller, okay??

Y: Oh! How could I forget to mention that scene in the opening of 5.10. That was… just beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Everything we love about Kurt Weller and then some. Seeing him standing in the middle of SIOC, in his natural born leader pose… it just makes me happy… and it’s such a perfect parallel to the scene in the Pilot as well. Yes, I know we have had several of those scenes, but that one from the Pilot really jumped at me.

Now… onto Jane… Jane, Jane, Jane...

Not to be outdone by her husband, who is willing to fight six fully armed men while he himself is not armed, Jane does the thing we all expected her to do—sacrifice herself for her team. I had a feeling Jane would do this. We know Jane. We’ve known her long enough to know that she would be the first to fall on her sword to protect everyone else. That’s what makes her Jane. That’s what we love about her. And I know that Madeline would not have honored the deal, but Jane really didn’t have much of choice and it’s so true to who she is that she would do that.

But sometimes Jane’s willingness to sacrifice herself to save those she loves can become a little too much and cause us a little too much pain. And I am still not ready to discuss this.

L: Jane’s self-sacrificing nature is simultaneously one of the things I love most about her and one of the things that makes me yell at my television screen like a crazy person.

We already know that Jane blames herself for, well, everything. And to some degree, she’s not entirely wrong. Her arrival in Times Square did put this story in motion. But that doesn’t mean it’s all her fault. The cases the team followed, the corruption they were fighting... all of that was already there, whether Jane showed up or not. If her tattoos hadn’t led the team there, something or someone else might have. There’s no guarantee that Shepherd—or even someone else—wouldn’t have put some other plan into action if Remi hadn’t returned from Afghanistan willing to join Sandstorm. And it’s not fair to blame her for the actions of others—for Oscar or Crawford or Madeline. And even if Jane can’t admit it, an awful lot of good came from her joining the team. All the criminals they put behind bars, all the evil plans they stopped, and all the innocent lives they saved. As Tasha put it, “Do you realize how many times this team has saved the world?”

But we know all of this has been weighing on Jane’s mind all season. And then we add in the weight of Patterson’s “death”; Patterson, who was the first person to welcome Jane to the team and who saved Jane’s life from her lab so many times out in the field. And finally, add the knowledge that Kurt will never get to be there to watch Bethany grow up, when Jane has already sacrificed her own happiness once before to ensure that Kurt would have this future. So it’s really no surprise at all that Jane is willing to accept all the blame for the team’s “crimes” in exchange for Madeline’s promise that the team will be treated fairly and sent to federal prison instead of an anonymous blacksite.

And similarly, it was no surprise at all that, when faced with the prospect of exposing Kurt to ZIP or taking all the risk herself, Jane would choose again to sacrifice herself. It’s who she is. It’s who she was as Remi—willing to sacrifice herself to stop the corruption they saw in the government—and it’s who she is as Jane. Like Kurt, she won’t ask anyone to take a risk that she won’t take, and if she has to sacrifice herself to save her husband or the rest of her family? Well, then there really isn’t a choice to be made.

Look, I am not worried about Jane. We know that Patterson has the stem cells and the cure for ZIP. Jane’s gonna be fine. Honestly, I’m a lot more worried about how Kurt is going to deal with Jane having her memory wiped.

Y: Okay, enough days have passed that I think I am ready to talk about that last scene in 5.10. If the elevator kiss in 5.08 was peak Power Couple Jeller, then the final scene of 5.10, with Jane in the world’s worst Escape The Room situation, is peak Epic Tragic Jeller. First from Jane’s perspective, this is such a Jane thing to do—sacrificing herself for the ones she loves. And that moment right there reminded me so much of 1.15, when Jane goes on the run to protect the team from Cade, and in the end when Kurt confronts her about it, and she asks him what he would have done in her place. And to that, Kurt replied that he would have done the same.

And he would have. In both situations, Kurt would have done exactly what Jane did.

And that is why these two will always be the most epic of ships—tragic, legendary, heartbreaking, a love story for the ages. As heartbreaking as that scene was, and what it sets up, and as nervous as it makes us going into the finale, it just seems right that Jeller get to go through something this huge in the finale. Every season finale has put Jeller through the impossible, so it is in typical Jeller tradition that the series finale puts them through even a harder final ordeal than ever before.

I don’t know what is going to happen. I am braced for the worst and hoping for the best. But what I do know is that this ship has for five seasons been perfect—well, almost perfect. They’ve made us laugh and cry and flail and swoon and cry some more and flail some more. They’ve been through everything—and put us through everything—and it’s only appropriate that at the end of the day they go through one final challenge that really tests who they are and who they’ve become and that beautiful bond between them.

I’m terrified and excited and scared and worried and at the edge of my seat.

And I have faith.

I have faith.

----------

Which brings us almost to the end of the fifth and final season of Blindspot. How has this season met your expectations? Is there anything that you need to see in the last episode? Come talk to our Ask Box. Or just come and wail about how much you love this show and don’t want it to end.

—Laura & Yas 

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: patterson #character: tasha zapata #character: rich dotcom #character: boston arliss crab #character: matthew weitz #character: madeline burke #character: ivy sands #ship: Jane/Kurt

[take2intotheshower]

Blindspot 30 Day Challenge - Day 4: Favorite Female Character (Main)

Patterson

"Shepherd tortured you, your boyfriend shot you, then tried to lethal injection you. I think you're entitled to a couple of sick days." (Tasha Zapata to Patterson) 

#Blindspot #BSHiatusProject #BS30DayChallenge #Patterson #Ashley Johnson #Sullivan Stapleton #Josh Dean #Boston Arliss Crab #Robert Borden #Ukweli Roach #favourite female character (main) #Blindspot gifs #Take2-BS2 #I was going to end with Patterson crying #but I decided she deserved to be happy

[crucif1x]

Blindspot + LGBT/minority representation

I got bored and decided to make a list of all the LGBT characters and how it's representative of all sorts of People on the show.

Canon LBGT characters:

- Cade, Gay

- Rich Dotcom, Pansexual.

- Boston Arliss Crab, Bisexual

- Sanjay Bonthala, Gay

- Eric Vance, Gay

- Julian Vance, Gay

- Sophia Varma, Lesbian

- Bethany Mayfair, Lesbian

- Alexandra, Lesbian

Other mentionable characters:

- Afreen, wears a Hijab

- Nas Kamal, grew up Hindu.

- Sam Kadkhoda. Played by Michelle Hendley, a trans woman. (Her gender was not mentioned, nor is it important but it's just nice to have a trans actress)

- Tasha Zapata has a book on Marriage Equality in her apartment

Misc:

There have been over 80 POC actors and actresses over the 3 seasons, as well as Hispanic and Latino actors and actresses. Many that have been lead characters/still are.

So basically. Blindspot could do better but it's still pretty good on the representation front.

Go watch it

#yall need to watch blindspot #lgbt shows #lgbt #representation #yes i counted all of those people on imbd

[has-the-moon-lost-her-memory]

So, after years of wanting but never actually doing it, this time I really wrote something! It's a Blindspot fanfiction, dedicated to Rich Dotcom, one of my favourite characters, and his relationship with Boston Arliss Crab.

Also it's in Italian, but I'm planning to translate it soon to English.

#blindspot fanfic #blindspot fanfiction #rich dotcom x boston arliss crab #rich dotcom #patterson #william patterson #boston arliss crab #rich x boston #my fanfiction

[captain-ogrodniczka-love]

Rich Dotcom vs. Boston Arliss Crab

You know what? I watched episodes 118 and 214 once again, and I have to say that more and more I like  Boston Arliss Crab and less Rich Dotcom.

Rich Dotcom is like a cartoon character. Funny but exaggerated to the limit.

He's almost unreal, and frankly less and less fit to the Blindspot.

Boston is funny in a very human way. We understand that this is only one side of his personality.

He also has a second, full of seriousness. He looks back and sees how else could have gone to his life.

I'm not saying he regretted the choices, but it is aware of them. And that, to me, makes him real.

Blindspot is not a comedy but  a very good crime drama.

So please - less Dotcom, more Crab.

#blindspot #rich dotcom #boston arliss crab

[more--than--anything]

Episode Review: "Just have a little faith, people." [S05E08]

So… can you dry your eyes long enough to work on this review?

Y: Excuse me, but how dare you?

L: I’m still dehydrated. This might be the first time ever that I really did not want to rewatch an episode. Or even think about it. In terms of fictional demises... Patterson’s is up there with Han Solo’s death on my list of “things I will never recover from.”

The case this week is two cases, actually, until… well, until it’s not a case at all. What exactly happened in those painful and intense 42 minutes?

L: Jane’s Cerberus tattoo shows up in a newspaper ad in three different cities: New York, Denver, and Cape Town; three towns where Jane has lived. The company in the ad doesn’t exist, but the tattoo decodes (sadly, we are not told how) to a secure FTP site, which contains a very complex, very processor-heavy digital puzzle that Patterson and Rich immediately start trying to crack.

But the tattoo is far from the only thing the team has to worry about. The tracker the Wellers placed on the cannisters of ZIP is moving, and Patterson and Rich locate it on a container ship heading across the Atlantic to the US. Even more worrying are the messages Ivy is sending to Madeline, “On the move. Ready to strike.” It looks like whatever Madeline is planning is going to happen soon. Trying to get ahead of the game, Rich hooks Kurt and Jane up with a ride on a cargo plane heading to the east coast with an unnamed friend of Rich’s in the “import/export business.”

Weller is still puzzling over the signal Allie gave in her interview. “Mission is a go.” He had assumed it was meant for him, but what mission? It would make more sense if she was signaling someone else, if she was working with someone to help the team and send them the tattoos. Tasha agrees that the timing would work out; the ads were placed after Allie’s press conference. Now that the team has received a third “message” from their mysterious friend, Patterson is able to figure out (again, sadly without a technical explanation) where the messages originated: Malta. The only person they know in Malta is Jake Keaton, who got exiled there by the CIA at the end of season four. He is a likely candidate to be helping the team, so Tasha sets out to pay him a visit.

Keaton confirms to Tasha that he sent the team the messages, helped by Allie and Boston. Boston went off the grid when the team rescued Rich, but he left the Cerberus puzzle with Keaton to release if one of them got caught. And Tasha tells Keaton that the team is tracking ZIP that Madeline is moving across the Atlantic to the US, where she plans to weaponize it. Before Tasha can tell him more, she realizes that his laptop camera is uncovered and pointed right at them. I love their last exchange: Tasha asks him how his family is—guessing correctly that Madeline is using them to control Keaton—and he confirms, “They’ve been better,” as they draw their weapons on each other. Tasha tries to help him, but they’re both trapped. Madeline bursts in, and Keaton tells Tasha, “Good luck,” before he tries take out Madeline and is shot himself in the process. Tasha doesn’t go down without a fight, but she ends the day in Madeline’s custody.

Patterson is still grinding away, trying to solve the Cerberus tattoo, without success. “Every time I solve one quadrant of this thing, the whole thing shifts and then it gives me another part to solve. It’s like it’s a... This puzzle is... toying with us.” She realizes with horror that longer they interact with the puzzle, the more hints at their location they are providing. And those hints have led Madeline and Ivy right to their door. Weller and Jane never make it out of the elevator; Ivy uses the local police to force them to surrender their weapons, knowing that they won’t kill cops to escape. Below them in the bunker, Patterson and Rich pack up to leave, setting bombs the server room to destroy any electronic evidence they leave behind. Unfortunately, there is no earth-shattering kaboom when Patterson flips the switch, so she has to go back to the server room to improvise a detonator timer out of her watch to trigger the explosives. Rich tries to divert Ivy’s team, but her goons get him, and under their gunfire, Patterson isn’t able to escape the server room before the detonator hits zero. And goddamn it, I will never be able to watch that scene without crying, but the whole sequence: flashing to the timer, to Rich, to Patterson mouthing “I’m sorry,” to the flames raining down behind the door, while the music drowns out everything but the sounds of my sobs... It’s horrible and awful and everything hurts, but it was so freaking well done. I’d say, “Bravo!” if I could get anything out besides sad dolphin noises.

This week delivers, by far, the biggest, most painful loss the team has ever suffered. Being captured by Madeline is bad. Losing Keaton as an ally and knowing that he betrayed the team rubs salt in the wound. But losing Patterson? There just aren’t words for this. This is a defeat that feels impossible to recover from. Madeline has won. And the thing that really gets me here is that this kind of all-hope-is-lost moment usually happens at the end of the penultimate episode of the season. But we still have three more episodes ahead of us. I’m happy we’re not quite at the end—because I will never be ready to say goodbye to our Tattoo Squad—but I’m also terrified because that means whatever is coming will be even worse before it (maybe) gets better.

But any way you look at it, this was a hell of an episode. It was masterfully cut from scene to scene, building intensity, and well, it also ripped my heart out, shredded it up, threw it on the floor, and stomped on the pieces. Well done, writers. You brilliant, unfeeling bastards.

Y: What is there to say here? I mean, Madeline found Keaton. Tortured enough intel out of him to be able to find the team. And then we cried. As far as how things have been going for our team, this week is the worst they’ve had since... forever? Four of them are in custody, one is dead, and their friends with means are locked up, in hiding, and dead. The only thing going for them is a lab tech and her not very trustworthy sidekick. Very very not good. Seriously, and I know it’s bad luck to say this, but can it even get any worse at this point? What are they gonna do? Shave Weller’s beard? Put him in another bad wig? I cannot handle any of this anymore!

It’s a good thing we watch the episode a few times before we properly start reviewing. The only thing I got from watching it live is the emotional impact, to be honest. It was such an intense and emotionally exhausting episode that it was really hard to pay attention to everything. But watching it a second time made me realize just how thematically heavy this episode was. And you know how I love a good thematically-rich episode.

Obviously most plot lines in this episode intersect, except maybe for what The Resistance was up to, but we try our best to break it up in a way that makes our lives easier and also makes it easier for you guys to keep track of our ramblings.

Anyway, everywhere you look in this episode you find one or two of these themes being tackled: the choices one makes and protecting one’s family. They’re not themes that are foreign to Blindspot, but this week they kind of take center stage.

These themes were ones almost every character had to deal with this week, and for the sake of this section, I just wanted to talk about Madeline Burke for a moment. It’s funny how we’re just coming off of Madeline making a very clear and controversial choice of zipping her own son, of choosing her mission over her child—over doing what should be the most instinctual thing for a mother to do. And this choice carries with her into this episode. It is a dark cloud that hovers her throughout the episode and it’s interesting how we see her try to project that guilt onto other people, mainly Tasha. What’s also interesting is comparing the choices that Madeline and Ivy for that matter make compared to the decisions that the team and their friends make, and for once on this show, the line between good and evil isn’t blurred.

I think the most important decision Madeline makes this week is to take the team in alive. We know she has no problem killing them—she did, after all, drone them in Iceland. I understand why she’d want the glory of being the one who captured them. But you know what, Maddie? This is one decision that’s going to come back to haunt you. You just arrested the four most dangerous people and you also killed their most precious Patty. I do not feel sorry for what they’re going to do to you.

L: We’ve been rooting for Madeline to get her comeuppance pretty much since the moment she arrived on our screens. But after this week... You know, I finally think I understand her hatred of the FBI after her father’s death. After watching what happened to Patterson—and then Madeline’s smug gloating about it—I think my hatred of her might be even stronger than her hatred of the FBI. And that’s good, because in a weird and twisted way, it’s helping me to relate to her.

Bad guys who are bad for the sake of being bad are boring. It’s the ones who are striving for a compelling goal, driven by some uncompromising motivation, that really get you invested in the battle to stop them. And similarly, a bad guy who is just bad is less interesting than one with a rigid, if somewhat inverted, moral code that they can’t compromise. That’s what made Shepherd such a great villain; she had horrible plans, yes, but she had this deep belief that she was actually helping to make the world a better place, and it meant she had to make hard sacrifices to reach that goal. All of which made her fascinating to watch on our screen.

For a long time, we struggled to understand what made Madeline tick. And because we didn’t really understand, it was hard to see her as the same kind of threat as Shepherd or even Crawford. Even after we learned about her father and how she blamed the FBI for his death, it was hard to translate that into something more than just distaste. But in the past few episodes, wow, she’s really turned the knob up to eleven.

Last week we saw an unprecedented degree of emotion from Madeline when she zipped Greg. And this week, we see even more. We see her dwelling on the trail of destruction she’s left in her wake. We see genuine fear when Tasha attacks her. And we see her replaying Tasha’s words in her head. “You zipped your own child. Was it worth it?” It’s not much by normal human standards, true, but it’s more than we’ve seen so far. Just as we root a little harder for a good guy who thinks about giving up before pressing on, a bad guy who falters for just a moment becomes that much more interesting to us.

Because it’s not just enough to bring Madeline down anymore. No, we need to see her know that she’s been beat. We need to see her recognize what it’s cost her. And we need to see her regrets, her recognition that it wasn’t worth the cost. It needs to be a defeat on absolutely every level, and it needs to be complete, without the slightest glimmer of hope left to her.

And honestly, after the crushing losses this week, focusing on that goal is what’s going to keep me (and the team, judging by their faces in the NYO at the end) going.

Y: One more thing I wanted to touch upon in this section is the choice of tattoo used in this episode. I think it’s safe to assume that this is the last tattoo the team is going to work on, and I love the choice of it being the Cerberus tattoo. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go too deep into Greek mythology and symbolism here, but it’s fun to consider these things, especially considering how important mythology has been to the show and how important visuals and graphics have been in the Blindspot universe.

Cerberus’s three heads are said to represent the past, the present, and the future—all of which are themes and topics that are essential to Blindspot’s narrative tools and mythology. And this tattoo, being the last one the team works on and ultimately being the key to their “demise,” is a powerful parallel to Cerberus being the final threshold and the last creature one encounters before crossing from one world to the other.

I’m sure there’s someone out there more equipped than I am to properly analyze all this, but in my humble understanding, I thought this was an interesting thing to bring up.

The Resistance is still resisting, even if they don’t exactly agree on how they should be going about it. How strong do we think their resolve is?

Y: You just gotta love The Resistance. For the most part they haven’t really been that successful, or at least they haven’t really been able to see the effect of their efforts, but they still try and try and try.

You also gotta love that this little resistance is made up of such an unlikely duo. Weitz, who for the most part has been a recurring character and generally an annoyance the team could never really get rid of. And then you have Afreen who up until last season was just a background character, and then just a bit part supporting character with a few lines every bunch of episodes. We didn’t really know much about her except that Patterson trusted her in the lab. Who knew she was such a total badass with an incorruptible moral compass and zero bullshit meter?

This week the Resistance gets access to Shirley’s computer and his database of bribery and blackmail. Because everyone has one of those on their desktop, right? After some back and forth, some banter, and some of Afreen’s trademark owning of Weitz, they decide that Afreen should corrupt the files to remove the leverage Madeline has on these people.

One of the best things about these two working together is that they cannot be more different in every aspect that matters, and Afreen has come out of nowhere to be the one person who can finally stand toe-to-toe with Weitz and really make him shake in his boots. Also, the chemistry between Aaron Abrams and Ami Sheth is just so good. Those two work so well off of each other, it’s almost magical. And they might be the C plot in the episodes where they appear, but they absolutely steal the show every single time.

Afreen is so morally incorruptible while Weitz is morally questionable. Afreen is driven by serving the greater good and doing the right thing, while Weitz flirts endlessly with what’s right and what’s right for him. Afreen has no tolerance for bullshit while Weitz… well I might be mistaken, but isn’t bullshit his middle name? Having these two work together is a stroke of genius by the writers.

Afreen is initially reluctant to work with Weitz. And then again reluctant to corrupt the files because it means she gives him an easy way out after finding out exactly what Madeline has on him. She’s so adamantly a champion of what’s right, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch, especially since she’s not a pushover. She puts her foot down and even though Weitz has the more senior job title, in this relationship, Afreen is the boss. And somehow, working with her has put Weitz’s redemption arc in high gear.

But the thing with Matthew is that… it’s always one step forward, ten steps back. He’s so infuriating. And after what just happened with Keaton, I really hope we don’t see Weitz relapse again. The good thing for Weitz is that he has Afreen there to kick his ass every time he screws up, something Keaton didn’t have. And Matthew Weitz just keeps getting all these second chances… but some day those second chances will stop coming and he will have to live with the last choice he made. So, Matthew… are you going to start making the right choices? Because we’re all really running out of time, and we need you to choose a side once and for all.

L: We are definitely seeing Afreen taking charge of Weitz in this episode, and words cannot express how much I love this. (At least one thing we didn’t see coming—this quirky partnership—is awesome, right?!) I love how she refuses to help him until he confesses all of his sins, all of the leverage Madeline has on him. She refuses to give him copies of Madeline’s blackmail files, telling him point blank that she thinks he’s just going to use them himself. And then she tells him to go get her a cup of coffee (and a blueberry scone!) while she works on corrupting Shirley’s files. And the best part of all of this is that Weitz—who is smarmy and self-serving but not stupid—realizes that he’s lost control of this situation and follows her lead. Weitz is many things, but he’s not a leader. He’s smart and able to figure out the right angle to make a situation work out to his benefit—whether he’s building a case against Mayfair or working his way in the directorship of the FBI—but he’s always struggled with assuming responsibility and giving direction to others.

Afreen is both lab-smart and people-smart, and she really understands what makes Weitz tick. “I know you want to be the kind of person that does the right thing. I just still don’t know if you will.” Because she understands him so well, she’s able to anticipate what he might do and cut him off at the pass—whether that is preventing him from using Madeline’s blackmail files for his own benefit or stopping him when he’s about to run away. In times of stress, we tend to revert to what is easiest and most familiar, and for Weitz, that is definitely covering his own ass. But Afreen won’t stop pushing him to be the better person that she knows he could be. Maybe it’s not quite as effortless as the team inspiring Rich to mend his crooked ways, but so far, it’s still been pretty effective. And I loved the way this played out in our second slow-motion, music-swelling scene of this episode, when Madeline and Ivy bring the team back into the NYO. Even though the team is mostly expressionless, you can see the panic and helplessness on Weitz’s face as they are paraded past. He truly believed that they were eventually going to succeed and return triumphant to take down Madeline, which would take the pressure off him to step up and save the day. But now that he knows they won’t, that he (and Afreen) are the only ones who are still able to stop Madeline. Your move, Matthew.

As much as I love the way Afreen seems so much braver than Weitz, I do want to note that she doesn’t have quite the same perspective he has. She’s aware that Madeline killed both Briana and Susan Shah, but she wasn’t there when Madeline cold-bloodedly gunned Briana down. There is a difference between being aware that something happened and experiencing it firsthand the way Weitz did. She is able to react to the threat Madeline poses intellectually. Weitz, on the other hand, has a far more visceral response. He’s reacting from his gut, his human instinct for self-preservation urging him to flee the impending danger. As much as I want to smack him and tell him to toughen up, I can’t entirely blame him for his all-too-human failings here.

But I am also even more worried now for Afreen. Everything she’s done up until now has been kind of behind-the-scenes, with no digital trail. Madeline might have her suspicions about Afreen, but nothing that she can prove. But breaking into Shirley’s computer from inside the NYO... where we know Madeline has every inch under surveillance... Afreen just stuck her neck out, and we know Madeline won’t hesitate to chop it off the second she figures out what Afreen was up to. Honestly, I kind of wish Weitz had turned the tables and convinced Afreen to leave town with him!

I also want to point out the tiny arc we see in Afreen in this episode. We see her begin to take charge of the lab, to assume control of it rather than just hold it until Patterson returns. She is rearranging the furniture—and clearing out the lab at lunchtime to work on special projects with Weitz. Which makes the moment at the end, when Madeline almost gleefully announces Patterson’s death to the lab team, even more poignant. No matter how much Afreen might have wanted to be in charge of the lab, we know that these are not the conditions under which she would have wanted it to happen. Turning the screens dark is such a quiet but powerful way to pay tribute to the person whose lab this truly was... That moment of data silence in Patterson’s honor once again makes me cry all the tears.

Y: Oh! The team’s return to the NYO! I cannot believe I almost forgot to talk about this! I realize I’ve said this about practically half the scenes I’ve talked about but this one is the absolute best. Seriously, probably one of my favorite sequences in Blindspot—the way it was shot and edited, the music, the close ups, the acting—everything was so good. Not a single word was spoken but so much emotion just burst through the screen. It was so chilling and menacing and heart breaking. Everyone involved did an absolutely spectacular job translating this momentous scene from paper to screen. From the smug look on Madeline’s face, to the terrifying death glare that never leaves Ivy’s face, to the shock on Weitz’s, the heartbreak on Afreeen’s, and then the pure rage on every single member of the team. And it’s impossible to forget that not only have they been arrested after fighting so hard against these false accusations, but they’re only a few hours into learning about Patterson’s death.

I hate this show.

In the last episode, two members of the mysterious group that has been secretly helping the team were unveiled. This week, we learn more about what they’ve been up to. How much help can the team hope for now?

L: Weller was right when he guessed that Allie was signaling someone else to continue the mission. And we were pretty excited when we learned that it was Keaton. But I’m even more excited now that we’ve gotten their “origin story.”

It’s no secret that we adore Allie, and finding out that she is essentially the ringleader of our band of renegades, recruiting both Keaton and Boston to her team, wasn’t really all that surprising. Allie has always been as strong as they come. She’s smart and she’s determined. And this is her family that’s at stake. Kurt may be a “mama bear” when it comes to protecting his “cubs,” but Allie is a literal mama bear. Her daughter’s happiness and safety are at risk, and Allie isn’t about to let Madeline destroy her family.

And this team just makes so much sense: Keaton has access to CIA intel but can’t move around. Boston has the tech skills to plant puzzles that will catch the team’s notice but can’t be easily cracked by their enemies. And Allie knows all about how to stay off the grid and escape the attention of law enforcement. (I especially loved the revelation that Allie was the one to trigger the screens in Times Square!) They really are an espionage dream team.

Y: One of my absolute favorite parts of the episode was the flashback we got to how the little group of vigilantes was formed. It’s no secret that the three people involved in it are among my favorite on the show, and I was still reeling from the reveal from last week. Although it didn’t end the way I would’ve wanted it to end, it was still a satisfying storyline in the episode because it was so well done.

Of course, I’m going to start with Allison Knight because Allison Knight is the absolute best. That’s a scientifically proven fact. I had no doubts that she’s the one who started all this and seeing her go straight into action just seconds into watching the news report on tv makes me love her even more. Allie is so fiercely protective of her family, and her loyalty to them and her faith in them is unwavering. It’s a joy to watch. I also sighed in relief to know she made sure Bethany (and I’m assuming Conor) is safe during all this.

Allie goes straight to Keaton which is a decision that does make a lot of sense. He’s worked with the team and knows that all these accusations are a lie. She knows he is good at his job and will be able to get access to information they need. And Allie being Allie, she doesn’t need to long to convince him.

Next is Boston, who in these few months has apparently become quite the successful artist and enjoying that life. But Boston is still Boston and we know he loves a good adventure. He also loves Rich and cares about this team a little bit, even if he won’t admit it. And given the chance to do some hacking and designing a theatrical event in Times Square? You know Boston will jump right on that!

L: The tattoos—and the complicated puzzles they represent—are the backbone of this show. They are artistic, challenging, and chock full of secrets. And let’s be real, they aren’t something that the average person, or even an above-average person like Allie or Keaton, can duplicate. Boston is one of the few characters on this show who can go to toe-toe with Patterson and Rich, and he might be the only one who can design tattoo references that only they can decode. So it makes complete sense that he would be the one to design these hidden messages.

I’ll admit I am still puzzling over the last tattoo, though. Keaton tells Tasha that Boston gave it to him and told him to release it if one of them got caught. But the tattoo is a trap that leads Madeline to the team. So either Keaton was lying about Boston designing it, or he was lying when he said that he didn’t know what it meant. If it was a trap that Madeline set, then someone on her team must have designed it. But who on her team has the technical savvy (and sheer geekiness) to set a trap to catch Patterson? Up until now, Ivy’s team has mostly seemed like just hired muscle. A trap like this would be far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen them do thus far. So it’s more likely that Boston designed it and Keaton was Keaton lying to Tasha when he said that he didn’t know what it did. He knew it would allow someone to pinpoint the team’s location, and he told Madeline about it so she could use that information to capture the team. But in that case, what did Boston plan to use it for? And will its use draw him out of the woodwork (pretty please!) in the next episode?

Because, let’s face it, we need a superhero—or at least a skilled hacker—to sweep in here right now.

Y: That’s a pretty interesting question you ask… honestly I hadn’t thought about it much watching the episode—I was too busy stuffing chocolate into my face hole—but now that I do it’s worth contemplating. I don’t think the show is going to give us much of an answer but if I may venture a theory, I think that Boston did design it and he designed it to do just that. And they all knew what it does. Keaton said it was designed to be released when one of them gets captured.

I think in such a case, the other two would be compromised or in danger of being caught themselves. They knew that was a possibility and if it happened then they too would need to go on the run. But they would also still want to help the team. So maybe Boston designed it so that they could track down the team’s location so that the remaining members of this little group could join them. I don’t know… it seems a bit of a shaky theory, but I cannot see Boston purposely designing it to sabotage the team.

Speaking of sabotaging the team… let’s talk about Keaton now.

What sets Allie and Keaton apart in this group is that they both work for the government and the stakes are that much higher for them but so is the motive, the desire to set things straight because they’re entangled in this mess of corruption. Their entire careers and lives have been part of this, and moving forward they will be defined by how this unravels and their role in it.

Allie’s choices are clear and straightforward. She will protect her family—all of her family—no matter what. This includes Bethany and Conor, and it also includes Kurt and Jane and the others. We saw her last week, just how badass she is, and saw how she managed to do both. This is a woman whose moral compass is as straight as can be. Also, she’s totally the most awesome character in like... ever.

Is my Allie bias showing? Good. Because Allie deserves all the unabashed admiration that she can get.

As for Keaton, his situation, his journey and his character, while they bear some similarities to Allie’s, are also different. And the juxtaposition of Keaton’s choices with Allie’s from last week—and also for that matter Kurt’s for the past few episodes—explains why things ended the way they did for Jake. And I’m not going to lie, the Keaton stuff in this episode absolutely destroyed me. I’m a huge fan of Keaton and the journey the writers put him on and how they’ve taken a character we first met as Jane’s torturer and turned him into someone the team consider an ally and at least one team member considers a friend and see him go as far as betray his country to help them.

Which is why it was so hard watching this episode. A part of me just knew in that opening scene of someone being tortured that it would be Keaton. I don’t know why but I just did. And the poetic justice in all this has not gone over my head. The first episode we see him, Keaton is torturing Jane. And in the last episode we see him, Keaton is being tortured because of… well… Jane and the rest of her team. Can we count this as Keaton having paid for what he did to Jane? That it’s all come full circle?

I really feel horrible for Keaton. When we find out that he’s filming his meeting with Tasha and streaming the video to Madeline and essentially betraying the team, I felt a dagger go through my chest because this one really hurt. Keaton has come a long way and for the most part even though he and team never really saw eye to eye on most things and liked to be thorns in each other’s sides, he was always more or less on the same side as them. And that dynamic always worked. They didn’t especially enjoy working with him and he felt the same way but still, they always did for the greater good and it was always a good thing.

So that’s why when we found out he’s betraying the team I wanted to absolutely cry. But then we found out why he was doing that—what Ivy and Madeline had done to him and then Madeline having his family—and I wanted to cry some more. From the moment we truly started get to know Keaton, we’ve known that his daughter and his wife are his pressure point. And here’s where the parallel to both Allie and Kurt comes in. Keaton had a choice to make and he picked the one that he thought would protect his family. And for him, that was not really a choice because Madeline didn’t give him much of that. I mean, who wouldn’t make the choice that Keaton made in his situation?

Well, Kurt and Allie wouldn’t… but that doesn’t make me judge Jake honestly because he doesn’t have the faith and the support system that those two have. Allie had the advantage of knowing Madeline couldn’t touch her family. I have no idea where she’s hidden Bethany and Conor, but if anyone knows how to hide people, it’s Allie. And what Keaton also doesn’t have in this situation is the support system that Kurt has—essentially Jane. We saw Kurt come close to abandoning the mission and taking the risk of going after Ivy to try and negotiate and exchange for Allie in last’s week’s episode. And he probably would’ve done that if Jane had not been by his side to talk him out of it and promise him that there is another way of doing this. Keaton didn’t have any of that. He just had the “help us or we kill your family” choice and he did what any father put in this situation would do.

I really hate Madeline for doing this to him. To all of them but you know, in this situation… she made Keaton have his last act be one of betrayal to the team. And honestly, Keaton doesn’t have the same experience with her as the team does. And Tasha is right when she says that there was no win for him in this. All Keaton had was Madeline’s word that helping her meant protecting his family. But you know he regretted it. You could read it all over his face in the last scene with Tasha. And it was so heartbreaking for both of them. These two had become close friends and to have things go down like this was hard to watch.

And watching Keaton spend most of this episode with Tasha reminded me of the season 2 finale, the first time those two really spent time together, and made me think of just how far they’ve come from then, and how far Keaton has come… We’ve said goodbye to a lot of characters this season—some main characters and some supporting—and as far as the latter category goes, this was absolutely the hardest to deal with, because it was not just the fact that Keaton died but how it all went down and how in the end he still tried to do the right thing despite everything.

Jake Keaton has had one of the most interesting arcs on this show. It may have been turbulent and unconventional and controversial and divisive, but dammit it was good. And now he is gone. And I am sad.

L: I am too.

Like you, somehow I knew that was Keaton when we saw Ivy torturing someone at the start of the episode. Maybe it’s because of the irony: In the first scene in the first episode where we see Keaton, he is the torturer, and in the first scene in this episode, he is being tortured. I can’t decide what applies better here: “What goes around comes around” or “Live by sword, die by the sword.” I’m gonna go with the second, because if there is one thing that we’ve learned about Keaton over the years, it’s that he’s a company man. He didn’t torture Jane because he took pleasure in it; he was trying to do his job, protecting the security of the US from someone who posed a threat to it. He worked hard at his job for his country and for his family. Even though we didn’t like some of his actions, we couldn’t argue with his motives.

And I agree, to see his arc come to such an abrupt end in this fashion really hurt. He was a good ally when he worked with the team, and he tried to help the team while they were on the run. We can clearly see that he didn’t want to betray Tasha and the team, but with his family’s safety on the line, he made the only choice he could. And in the end, he chose to try to help Tasha, to kill Madeline, knowing that he was signing his own death warrant. And I suppose that’s our only consolation. In his last moments, he chose to go out a hero, trying one last time to help the team. And that’s how we’ll have to remember him, I think.

I’m angry at Madeline for what she did to him, but I’m also weirdly angry that we weren’t able to really process and mourn his loss before it was overshadowed by another. I can’t handle so many traumas so close together!

The team collectively and individually faced what was probably the worst day of their lives. I mean… it was pretty tough… there is no other way of putting it without bursting into tears. Where does this leave them, both individually and as a group?

L: I’m just gonna rip the bandaid off and start with Patterson. Oh, William. I can’t even think “Patterson” without tearing up. And I will say, again, that the scenes leading up to her death were just amazing. The writing, the cinematography, the music, and of course, Ashley Johnson’s performance. It was so incredible. And I sincerely hope I never ever sit through another scene like that again, because my poor little heart just couldn’t take it. I completely broke down and sobbed. And I’ve cried every time I’ve rewatched the episode. And once we’re done this review, I might never be able to watch this episode again, unless I need to donate tears for some unknown cause.

And it’s not just that scene. Everything that leads up to that point hints at what is to come, even though we don’t want to go there. It starts with the unveiling of this week’s tattoo. The team is... not enthusiastic enough to suit Patterson. “Come on, people. I get it. You have a lot on your minds, but... these are the tattoos. We used to love these.” In all likelihood, this is the last tattoo the team will solve together, and it feels like the writers are using Patterson to draw attention to this moment, so we can say goodbye to the tattoo squad as group, too.

And the goodbyes continue as Patterson sees each team member off on their respective journeys. She hands each of them a little Tamagotchi-like digital pet to take care of. She tells Tasha to tap its nose to show it affection, and Tasha taps Patterson’s nose in response. She gives Weller his and tells him that he’s “like a mama bear, anyone who gets between you and your cubs will get torn to shreds” (and because he’s scruffy). We know how fierce Weller has gotten when something’s happened to Patterson or his other “cubs” in the past (and we see him break down when Rich tells him that Patterson didn’t make it out). Jane tells Patterson, “I was just thinking about how you push buttons to look after us. We’re kinda like your virtual pets.” Weller agrees and thanks Patterson for all the times she’s kept them alive out in the field. And then Patterson tells Rich—with all sincerity—“You are the best hacker I know. And you’re a pretty awesome person, too.” If she were to have a deathbed scene, it seems like these are all the things that Patterson would say to the team, and they would say to her.

I’m trying to find some comfort in the idea that they did get to say their goodbyes, even if they didn’t realize that’s what they were doing at the time.

But the internet loves nothing more than a good conspiracy theory, and the second this episode ended, it lit up with people insisting that Patterson must have survived. In the interest of full disclosure, I am reluctant to get on this train because I just can’t bear to get my hopes up only to have them dashed to pieces, but even I must admit that there are a few clues we could cling to.

Patterson is the team’s tech goddess, and a lot of my hopes rest on tech. The first gadget of hope is the Beaconer device they got from Ice Cream that they’ve been using to follow Madeline and Ivy’s communication. When Patterson and Rich are clearing out the bunker, she puts it in her bag, and it’s with her in the server room at the end. “We need to protect this device at all costs. Intercepting her private messages will be the only thing we have to take her down.” If Patterson is alive, then the device is still operational and in her possession, and the team still has an edge over Madeline. (More importantly: Tasha didn’t tell Keaton about the device, so Madeline doesn’t know that Patterson is spying on her.)

And then there are the little digital pets that Patterson gave every member of the team. They’re not just adorable; they are her way of contacting the team. Sure, Ivy’s goon squad probably patted the team down and took all of their weapons and personal effects when they brought them in. But then again, they aren’t real, trained FBI employees, so it’s possible that they just collected the obvious weapons and left their 1990’s keychain toys alone. Imagine one of those little gadgets chirping at the team and giving them all equal shots of shock and hope. “This is gonna tell you what your next move is,” Patterson said to Tasha. And man, I’m not gonna lie, I very much want that to be true.

And then there is Patterson herself. “This is not over,” she says to Rich as she stuffs the Beaconer into her bag, followed shortly by “I always have a plan B.” She tells Rich tunnels are full of “refuge spots” in the event of a cave-in. Some of them were filled in, but others remain. It is possible that there was one in the server room; even if it didn’t go all the way to the surface, if it had a solid door between her and the explosion, it could have provided enough shelter to shield her from the blast. “There is nobody I have more confidence in in the entire world than you, including me,” Rich tells her. If there was a way out of that room, Patterson would be the one to find it.

“Just have a little faith, people,” Patterson tells the team while she’s working on the puzzle. And “having faith” and “taking a leap of faith” have been ongoing themes this season. And if Patterson wants us to have a little faith in her....

Well. Who are we to argue?

Y: Did you really have to start with Patterson? I was hoping we would keep her until the end and then I could distract you with chocolate and Jeller gifs until you forgot about it.

You know what’s funny? That whole entire scene felt like such an out-of-body experience for me. I still remember watching it, remember what I thought while watching it, and remember what I felt what watching it. And I never knew the true meaning of denial until then. I have to admit I didn’t cry, because I didn’t believe it was happening. I just couldn’t understand what was happening on the screen. Because how can any of it make any sense? This is Patterson. Patterson. Our Patterson! Our MVP. Our LeBron. This cannot happen. This isn’t happening.

And the denial continues to be strong.

I’ve read all the analysis and theories and the intellectual breakdown of hints and clues of how Patterson could’ve survived, and I hope they’re right, that somehow she did. But all I feel is numb. I don’t know… I’m clinging to the fact that Patterson always has a plan B and that we didn’t see a body. On Blindspot, we’ve learned that if we don’t see the body post explosion then there is a chance the exploded person could have survived.

And here’s the thing. Remember the last time this happened? Yeah, it was Borden. We all assumed he died in that explosion, and then he showed up again very much alive. It would be quite the parallel if the same thing happens with Patterson, given the connection between the two characters. We already saw the same thing with Keaton—torturing Jane in his introduction to the show and then being tortured himself in his exit from the show. It would be a nice touch if Patterson pulls a Borden on us and returns to save her family.

Because let’s face it, at this point, the only way the team can get out of this is if they have someone on the outside with Patterson’s IQ helping them out. Jane and Kurt’s comments about Patterson protecting them from behind her computers and keeping them alive has to be some sort of foreshadowing… actually all those moments with the virtual pets, with Tasha and Kurt and Jane, with Rich later in the bunker… those were not goodbyes. They couldn’t be.

And this is why Patterson cannot be dead. But also because it’s Patterson and I am still rowing down The Nile and refusing to accept it.

And also, they wouldn’t do that to Bill Nye, would they?

Can we stop talking about Patterson now and talk about someone else? Can we talk about Rich for example? Rich and his beautiful journey of redemption and becoming the heart and soul of the team?

This week, Rich was once again all of this. He brought his usual brand of humor to lighten things around the bunker. He also pulled his weight in solving this week’s case by getting in touch with one of his friends and securing a covert flight back to the States for Jane and Kurt, and when things got really bad, he was, again, incredible. Both conversations between Rich and Patterson are probably my favorites in this episode. I guess the emotional impact was bigger because shit was hitting the fan when they happened, unlike with Tasha or Jane and Kurt, when it was a routine tech briefing before heading out.

The best part of Rich’s speech was the amount of self-realization in there. We saw a bit of it last season when Jane came back from her Remi phase and she had that moment with Rich in the van. And we saw more of it here. A huge part of Rich’s redemption has relied on him owning up to his past and identifying his mistakes and learning from them and realizing what parts to hold on to and what parts to change.

And that has given us one of the best characters ever, which remains true to his essence but allowed him to grow and learn and evolve and become so self-aware that he has the freedom and intelligence to really make himself who he knows he deserves to be.

And finally, we have to give Ennis credit to how he played those scenes when the thermite went off and he watched Patterson disappear in the flames and when he’s thrown into the military vehicle with Jane and Kurt. He absolutely destroyed me. I don’t think we’ve ever seen Rich so broken, so absolutely destroyed that he cannot even speak. Dammit, he was just so good, and his pain and heartache just exploded through the screen.

L: My god, yes. Ennis destroyed me in those scenes. I was in shock and denial about what was happening on my screen, but his reaction was so visceral that it just forced you to accept what you didn’t want to.

And I agree; those two definitely-not-goodbye scenes between him and Patterson, when they admitted how much respect they have for each other, while also saying without words how much their friendship means to each of them? Man. Those choked me up almost as much as that scene-I-want-to-forget.

So let’s move on to Tasha, who is having the second-worst day on the team. We talked a lot about Keaton and his arc, but we can’t ignore Tasha’s role in that journey. Just as we saw the team inspire Rich and even Weitz, Keaton went from viewing them as competition to being a fan of theirs, too. So much so that he recruited Tasha to work with him, his own way to try to produce the kind of results that the team made seem so effortless.

Tasha worked so closely with Keaton, and she trusted him implicitly. When she wanted to abort the undercover mission with Madeline, he urged her to stay the course. He had faith in her, and she worked hard to live up to that. While she was with the CIA, he was her whole team. And so finding out that he’d betrayed her and then losing him like that? It’s not quite as painful as losing Reade, but it’s damned close.

And then she has to listen to Madeline gloat about it. “Everywhere you went, you left bodies behind... Your NYPD partner, and then your FBI partner, and now your CIA partner.” Of all of Madeline’s lines, this is the lowest blow, and the most painful, because it’s not false. We learned in 1.19 that Tasha’s partner at the NYPD was shot and killed while they were responding to a domestic disturbance. She’s lost her FBI partner (and Madeline is again right, Reade was much more than that), and now Keaton. We know Tasha already blames herself for Reade’s death and for her NYPD partner’s death. There is little doubt that she will hold herself responsible for Keaton’s death as well. If she hadn’t accepted his offer to move to the CIA, if she hadn’t come to Malta to see him today... Logically, we know that the responsibility for Reade’s and Keaton’s deaths lies solely with Madeline, but we know it’s not so clear in Tasha’s heart. “I don’t know what’s worse, the grief or the survivor’s guilt,” as she says to Keaton. Tasha was as much a victim of Madeline’s plans as they were, but it’s not something she would be able to admit, knowing that she is walking around when they no longer are.

And it’s the contrast between these two extremes, between Tasha and Madeline, that plays out over Keaton’s dead body. Tasha has no defense against Madeline blaming her for these deaths, because she accepts all blame, even for things that were outside of her control. But when she confronts Madeline about zipping her own child, Madeline responds, “You left me no choice.” Madeline blames her own actions on others, while Tasha blames herself for the actions of others. One shows great heart and character... and the other is a psychopath.

We haven’t seen Tasha take any real action with regard to her pregnancy, either embracing it or deciding not to go through with it. In some ways, her inaction is a decision of its own; after a certain point, there is only one outcome left. To be fair, she’s also on the run for her life, so it’s certainly not as easy as scheduling a prenatal appointment at the local health clinic. But as tough as nails as Tasha is, we know how fiercely protective she is of her family, and there’s no question that she would be even more so for a child of her own. And we see that in her abject horror when she discovers that Madeline zipped her own son. Look Tasha, motherhood is hard, yes, but this is a pretty low bar to beat. Without even trying, you’ll be better at parenting than Madeline!

Y: Tasha’s line about the virtual pet being for baby practice and then saying that she knows they have to be fed is one of the best lines of dialogue on this show ever. And Audrey’s delivery was just so perfect.

It worth mentioning that the way the team breaks up in this episode puts Tasha on her own. I know as an odd numbered group, this could always be the case, but it was relevant this week because her outing puts her in two head-to-head confrontations with two people who have had such an important role in her life. And both Tasha and Audrey are so good in both those confrontations.

With Keaton, even though he eventually became an ally to the team, he wasn’t so at first. And one of the first things he did was recruit Tasha to the CIA and cause that rift between Tasha and the FBI team. Her relationship with Reade was strained for a long time after that, and her relationship with Patterson was never the same again. Don’t get me wrong, Tasha is as much a member of this family as anyone else, but for a while Keaton’s presence in her life strained her other relationships.

And then her undercover op with Madeline really pulled her away from the team for a while and even upon returning she had a hard time finding her place again. So it seems right that she went on this mission alone and faced these two people on her own. Her realization that Keaton was betraying them was so sad to watch. For a minute, she allowed herself to hope that maybe this group of people helping them can really make a difference. And what made it harder was that she was opening up to him on personal stuff. We know how hard this is for Tasha. She never talks about her feelings, and to let her guard down like this only to get burned is heartbreaking.

L is spot on in her analysis that Tasha blames herself for everything. And the guilt she’s carrying around has to be crushing her. And this made the confrontation between Tasha and Madeline that much better. Of all the team, Tasha is the most ruined by Madeline—the months she spent with her were brutal, emotionally and psychologically and socially and professionally. Tasha was forced to do things and witness things that were unbearable and then after all that, after believing she finally got her, Madeline turned all the tables on them and sent the team running for their lives and costing Reade his.

The conversation about the track of destruction was so poignant. It drew a parallel between both women, but also placed them on the extreme ends of the spectrum. And that parallel was further highlighted by how both women perceive their path of destruction. Tasha carries all the responsibility and the guilt even though none of it is hers. And Madeline is so devoid of any feeling of guilt or responsibility and somehow manages to project responsibility onto others.

In many ways, everything that happened this week with the team played the role of emphasizing that they’re the good guys. Every choice they made served as a reminder that they’re the good guys.

But in the end—at least the end of this episode—they lose. A bleak representation of the real world, I’m afraid, but since this is tv and shows provide a good platform to provide hope in a miserable world, let’s just cross our fingers that the last chapter of this story is one that gives us an alternate view.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the fact that we didn’t see Tasha react to the news that Patterson’s dead or that she has lost her two best friends in a span of three months.

Jeez, this turned pretty dark from me. I’m sorry.

Here, think of Tasha boop-ing Patterson’s nose instead.

Boop.

Just like their team, Jane and Kurt were faced with a couple of impossible decisions this week, but those two will go on fighting until the bitter end, right? Right?

Y: In a fangirl’s lifetime, they would be lucky to get one or two ships—maybe three if their stars align properly—that will bring them endless joy and manage to fulfill all their shipping heart’s desires. Jeller is one of those ships for me. It hasn’t been without its hiccups, but dammit going into the finale chapter, it’s everything I could have ever wished for or imagined.

As intense as this episode was, somehow Jeller managed to give us a handful of their trademark sweet little moments that they always know how to steal in the madness. They also gave us one of their typical epic moments—the kind that goes down as a ship-defining moment. And at the end of the day they threw in the ultimate power couple “you just messed with the wrong people” look.

It was once again one of those episodes where we cannot separate Jeller in the review because they were glued together the whole time. I mean other than their entrance to the interrogation room, there was only one scene where they weren’t together, when Kurt was talking to Tasha.

Jeller once again give us a standard to aspire to in their relationship in the way they support each other and the way they find a balance and open dialogue all the times. They both have different opinions as to how to move forward and when Kurt decides that Jane’s course of action—heading to the east coast to stop the ZIP—is the right one, Jane starts to question the decision herself. But then all it takes is for Kurt to tell her to go with her gut—because he trusts her gut more than his own. That element of trust and honestly and codependency is what makes those two such an amazing couple.

I absolutely loved the moments they shared with Rich and Patterson. The comedy with Rich is always a treasure and we’ve gotten to a point in their relationship with Rich that his idiosyncrasies are no longer a thing of annoyance. Rich asks a question that should stop any sane person in their tracks. “Are you allergic to any endangered animals?” And to that, Kurt just shrugs and carries on. It’s a nice little nod to the fact that they’ve accepted Rich for who he is and just embrace him and love him for it.

And then the scene with Patterson. Jeller pretty much calls her their guardian angel. She urges them not to die. And before all that she gives us the best possible description of Kurt that could ever exist. Kurt’s the mama bear who’ll protect his cubs no matter what.

And Jane is the flamingo. The elegant and striking creature that is surprisingly fierce and resilient.

The moment Jeller shares in the military vehicle where Jane seeks comfort and reassurance and Kurt offers it via reminding her of who their team is—assuming in that moment that Tasha, Rich and Patterson are still out there. The trust and faith they have in their family is a beautiful thing.

Obviously, my favorite moments in the episode with these two occur when they’re stuck in the elevator. First, Jane stating that they won’t kill cops is a testament to who these guys are. It’s such a simple line, but it is right at the core of who they are. And it once again emphasizes a major running theme. There’s a good side and a bad side. The choices you make define where you stand. It was evident with Keaton and still ongoing with Weitz. So pick carefully because the lane you end up in defines your legacy.

And speaking of legacy, it seems Jeller are going for being the ultimate power couple and battle couple. And I mean, I don’t see that many couples even coming close. That kiss in the elevator with their hands on their weapons, poised for battle, ready to go down fighting for what’s right, declaring their undying love for each other and heading into battle with all the trust in each other and devotion to each other.

Excuse me but they’re the worst.

And if they don’t get their happily ever after... I guess I’ll be resigned to the fact that there isn’t justice in the world.

L: Speak for yourself. I will be angry on a level that will make Game of Thrones fans seem “mildly perturbed.”

I have expectations for this couple. They have fought so hard and so long, and throughout it all, they have never given up on each other. No petty squabbling (and in that they are doing better than pretty much every single couple stuck in quarantine together), no poor communication leading to big misunderstandings. Just... quiet faith in each other and way of working in sync that feels almost telepathic in nature. They have sacrificed almost everything they hold dear to do the right thing... And if they don’t deserve a happily ever after, then no one does.

But yes, that scene in the van. The last time they were handcuffed in a police van was in Iceland. And Tasha and Rich and Patterson got them out. Ivy captured Kurt, but the team found him, and Tasha brought him home (after she and Patterson and Rich saved Jane’s life). So it’s easy to understand why Kurt seems so optimistic this time. “With Patterson, Rich, and Tasha still out there? Yeah, I like our chances.” And knowing what we know at that moment, about Keaton and Tasha and Rich and Patterson, that lighthearted moment felt like being smacked in the face with a lead pipe. It is yet another example of how the cross-cutting from scene to scene in this episode was so incredibly effective.

So let’s just focus on the message that Kurt is giving us there. That this team is made up of individuals, who can be individually arrested and restrained, but they know that they are so much more than that. This team is a force. It’s strong enough to reform a dark web hacker. It makes a CIA company man go rogue and help a band of outlaws. It makes a self-serving smarmy lawyer start a resistance. It pairs up a couple of jaded federal agents with a convicted criminal/artist/hacker. This team is good, and they push the people around them to be better than they were before.

For that, if nothing else, we have to have faith.

----------

Well that was one of the most traumatizing and emotional episodes in the history of Blindspot. I guess that’s what they meant when they said we’re in the endgame now. Have you stashed enough chocolate? Is such a thing possible?

—Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: tasha zapata #character: patterson #character: rich dotcom #character: matthew weitz #character: afreen #character: madeline burke #character: jake keaton #character: ivy sands #character: allison knight #character: boston arliss crab #ship: Jane/Kurt

[more--than--anything]

Episode Review: "Underneath it all, we're just dealing with good old-fashioned PTSD." [S04E16]

This week, the team closes in on Madeline, Jane gets therapy, and Rich and Boston flirt in weird ways. What did we think of “The One Where Jane Visits an Old Friend”?

Y: The ways in which couples flirt on this show does raise a lot of questions, doesn’t it? Rich and Boston are all about the passive aggressive, and on the other end you’ve got Jane and Kurt flirting while disarming bombs with their lives on the line. But strange flirting habits aside, one thing that is absolutely on point this year is Jane’s emotional and psychological journey which has taken the front seat from the “evil villain du jour” this season. And I for one am not complaining.

L: I didn’t expect the writers to take such a dark turn with Jane (we’ve talked before about how they skirted deep emotional and psychological themes such as Jane’s likely PTSD after her time with the CIA or the Wellers trying to put their marriage back together after the Avery/Clem reveals), but I have to say, I really appreciate the fact that they aren’t afraid to wade into the deep end this time. Bringing Borden back was even more unexpected, but really makes sense the way it played out. Jane’s story is driving this season much more than the Madeline plot, but as long as it’s this good, I am not complaining one bit!

Instead of a tattoo, this week’s case arrives in a hail of bullets and a string of dead bodies. How does our team figure out what’s going on?

L: This week’s case starts, fittingly, in Mad Maddie’s office, where Tasha is scouring every nook and cranny for evidence the FBI forensics team might have overlooked. Reade points out—correctly—that the reason she is so determined to find something is because if Madeline gets away, everything that Tasha went through—all the bridges she burned, every morally repugnant thing she did to gain favor with Madeline—would be for nothing. Not to mention the fact that her future is still up in the air, pending the outcome of this investigation. And frankly, if I was her, I’d probably want to take a sledgehammer to Madeline’s whole office, not just one tile in the floor. There has to be some job satisfaction in that for Tasha. (And I can’t be the only one who thinks there has to be something about the weird tree in Madeline’s office, since it seems like someone comments on it in almost every episode, right?!)

But instead of finding anything, Tasha and Reade nearly get themselves perforated by a hail of bullets through the window from across the street. (And wow, the slow-motion photography in that scene is intense!) The team jumps on the case and figures out that the shooter was Alonzo Cortez, chief hitman (and cousin of the leader) of the Sabinito drug cartel. Which answers our question about how Franco Cortez is taking the loss of his top hacker: Not well, not well at all. Two more HCI executives turn up dead under gruesome circumstances, which makes me even more relieved that Tasha and Reade escaped unscathed. Rich worries that Boston might be a target as well, so they bring him in, and he helps them find the hitman before he can take out any more HCI execs. (I honestly can’t figure out if it would have been a good thing or a bad thing if the cartel had managed to off Madeline before the team could bring her in. I mean, it might stop her plans before she has a chance to carry them out, whatever they are. But it also might leave Tasha hanging, if the FBI isn’t able to prove that Madeline is guilty of the crimes Tasha says she is.)

Three more HCI executives are killed after they take Cortez into custody, and the team realizes that there is another killer on the loose, this one working for Madeline, taking out everyone who knows what she is up to before they’re tempted to share that knowledge with the FBI. (Which makes me wonder, not for the first time, who the hell is running HCI Global right now? Mad Maddie is on the run, a bunch of their top executives are dead, and the rest are in hiding if they have any sense at all. I still don’t see how this organization is such a threat. If there was ever a time for someone else to step up and take over HCI—as Tasha told Reade the CIA was afraid would happen—this would be it, right? But apparently they are just worried about Madeline.) Patterson finds a list of past and present HCI executives in the fragmented data that Tasha retrieved in Zurich, along with the word “Helios.” They arrive too late to save the last person on the list, but in his desk they find a number for Madeline’s personal pilot, James B. Kelley.

Tasha calls J.B., but he doesn’t want to talk. She tells him that Madeline is killing everyone who might be able to produce evidence to incriminate her. Tasha promises that the FBI can keep him safe, but J.B. is the kind of smug asshole we love to hate and is only willing to come in if they pay him $10 million in bitcoin. Fortunately, the FBI has Rich Dotcom, hacker extraordinaire, who makes it appear as though the money has been deposited into J.B.’s account without actually dipping into the FBI expense budget. J.B. tells them that he’s supposed to fly Madeline out of the country, so the team heads to the airport to lie in wait. Only Madeline is late, and J.B. is much too calm about it, so Boston has Tasha tell him that Madeline has arrived, startling him into giving away the ruse; he was just stalling them while Madeline made her escape some other way.

Reade gets the FAA to ground all the flights (and I agree with Patterson: “That is impressive.”), but Weller realizes that medevac helicopters are still flying, and J.B. used to be a medevac pilot. Rich cross-references the pilots in the air with J.B.’s flight history and discovers that one of them is J.B.’s old co-pilot, en route to a hospital in Brooklyn. The team storms the hospital, but Mad Maddie brought a full complement of heavies with her, so they have to fight their way to the roof. (And okay, Jane’s improvisational use of the MRI machine to disarm the bad guys was seriously cool.) Tasha corners Madeline and arrests her, but we barely get a minute to revel in that before Dominic shows up dressed as an EMT and jabs Jane with a syringe filled with an extremely fast-acting tranquilizer (she couldn’t even gasp her husband’s single-syllable name into her comm before she passed out) and drags her off to parts unknown.

So today is a weird “win” that doesn’t really feel like one. They bring in Madeline, but Dominic takes Jane. Our team definitely got the worse end of the deal in that trade. Tasha and Reade escape their attack unscathed and bring in Boston before the hitman can get to him, but Mad Maddie manages to kill absolutely everyone who would have been able to tell the team what she’s up to. So now they have Madeline, but no hard evidence or witnesses they can use to put her away for good, and we still don’t have any idea what she's up to. And the whole promo for the next episode has me so worried about Jane that I am having trouble focusing on what happened in this one!

This episode was very fast-paced and the case was really fun, but honestly, Madeline is making less and less sense to me. I think Tasha kind of summed it up for me when she was talking to J.B., asking him if Madeline would really protect him. “And all her other allies she killed today? What happens when you outlive your usefulness?” This is the question I keep asking: Why are any of these people still loyal to her? Madeline is like a rabid dog; even if she was looking out for you yesterday, she could turn on you at any moment. After seeing the all the dead bodies that accumulate around her, it seems like anyone with basic survival instincts ought to say, “It’s not worth whatever she’s offering to pay. I should go hide somewhere she can’t find me!” What is she doing that makes people so willing to follow her, even at the risk of likely death or imprisonment? Unlike Shepherd or Crawford, she doesn’t have that righteous fervor that pulls people to follow her on her crusade. She just has employees that she threatens into submission, which seems like a far less sustainable model, long-term. I’d like to believe that with her in custody, we can wrap up this plot, but there are too many episodes left in the season, I suppose, to do that just yet. (And we get a convenient flashback at the start of the episode to remind us that Weitz is in Madeline’s pocket now, so I guess we know what “get out of jail free” card she’ll be playing next week.)

Y: Madeline having Weitz in her pocket and Jane in, I’m assuming, Dominic’s trunk at this point really does turn what appears to be a win for the team into something that will definitely make things worse for them. Even without having captured Jane, just the fact that Weitz is under Madeline’s thumb would have ruined this win for the team. There’s no way she is spending the night in custody. And knowing Weitz, he will get her out without getting any dirt on his hands, but he will make things worse for the team, mostly Tasha, and make taking Madeline down in the future even harder.

But having Jane gives Madeline an extra advantage because she’ll be playing Kurt Weller too. We know Kurt is the most by-the-book agent out there, but we have seen him cover up some things in the past to protect people. He covered up for Mayfair and Daylight. He covered up the truth of what happened to Taylor. And now with his wife’s life on the line? We know Kurt will do anything to protect Jane. And at this point I’m really worried about just how far he will go and what it will do to him to protect her.

But back to Madeline for a minute. We’ve been talking a lot this season about how Madeline may be a little crazy and a little evil but all of this still doesn’t seem to be founded in anything. And that is still the case. Her crazy is getting crazier and her evil is getting more evil, but we still don’t know what her endgame is. And we’ve talked about how this has made her a much less compelling villain than Shepherd and Crawford ever were. And in comparing her to the other two, this episode also showed just how sloppy she is. She made a mess and left a trail and didn’t care to clean it up. Crawford and Shepherd were never like that. They were meticulous and careful and calculated, and the team were never close enough to catch them, or if they were, those two always were a step ahead or had another card up their sleeve.

I’m not sure where all of this Madeline stuff is going or if she’s meant to be this sloppy villain without something grounding her that’s based on a firm belief or goal or higher purpose. But at least the plots of Jane’s story and Tasha’s story are compelling and interesting enough as character-driven plots to keep this season just so good.

Our team is back together, and they even pull Boston back into the fold with them this week. What shape is our tangram in this week?

Y: This tangram of ours keeps shifting and changing and evolving, and it’s a great thing to see because it forces these characters themselves to evolve and change and adapt. Boston coming in every once in a while forces certain shifts in how the team works and the dynamics. Similarly when Keaton is there or Weitz pops by or less-frequently recurring characters like Dave. It’s great when characters are constantly forced to face changes and shifts in their comfort zones. But for at least one of our faves, this season has been altogether lacking of any comfort.

L: Poor Tasha. We’ve been so focused on Jane lately, with all that she’s going through, that it’s easy to overlook that Tasha is walking around with her own Madeline-induced case of PTSD. We can see how frayed around the edges she’s become when she’s tearing apart Madeline’s office. But what Tasha does have in her corner is Reade. He understands—maybe better than anyone else—what Tasha had to do to maintain her cover and how much it is eating away at her. He knows what’s on the line for her, and how desperately she needs to bring Madeline in. And he is willing to do just about whatever she says, whether it’s taking a sledgehammer to Madeline’s office or calling J.B. and pretending to hand over $10 million. Or diving instantly to the floor to avoid being gunned down. He might have told her he couldn’t trust her anymore, but as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.

Y: Tasha’s storyline has been fantastic this year—minus the whole flakiness of the CIA hunting her down part—but the focus on Tasha’s psychological and emotional journey has been great regardless. For three seasons we’ve been waiting for Tasha to step out of the awesome sidekick position she’d found herself in and enjoy her moment in the spotlight, and what the writers have given her this season has been nothing short of brilliant. It’s true that it is sometimes overshadowed by Jane’s story arc but I think those two plot lines have been the driving force of the season, and thanks to the amazing writing and beyond phenomenal performances of both Audrey and Jaimie, this season has not disappointed on that front. Tasha’s finally getting her moment, and what a storyline it has been. It has torn Tasha apart and left her so bare and vulnerable, having to rebuild herself and her relationships and rediscover who she is and what she stands for. It’s been a struggle and a true hero’s journey and while she had to go some of it on her own, it is quite the relief that she’s finally welcomed people who love her back in her corner.

It’s the season of badass women having to rediscover themselves and reinvent themselves and allow themselves to break down and reach rock bottom, but nothing is more satisfying that watching them fight their way back and refuse to give in or give up.

L: Amen. I know we’ve said it many times before, but I really love how this show writes their female characters, and the actresses who portray them just keep knocking these scenes out of the park.

Which isn’t to say that the male characters are any less developed. We talk a lot about Rich’s amazing arc, and this week we see fan-favorite Boston return to the FBI to bicker with Rich (and also assist in the investigation, but really, we’re here for the excellent snark). Is it weird that I am rooting for Rich and Boston harder than I am for Reade and Tasha? Their relationship might not be exactly conventional, but it in a weird, dysfunctional way, it works for them. “I love us,” says Rich. And frankly, so do I! Close second to that relationship, though, is Rich’s friendship with Patterson. I love how she doesn’t hesitate to call him on his bad behavior. “I know you. You are your own worst enemy.” Everyone needs a friend like Patterson, who is willing to call you on your bullshit.

And really, this kind of friendship is what sets this team apart and makes them the incredibly effective unit they are. As Reade said at the end of season two, this job “gives us family.” Nothing illustrates how close this team is more than the moment when Kurt told them that Jane was meeting with Borden. He’s obviously hesitant to drop this bomb on them, especially Patterson. There’s a brief pause while they digest this news, but Patterson, Reade, and Tasha immediately voice their support for Jane—“whatever she needs”—without hesitation. Jane being able to cope with her past and function as a part of their team is more important to them then their own past hurts and grudges. And that moment shows us so beautifully how much this team cares about each other and look out for each other.

Honestly, I think my only disappointment with this episode is that Patterson doesn’t say, “Stardate” when she is dictating into her log. (You can’t tell me that there isn’t an outtake somewhere of Ashley saying that.)

Y: I’ve actually been thinking a lot about Patterson recently and how unlike previous seasons, this year she’s more in the background than we’re used to seeing her. At this point in previous seasons, Patterson would have had a few centric episodes and a long arcing storyline, whether it was with David in season one or with Borden in season two. But this year, she still hasn’t had that. But don’t get me wrong, she has not been any less incredible and any less the LeBron of the team. It’s just that she’s been quieter. And in many ways, it’s a good thing. For one thing it has allowed Tasha to be in the forefront. But also, after years of suffering so much and going through so much pain, it’s great to see at least one character has found some sort of peace and balance in their life. And this episode highlighted that perfectly when she learns that Jane has gone to see Borden. It showed that Patterson has found closure and moved on and is in a much better place in her life.

But that moment wasn’t important just for that. It also showed us how supportive Patterson has been this year of all her friends—and like L mentioned, her friendship with Rich has been an amazing thing. Rich’s journey from smug dark web shady person into reluctantly reformed good guy has been one of the most rewarding storylines on this show, and watching how Patterson has been there by his side as a supportive friend who won’t let him get away with his shit is just a testimony to her own development and character. None of these people would be here without her—and not just in the field.

What I want now is to see more Patterson and Tasha interaction, though. Those two were unbelievably close friends and right now… not so much and that sucks. I need those two to interact more—to talk and be as close as they once were!

When we last saw Jane, she was breaking down, and this week, she seems to have hit rock bottom. She’s nothing if not a fighter, but even badasses need a hand now and then. How does she get the help she needs?

L: Jane has been through a lot, and even through the worst of it, she still kept on swinging. This is the lowest we have ever seen her, which is really saying something for someone who found out she wiped her own memory to bring down a team that had become her best friends, killed her former fiancé after he shot her boss who died at her feet, spent three months being tortured by the CIA and eighteen months on the run from hitmen, tried to arrest both her brother and adoptive mother, found out her husband killed the daughter she didn’t know she’d had, and received a fatal diagnosis and almost died. Whew! The last time we saw Jane call in sick to work was, what, season one, after Oscar told her she’d done this to herself. And even then, she only made it half a day before she went back to work. So to find out that she’s been hiding out at home for several days is... unsettling, to say the least.

It’s a step in the right direction for her to admit that she can’t cope with all this on her own. We have always seen that Jane is the type of person who will keep struggling along on her own, rather than asking for help. Calling a therapist illustrates both how far she’s fallen, but also how far she’s come in her character arc to be able to reach out and ask for help when she needs it—which in turn makes it even more heartbreaking when two different therapists aren’t able to help her.

The two scenes with the therapists are funny but also sad. (My favorite moment in this episode might be while the second therapist was trying to get all the details straight, and Jane just looked at the camera and sighed. So much said with no words at all!) I love that the writers are able to laugh a little at the insanity of everything that they’ve put Jane through in four seasons. It is... a lot. But at the same time, my heart breaks for Jane, because it does seem too much for anyone, even our badass ninja warrior goddess, to be able to recover from.

It does make a twisted sort of sense that she would turn to Borden. He’s a doctor with training in psychiatry. He’s familiar with Jane’s case, with the extent of her memory loss, and also knew her as Remi. But I think it’s that last bit that is the most significant here. It’s not just that he knew her as Remi. Remi and Borden formed a bond from what they went through in Afghanistan. Both of them experienced significant losses there; Borden lost his wife, and Remi lost her whole unit. They were both lost and grieving and traumatized, so they joined together to help each other through and to do what they could to prevent other people from experiencing the pain they were going through.

The first time I watched this episode, it bothered me the way Jane bullied Borden into helping her. She is one of the people who put him in prison; he doesn’t owe her a damn thing. She demands that he help and runs roughshod over his objections, and honestly, you wouldn’t really expect good help from someone you treated that way, would you? But that’s viewing this only through the prism of their relationship as we viewed it from Jane’s perspective. These two have a history that predates all of that, and Jane remembers it all now. She knows what they went through together. And the more they talk, the more it becomes clear that Remi encouraged him and helped him find a new purpose when he was lost after his wife’s death. So asking him to do that for her now, to return the favor in essence, when she is the one who is so lost and adrift, doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

We are used to viewing Borden as a monster, but he was simply carrying out the task that Remi asked him to do. We see him as the person who betrayed the team, but all the while he was simply staying loyal to Remi. And he helps her today—without asking for anything for himself in return. When Kurt went to see Hirst, the first thing she did was ask what she was getting out of the deal. But Borden doesn’t do that. We’re so used to thinking of Borden as “the enemy” (I know I did, even in the review for the last episode!) that it seems odd to think of him as being selfless, but in these scenes, he is. As he says to Jane, “It feels good to be needed, doesn’t it?” The work that he and he wife did in Afghanistan was clearly needed, and Sandstorm needed him to play a role that no one else could. Even at the FBI, he was needed—both by Sandstorm and the FBI.

Pardon me, I need to go have a small existential crisis. First I started empathizing with Keaton. Now Borden. Where will this madness end?? What are these writers doing to me?!?!

It is clear that Borden does know Jane, by whatever name she is using, and he is willing to help her. He leads her, step by step, to the acknowledgement that she and Remi are in fact a single person. We saw a hint of this in 4.09, in Jane’s ZIP hallucination. But if I complained about that being a little too pat of a resolution for this schism, I take it back now, because this is the moment that first, small step was leading us toward. The way Borden leads her to this realization is so masterfully done. Like Dorothy in Oz, he couldn’t just tell her how to get home; Jane had to come to this conclusion on her own. “Doesn’t it feel better to talk about yourself as one person?” he asks once she gets there. Because you can’t apologize for something that someone else did; that’s meaningless. In order to truly atone, you first have to own whatever you did, to accept responsibility for your own actions. Then and only then can you say, “I’m sorry,” as Jane does, and have it actually mean something. She has to accept that she is Remi, which means that she alone is responsible for everything that Remi did. As painful as that it is, it frees her to apologize and opens the door to atonement.

And it is beautiful to see where this acceptance takes her: Once she accepts that she has always been one person, she can see that her motivation hasn’t really changed. As both a member of Sandstorm and as an FBI agent, she’s been trying to see that justice is done, that the innocent are protected and that the people who would exploit others for their own ends are punished. (And I have to wonder if, even though he was loyal to Sandstorm, did Borden, like Jane, get caught up in the satisfaction of the work the FBI was doing?) Remi’s motivation was the same as Jane’s, but Remi was manipulated by Shepherd (and I still think she needs to recognize this in order to fully forgive herself), whereas Jane was encouraged the follow a more legal path by the people she encountered at the FBI. Same person, different circumstances, leading to different outcomes.

And this also goes back to what we were talking about last week with regard to Shepherd—as evil as she might have been, the goal of the initial tattoos was always to unmask corruption and bring the perpetrators to justice. As this show points out so masterfully, the difference between the good guys and the bad guys isn’t as great as we’d like it to be. Sometimes it just depends on the perspective from which you are viewing the story. (In fiction, the best antagonists are always the ones who believe themselves to be the protagonist of the tale, which is one of the reasons that Shepherd was such a phenomenal villain. From her viewpoint, all of her actions were justified and necessary to stop the abuses she had witnessed.) In the hands of less skilled writers, showing us all the terrible things that Remi did might have made her seem unsympathetic and unrelatable and turned us against her. But these writers (and Jaimie Alexander) are so good: They took this character, gave her all of these dark, hidden depths, and then made us feel every bit of her agony and remorse. It’s a redemption arc of epic proportions, rewarding both Jane and the viewers for four years of torments.

The final message delivered is no less powerful: Instead of focusing on the whole beach, on the whole of Remi’s transgressions, Jane should just focus on the things she can do now. She cannot go back and change the past, but she can move forward, continue the work she’s begun with the FBI, stopping the Madelines (and the Shepherds and the Crawfords) of the world from hurting innocent people in pursuit of their own gains.

We’ve been rooting for Jane since the moment she climbed out that bag, and we will continue to root for her—hopefully for many seasons to come!

Y: Oh boy… what else can I add to this masterpiece right here? L’s killing it every week in the Jane section, isn’t she? I can just sit back read this and applaud and sit anxiously waiting for everyone to read it and join me in being in awe of L, her analysis of Jane and of Jane’s arc this season and of course of Jaimie’s incredible performance every single week. Honestly, this is all just a thing of beauty.

I loved that they brought back Borden for this episode, and I may have thrown my arms in the air and sighed “Finally!” because I have been waiting for them to get him involved since Jane first started showing symptoms. I mean he is the most glaringly obvious person that they should go to. He was obviously Sandstorm’s go-to guy when it came to the whole ZIP scheme, and if anyone should know anything about the medical consequences it should be him. But I guess it does make more sense to bring him in the psychological part of the consequences rather than the physical. He was singlehandedly, for some time, responsible for creating and morphing this nameless woman who came out of the bag into Jane Doe. A lot of what drives Jane, or at least what drove her in the first season or so, was a direct result of things that Borden had told her and convinced her of. In so many ways, Shepherd’s plan when it came to Borden’s role was just as manipulative as you’d expect it to be.

And here we are once again going back to just how deep-rooted the effect of Shepherd’s actions are in Jane’s life and in the heart of this show.

But back to Borden, I think it was brilliant how he was brought back and why, and the entire process of breaking Jane down. And at the same time, allowing Borden himself to be exposed revealed once again that while we might see him as a villain in our view of the story, he too was in many ways a victim and a person only trying to seek justice and do the right thing. It was absolutely heartbreaking listening to him and remembering everything he went through and realizing just how useless he feels right now. I agree with L that he too may have been slightly falling into the good things he was allowed to be a part of while at the FBI, and I cannot help but think back to the episode with young Maya and how incredible he was in that episode. A part of me wants to believe that that was the truest we saw Borden be—that if all the horrible things that happened in his life including being manipulated into being a terrorist—that is who Nigel Thornton really is. He is a man who genuinely cared about helping others, but he was just… it was just never meant to be… at least so far.

One last thing before I wrap up this very long section. I think we all need to take a moment to appreciate just how unbelievably amazing Ukweli and Jaimie were in every single second of every single one of their scenes together. There was nothing to fault in those scenes, not in the writing and not in their performances. I swear, if this were any other show, those two would be up for Emmys for just those scenes. I cannot stress it enough just how dedicated and phenomenal these actors are, and these two were just out of this world in their scenes. So if the rest of the world won’t appreciate it, then our little mighty fandom will do it, because dammit it’s been a long time since I’ve seen two actors take such scenes and knock them out of the park so brilliantly.

No matter what happens, Kurt Weller continues to be the most supportive husband ever. Is there an award for Best Husband, and if so, is there a limit for how many times in a row he can win?

Y: He deserves it. He deserves a thousand million times and then some.

And if subtlety has been the key to how Patterson’s story is being told this season, and how her acts of awesomeness are still so loud and yet so subtly written, then the same in some ways can be said about Kurt. As the core leads of the show, Kurt has been by far overshadowed by Jane—or at least his main arc has been—this year, but that does not take away anything from Kurt’s story or his arc. It is just as important and impressive as it has ever been. And the growth and development of his character has taken leaps forward even if he has not been the focus. And once again, that is excellent storytelling right there—to allow a character to take a step back but still manage to put them through an amazing arc and allow them to grow so much takes a lot of talent and really impressive writing.

What they are making Kurt go through with Jane and within her main arc is something that reaches to the core of who he is and what his character is all about. They’ve designed his arc this year and his journey to be woven into hers, and the apparent passiveness of it is very much his own struggle and his own monster that he needs to slay and overcome.

L: Oh man, yes! And it shows that you don’t have to give every single character a major crisis every season, soap-opera style. Characters can still grow and change in the course of supporting other characters through their crises (which is also, not coincidentally, how successful marriages work).

If we are worried about Jane’s behavior, just think about how freaked out her devoted husband must be. His fearless, badass wife is refusing not only to go out in the field (the one place where both he and she feel comfortable, as she told him in 1.05), she’s apparently not even willing to leave their apartment. As we talked about last week, this is an enemy Kurt can’t fight, and that must be almost as terrifying for Kurt as it for Jane.

My favorite thing about the moment where Kurt gives Jane the therapist’s card (which implies that he’s either met with the guy or stopped in at his office or something; he’s not just giving her a phone number handwritten on a post-it note) is the way he leaves it up to her. He doesn’t tell her that she needs therapy, he doesn’t schedule an appointment for her, he just hands her the card and leaves the ball in her court. It shows how much he respects her and shows how much confidence he has in her to do what she needs to do. (Although, yes, with true mental illness, sometimes the person who is struggling needs someone else to take the wheel for a little while to get back on course.) And yes, therapy doesn’t work if it’s not really the idea of the person getting therapy. But I still love the way Kurt doesn’t try to pressure or guilt her into going by telling her how worried he is. He just gives her the number and goes to work, and lets her decide what she wants to do.

But he doesn’t abandon her. He goes home to check up on her. And when she tells him she wants to see Borden, we don’t see him voice any objection (although we see his obvious discomfort with the idea when he tells the team). He is willing to do whatever it takes to help Jane become happy, healthy, and whole once again. And that right there is our ship (and our team): willing to do whatever it takes so that all of them come through okay in the end.

Which is why, as freaked out as the clips of Jane in the promo for the next episode make me, the clips of Kurt are somehow even worse, for this poor control freak who has already dug up the body of one person close to him in the course of this series. Excuse me, I need to go buy all the chocolate in a three-state radius before Friday...

And last, but never ever least, our favorite badass power couple has been through a lot, but the happily ever after they deserve still seems elusive. They’re still setting #relationshipgoals anyway, though, aren’t they?

L: We’ve already talked about how supportive Kurt was, first finding Jane a therapist, and then agreeing to her going to see Borden—and being the person to tell the team about it. I really loved that moment, because it made him a party to Jane’s decision, accepting any of the heat that might have resulted (I’m still so proud of our team that there wasn’t any). And it underscores that these two are a team: Jane may be the one with the past full of demons, but they are fighting them together.

If I’m honest, the only moment that really had me worried about them (aside from the last twenty seconds of this episode, which I am endeavoring to forget until April 5th) was the opening scene, when Kurt knocked on his own bedroom door and said “Good morning” to Jane, implying that he’s been, what, sleeping on the sofa? While she’s been holed up in the bedroom (but coming out long enough to brew a cup of coffee)? That might have alarmed me even more than Jane apparently not leaving their apartment for days.

Y: Okay, that is an absolutely random thing to pick up on, and I cannot stop laughing that this is what you took out of the episode. But yes, #relationshipgoals does seem to be Jeller’s thing this year, and dammit they are setting the bar high. Just when you think their unconditional support for each other has reached the maximum possible, they go and take it up a notch. They go from being fiercely supportive to adorably domestic, and then you take them out in the field and they kick ass like no one’s business, and when all is said and done, they make things worse by being all flirty and adorable over open comms.

How are we mere mortals supposed to deal with this? How are we expected to compete? This is just stupidly unfair at this point.

That’s all from us! What did you think of Borden’s return? On a scale of “one” to “the season two nuclear finale,” how freaked out are you by the promo for the next episode? Can we all get some group therapy to help us cope?? Or should we just panic quietly and eat more chocolate? Come talk to our ask box!

—Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: patterson #character: edgar reade #character: tasha zapata #character: rich dotcom #character: boston arliss crab #character: Robert Borden #ship: Jane/Kurt #ship: Rich/Boston

[more--than--anything]

Episode Review: "I got you something." [S04E12]

This week’s adventure takes Rich and Patterson to new heights in the mountains of Peru, Jane and Weller to the depths of despair, and Tasha and Boston into ever-deeper trouble. What did we think of this week’s roller-coaster ride?

Y: I don’t know how Blindspot does it, but here we have again one of those episodes that run for 40-odd minutes and manage to have me experience the entire gamut of possible human emotions—from soul-shattering angst, to nail-biting worry, to edge-of-your seat excitement. And at no point do you feel that this is not a seamlessly woven story and a contained episode with all of its plot lines fitting together perfectly. Dammit, I love this show!

L: SAME. This was another terrific episode. I know we keep saying this, but the writers are really giving us the perfect balance this season: Heartbreaking and heartwarming, drama and action, tension and humor. We never get too settled into any one emotion before we go hurtling toward another extreme. And that makes for some really incredible television. Every episode seems to go by in a flash and yet give us so much more than seems to fit in a mere hour.

This is, without a doubt, the most important puzzle our team has ever cracked, with Jane’s life hanging in the balance. How do they put the pieces together before her clock runs out?

L: For our team, the stakes have never been this high—and given that I’ve lost count of how many bomb threats they’ve stopped, that’s saying something. But they know that Jane’s remaining time can be measured in days, so I am guessing that Patterson and Rich have been basically living in the lab since they gave Weller the grim prognosis. Patterson found a lead in Roman’s cache that points toward a billionaire named Ken Lee, an agoraphobic hypochondriac who is hoarding some Stanton cells in the off chance that he might need them one day. He’s not eager to give them up, even for a worthy cause. (He does strike me as the sort of person who probably has a stockpile of organs on ice, you know “just in case.” Also, we haven’t given the set designers their due in a while, but major credit to the folks who designed all the creepy artifacts in Ken Lee’s home.) When appealing to his humanitarian side fails, Patterson quickly offers up a trade: The Stanton cells for the Book of Secrets, never mind that they don’t actually have the Book of Secrets to trade. (And I absolutely love the role reversal here, with Patterson doing something outrageous and Rich trying to reel her back in.) Lee gives them 48 hours to make the exchange or the deal is off the table.

Rich and Patterson head back to the NYO to convince Reade to let them go on a “glorified treasure hunt.” In the course of listening to Rich pontificate on where the book might be (“One of the Americas. Central, possibly South. Maybe North.”), Patterson recognizes one of the images in his PowerPoint presentation as one in Roman’s cache, only Roman’s contains slight differences and is overlaid with a grid. They fill in all the grid squares that contain differences to reveal a pattern that Patterson matches to the doors of Cusco Cathedral, in Peru. The pattern is missing the bottom right corner, which Patterson and Rich conclude means they need to go to Peru and look at the Southeast cornerstone of Cusco Cathedral, where they find a mural of a snake that Afreen (holding down the fort in the lab like a boss while they are gone) matches to a bed and breakfast in town. At the B&B, they discover that the snake’s tongue is pointing upstairs and put on a convincing show as honeymooners to convince the innkeeper to offer them a room that happens to be her father’s private study—one of the explorers who was looking for the Book of Secrets.

In the study, they find a weather station in colors that match the mural on the wall in the B&B lobby. None of the gauges are working, but when they look at the numbers they are set to, they turn out to be coordinates to a lookout point above Cusco, where our intrepid explorers find a stone with an outline of the weather station. They pull out the stone, but the hidey-hole behind it is empty. For a moment, all hope seems lost, until they turn the stone over and find a series of ones and zeroes carved into it, along with the “RB4RB.” They figure out that the inscription means “Roman Briggs for Remi Briggs,” and the binary digits tell them to look back in the cache. Patterson recalls a file in Roman’s first cache called “Full Circle” that she was unable to open. They call Afreen and ask her to plug in the coordinates of their location to unlock the file. The code unlocks an image... and a message that asks for secondary code.

Afreen sends the image to Weller, who describes it to Jane. She makes a joke about a blind woman solving a visual puzzle, but then identifies the image as a springbok, a South African gazelle, which appears on the South African coin that she and Roman passed back and forth. When she returned to him as Jane in 2.01, Roman gave the coin to her, saying, “I got you something.” Jane suggests they try that as the authentication code, and it works. Inside the file, they find a map, and a note from Roman, labeled, “In the event of my death.” (Because clearly we needed another kick in the feels, since there just haven’t been enough in this episode so far.) The map seems like a bunch of random dots and a compass rose, until Patterson and Rich dig around in Alejandro’s study and find a matching map of Machu Picchu. Both maps are marked with an X, but in different places, so Patterson uses math (in her head, where math is done) to find the midpoint between the two locations, where they find a plaque which tells them that an Incan telescope dating back to 1451 was discovered on that spot on April 23, 1920.

Patterson uses an app that she and her dad created to figure out what stars would have been visible on that date from that location and discovers Urcuchillay, the llama-shaped god of Incan herdsman. Rich recalls seeing a llama conopas—a llama grave marker—on their way to that location, so they head back there. Fortunately, Rich has brought both a trowel and whisk broom with him, and quickly uncovers a box containing the Book of Secrets. They take the book and head back to the B&B to grab their bags, but are stopped by Ken Lee and his henchmen, who order them to hand over the book at gunpoint. Fortunately, Weller and Reade are one step ahead of this situation, and the Peruvian National Police come in the door one step behind Patterson and Rich, thanks to the tip they received from the FBI. The police arrest Lee and his henchmen, but Patterson and Rich have a deal that Lee can’t refuse: Turn over the stem cells, and he won’t spend time in the unsanitary confines of a Peruvian prison.

So in the end, our team gets the stem cells and save Jane’s life, and they also find the Book of Secrets and turn it over to the Peruvian government. It’s been a while since they’ve had a truly decisive win like this one, so they definitely have reason to celebrate. And frankly, there was a lot to celebrate about this episode (although I will be forever disappointed that Rich didn’t to bring a therapy llama back from Peru).

I loved the twist that the cure for Jane doesn’t lie in the Book of Secrets itself. When they first introduced the book, it seemed far-fetched that the cure for a modern manufactured poison could be found in an ancient mystical text, but given how practical Roman and Remi were, it is much more believable that Roman viewed the book as simply a means to an end, an item of value that could be traded for something of greater use.

We’ve talked about how much we love that the data cache and the clues that Roman left for Jane and the team keep him alive for us, but we really get that in this episode, with the note that he leaves for Jane. And I really loved that, because it shows that even as angry as Roman and Jane were at each other through most of season three, underneath it all, they still loved each other. I also loved the fact that this puzzle could not have been solved and Jane could not have been cured if she hadn’t recovered her Remi memories. Jane would never have known what a “springbok” was (especially without her vision), but Remi knew. And it’s a beautiful and subtle way of reminding us that Jane is better and stronger as a whole person, as both Jane and Remi combined, than she was as either half of herself.

But the biggest thing I loved about this case was that it took all of them (even Bill Nye!) to solve it. Yes, Patterson and Rich did the majority of the leg work, but Afreen helped from the lab, Weller called Ken Lee, Jane solved the encryption image, and Reade set up the Peruvian government sting/deal. It really was a team effort and underscores how important this team is. They may all be superstars individually, but they shine the brightest when they all work together. And together, they are pretty much unbeatable. So let’s bring Tasha back into the fold, so they can vanquish all the baddies, save the world, and maybe take a vacation that doesn’t involve being held at gunpoint. Is that too much to ask?

Y: I love when an episode is focused on saving one of the team members—whether it’s Patterson from a deranged kidnapper or Tasha from sex traffickers or now Jane from ZIP poisoning. This team will always go above and beyond for any case and any mission, but when it is one of their own, somehow they become even more amazing. And I agree. The twist that the Book of Secrets itself is not the answer but a bargaining chip was a pretty cool one. And once again, Roman having it in the cache and Patterson immediately upon meeting ken Lee figuring out why it was there gives us another one of those moments where Patterson and Roman engage in some sort of indirect conversation and proves what Patterson once said about him being the only other person who loves puzzles as much as she does. And once again, it’s one of those moments that make me wish those two had more interaction and more scenes together and a chance be two awesome and very pretty puzzle nerds together.

And it was great seeing how all the team members, and the bench players, including Afreen and Bill Nye, all played a role in saving Jane’s life, whether directly or indirectly. Patterson name dropping Bill Nye—well, just mentioning her dad—was pretty awesome, of course, just because he’s Bill Nye. But what’s important here is the fact that this team is this super well-oiled machine that always works well together, that each one will always have a role to play, that they’re all an integral part of this puzzle-solving puzzle of a team, and no one is dispensable. Even separated by distance and broken apart by tragedy, they still find a way to work together and fill all the necessary gaps to be the awesome crime fighting team that they are. And this reminds me of the season one scene when Patterson explained to Jane how the old team was like a tangram and they’re trying to find their new shape now that she had come along. Well, from the looks of it, they have found this new shape and it’s absolutely incredible!

Meanwhile, Tasha is back in Mad Maddie’s good graces, at least for the moment. And she brought a buddy to work this week. How do Tasha and Boston fare in the lair of our supervillain?

Y: I cannot believe I am saying this, but I’ve missed Madeline. I guess her brand of crazy is something I crave in a Blindspot episode? But the best thing about this episode was not Madeline’s return but somehow the combination of Madeline, Tasha, and Boston is apparently a recipe for perfection. Who knew? I had a feeling that Tasha and Reade were going to reach out to Boston to play the role of Del Toro, and I am so glad they did. It is such a perfect way to bring Boston back into the story and not have him tied to Rich. Giving him his own storyline is the perfect opening to turn Boston into a more permanent member or at least more recurring without having him always have to tie in to Rich’s storyline. And you all know we love our brand of reformed or on the path to be reformed snarky sassy criminals.

L: I had no idea that they would pull Boston back in here, but he was absolutely perfect for this job. I loved the way he and Tasha play off each other undercover. And also, I kind of adore Boston’s unique flavor of snark... somehow he’s even more arrogant than Rich, but in a way that always seems kind of unexpected. And I love that Boston is braver than we expect. We kind of expect him to be more like Rich (whom I will forever see in my mind as dropping the sword and backing away from Remi’s “top five sexiest all-time rooftop swordfights” in Tokyo), but Boston signs up for this job and then faces down certain death from Mad Maddie with little more than an exasperated eye roll. As Madeline says, he’s either very brave or very stupid—and it’s a fine line.

I’m also a little (okay, a lot) worried that Boston’s arrogance might get him into trouble. “I faked a nuke attack. Remember?” he boasts when Tasha warns him that Madeline will test him to make sure of his abilities. We remember, Boston. We also remember that the reason you were able to do that is because Rich provided you with a device that Remi installed to give you inside access to the FBI network. This time you’ll be all on your own. May The Force be with you.

I have to admit, returning to the Mad Madeline plot felt a bit anticlimactic to me after the race to find the Book of Secrets and save Jane. Kind of, “Oh yeah, crazy lady trying to crash a plane, I remember.” And I think part of the problem here is that she still doesn’t feel like quite as big or as bad as our previous big bads. Crashing a plane is the biggest plan she’s had so far, and it’s still at the low end on the previously established scale of “nuking the White House” to “establishing a new world order.” The battle for Tasha’s soul has been the much more compelling piece of this tale, and now that we know she’s been under cover the whole time, I am kind of ready to wrap up this plot, arrest Madeline, shut down HCI, and move on to whatever other horrors are lurking in Roman’s cache, waiting to be unmasked.

Y: I agree that still not knowing what Madeline’s endgame is and what her motivation is has been rather frustrating and taking away from potentially enjoying her as a villain but like you said, that storyline has given us so much to work with when it comes to Tasha and that’s what I’ve been focusing on. We finally have Tasha at the center of a juicy plot, and Audrey is knocking it out of the park each week. I’m so happy she finally gets to stand in the spotlight like she deserves.

Bringing Boston in to replace Del Toro was a smart yet risky move, but very very in character for Tasha—taking a gamble for the greater good—and the way she manages to control the situation is a testament to how good an agent and how shrewd she can be. She’s been undercover for some time now that we haven’t had the chance to see her in her Agent Zapata element. We’re finally getting to see things from the angle of her as an undercover agent as opposed to questioning her loyalties as we were earlier in the season, and now things are getting more and more interesting. Gone are the days of a scene fading off of Tasha’s conflicted look and back are the days of the confident capable agent who will do absolutely anything for the case. We know Tasha will always go the extra mile—we saw her in season one with the sex traffickers and when she went undercover in prison in season three—and this is no different this time. Okay, maybe Madeline is scarier and more dangerous than both, but I have faith in my girl.

And now she has teamed up with Boston, who is apparently just as clever and just as shrewd in the field immediately picking up on Tasha’s cues to play Madeline, and Tasha maybe can relax just a little to have an ally by her side—even if it is Boston. I am glad she is no longer on her own. That had gone for too long for our dear Tasha.

And that scene in Madeline’s office after she outs Boston’s true identity is officially one of my favorite scenes of Blindspot ever—the quick thinking, the smart dialogue, the way these two characters played off each other and the way the scene unraveled… absolutely perfect!

The question is, however, did Madeline really fall for the act or is she just playing along because she’s on a deadline and needs someone with Boston’s hacking skills?

Her “crash an airplane” little project is happening sooner rather than later and while Tasha for a minute thought she got things under control, it became very clear very quickly that Madeline is always a step ahead. Tasha and Boston obviously have no time to warn Reade and the team, and they have gone dark, which doesn’t help anyone. And with Madeline working with the suspicion that Tasha is not as loyal as she is… yes, once again I’m sitting here all worried about Tasha.

And now let’s add Boston to the list because why not.

Our team has been through a lot together, and they would do just about anything for each other. Just how far were they willing to go to save one of their own?

L: As we talked about above, one of the very best things about this week’s case was the way all of the members of the team worked together to save Jane. If any one of them hadn’t done their part, the whole thing would have fallen apart like a house of cards. For this team, their whole is so much greater than the sum of their parts.

Y: Committing crimes in foreign countries, breaking international protocol, causing a diplomatic crisis—there isn’t anything these people aren’t willing to do for each other, and that is why they are the most precious family that ever was. Patterson and Rich did not think twice before saying yes to this mission, and despite all the red flags, Reade gave them the green light because it means saving Jane. Seriously, how awesome is this team?

Before we jump to Rich and Patty’s Peruvian adventure, I’d like to take a moment to applaud Reade’s performance as AD. We’ve seen him week after week handle everything that is thrown at him and they haven’t been easy things. He not only heads our team, but he’s also got the rest of the NYO to take care of and I really enjoyed that they showed us a glimpse of that last week with Brianna and the paper signing, and we know he has to deal with Weitz even if we don’t see it every week, and he’s dealing with the CIA headache and acting as Tasha’s handler. Honestly, I don’t envy him for all the things he is doing but I do tip my hat to him for being able to juggle it all with utmost professionalism and leadership.

He’s learned and grown up so much over the seasons and all I have to say is that Bethany Mayfair would be so proud of him!

L: Reade really has established himself in this role. The hallmarks of a good leader are getting the right people for the job, and then getting the hell out of their way and letting them do that job, and Reade is doing that to perfection. Of course, he has a good reason (make that many good reasons) to know what this team can do and trust their ability to pull off whatever task is in front of them, but we really see that illustrated in this episode.

First off, he is totally on board with bringing in Boston to fill in as Del Toro, offering to grant him immunity, expunge his record, and end his house arrest immediately. That’s a pretty big gamble, especially when his last interaction with Boston occurred when Boston violated said house arrest to help a terrorist fake a nuclear attack, cause mass panic, and break out another terrorist from a CIA black site. Then Reade approves Patterson and Rich’s treasure hunt to Peru, which would be kind of hard to document to, say, a Sabrina Larren. “Approved trip for one agent and one former criminal to a foreign country to hunt for a mythological artifact that may or may not exist, in violation of all of the laws of said country, so that we can trade this stolen priceless cultural artifact for some almost-as-mythological stem cells, which we can use to cure a former terrorist of a poison she voluntarily exposed herself to.” Even though this is the kind of thing that might cost Reade his job, he doesn’t even blink. But Reade’s no pushover; he rejects pretty much all of Rich’s requests regarding the trip, except for the trowel (which was very prescient thinking on both of their parts, to be honest). And finally, when they realize that Lee has double-crossed them, he puts together a new plan to force Lee to give them the stem cells anyway. It’s easy to give Patterson and Rich the bulk of the credit for finding the book, but without Reade’s full support, that wouldn’t have happened.

And then there are Patterson and Rich, who bickered their way through this episode more than the real married couple on this team. I loved their “American honeymooners” act, but my favorite moment is when Rich says to Patterson, “You know, I know that we’re not technically married and you’re not really my type, but every time we do this thing where we finish each other’s sentences, I get a little turned on.” I’m pretty sure that these two aren’t ever going to be a real romantic ship (I am still hoping that with some intensive counseling, Rich and Boston can work things out), but Patterson and Rich might be the best platonic pairing ever. They are the only two people on this team who can really keep up with each other intellectually, but they have just enough different viewpoints and life experiences to be able to fill in the other person’s gaps. When they first introduced Rich as a permanent fixture in the lab, we worried that he might be superfluous. After all, we already had a Patterson, why did we need another lab geek? And the answer to that is that it is much more entertaining to watch Patterson and Rich squabble and compete to find their way through the puzzles than it is to watch Patterson try to explain her reasoning to a mostly confused team. Rich keeps up with Patterson in a way the rest of the team can’t—and Patterson challenges Rich in a way that few other people have. Watching the two of them together is always a treat to viewers. (My husband announces almost every week that they are his favorites. You’re not alone, babe.)

But while we’re talking about the geniuses who hang out in the lab, let’s not forget to give a shout out to Afreen, who stepped up and took over while Mom and Dad were off honeymooning in Peru!

Y: Afreen! My girl did us proud this week subbing in for Patterson and Rich and filling those huge shoes! I love when she pops up, especially in Rachel Caris Love’s episodes because I love Afreen and I love when those background characters also get a chance to shine.

But in this episode, no one got to shine as bright as Patterson and Rich. We always talk about how we love seeing the Wonder Twins out of the lab, and this episode took them not only out of the lab but out of the continent! Finally! The lab isn’t big enough to house their awesomeness anymore! The Peru adventure is one we’ve been eagerly anticipating for months, and nothing about it was disappointing. The Rich/Patterson pairing is always flawless, whether they are arguing in the lab or completing each other’s nerdy sentences, but having them go undercover as a married couple on their honeymoon in Peru was a stroke of genius. And yes, while those two share a lot of things in common, they’re also so very different and complete each other in the best—and most hilarious—ways possible.

What made this whole adventure so enjoyable was not only this pairing and Ashley and Ennis’s amazing chemistry and acting, but everything else as well. It was a truly a collective effort to give us one of the most memorable episodes and adventures on this show ever. The writing, from dialogue to pacing to characterization, was flawless, the music was absolutely inspired, the cinematography and the fact that they actually filmed there made everything so much more epic and fabulous and just full of wonder. I think I will never get bored of coming back to this episode and watching it over and over again. It had the laughs, it had the excitement and the action, it had the adventure and the drama, and most importantly, it had so much heart being driven by the relentless pursuit of a cure for a loved one.

Weller is no stranger to facing down death, but facing Jane’s death is the hardest thing we’ve ever seen him do. How does he bear up under this unimaginable burden?

L: So last week, I said, “When Sullivan Stapleton cries, I cry.” Let me amend that statement: When Sully cries, I sob buckets. I weep to the point of dehydration. Because dammit, he and his tears and his sad eyes broke my heart every which way to Sunday this week. And then some.

Y: What she said. Everything that she said. And then some. Good lord, can we go just one episode without making him cry because I don’t think I am medically allowed to experience any more of that for quite some time.

L: Can we talk for just a second about how Weller absolutely refuses to leave Jane’s side? The way he tells her that “I want to be here because I’m your husband first and I’m an agent second.” And that’s Weller, right there, in a nutshell. He is absolutely loyal to the core, and once he’s committed, that’s it. He’s not going to leave Jane’s side, not even to find something that might bring her a cure.

So it’s not strange to me that Weller would refuse to leave Jane’s side, believing that she has only days left to live. It was more surprising to me that Patterson would even ask him to go. What kind of person would leave a dying spouse, especially for something that might turn out to just be a wild goose chase? I also had to wonder if there is a part of Weller that remembers that he turned his back on Taylor for a few minutes and she disappeared forever. If he leaves Jane’s side, even to find something that might bring her a cure, could he lose someone important to him again? But if he stays, if he doesn’t let her out of his sight, then maybe he won’t lose her.

I keep thinking about what Kurt said in their wedding video: “I love the person, the man that you make me. You are my north star. You’re my starting point. And you’re my end point.” Before Kurt met Jane, he was just an agent—first, second, and only. He was a workaholic who didn’t really have a personal life. He had no friends besides his fellow agents, who had never even seen the inside of his home. The only relationship we know about was with someone he met on the job. It was almost an anonymous existence; if something had happened to him, his job would have been filled by someone else, and the world would have moved on. But Jane gave him a life outside of work. She tore down his walls, she made him feel, and she made him live life, not just protect other people as they lived their lives. And in that light, we understand why the prospect of losing Jane is so utterly devastating to him. He’s changed too much to go back to the person he was before he met Jane. He wouldn’t just lose his wife, he would lose the whole life that she gave him.

Dammit, my eyes are leaking again.

Y: That’s happening to you, too? So strange… it must be something in the air…

Kurt’s loyalty and commitment, that’s pretty much what makes him who he is. That combined with his stubbornness and, you’re right, the trauma of losing Taylor, meant he was never ever going to leave Jane’s side. And while I see what you’re saying about how it’s weird Patterson even asked him, I also sort of understand it as well. He’s still the lead field agent of this team and from where Patterson is standing, if it’s just her and Rich then there is no field-rated agent on this mission. So while I think deep down she knew the answer was going to be no, from an agent’s perspective she was doing the logical thing.

But yes, Kurt was never going to leave Jane’s side, even if it wasn’t a wild goose chase, even if they had a road map to the cure itself. He trusts Rich and Patterson enough to bring it back, but his place is by Jane’s side. And look how far he’s come—from a workaholic whose whole life was his job as an FBI agent to Kurt Weller, husband first, agent second.

There are so many qualities that make us love Kurt Weller so damn much but it’s his heart, his capacity to love and to care, and his refusal to ever give up on those he loves that are just so absolutely endearing. And they’re also why he’s so tragic and so heartbreaking so often. It’s not just that Sully is so good in these emotional scenes that break our hearts, but it’s a combination of Sully’s performance with Kurt’s character and the pain we feel with him and for him.

But I think it’s time this boy caught a break. Let him be happy, just for a minute. He’s suffered enough and endured enough and he has never given up or lost hope but he has got to be tired, yearning for a break from it all. And he’s earned it. So as much as we love the angst, I think we’re all ready to see him be happy for a while.

Because I really really can’t cry anymore. I really cannot.

And on the other side of that equation, Jane is already dealing with the loss of her vision and now she’s facing her own imminent demise. But she’s our favorite badass action hero for good reason. How does she keep fighting against this, her hardest opponent yet?

L: As I might have mentioned one or two (thousand) times before, I love Jane. And in this episode, I especially love that she doesn’t go down without a serious fight. In the very first scene, she tells Weller, “I want to beat this.” And she doesn’t give up. She’s Jane, and she’s going to fight until the end. And if that means decrypting a pictorial clue when she’s lost her vision, then dammit, that’s what she’s going to do.

But at the same time, she’s also vulnerable. From the very first episode, we’ve seen this contrast between Jane’s strength and her vulnerability, and it is even more powerful in this episode, as Jane faces her own mortality. The scene when she breaks down and admits to Kurt that she’s scared, that she feels cheated out of the life she should have had—the life they should have together—was absolutely devastating. We could understand where she was coming from. We could relate to her fear and anger and sense of loss. We can feel her despair when she realizes that Roman couldn’t crack the map, so the odds of the team being able to are slim indeed. But self-pity has never been her style, so just as we’ve seen her do a thousand times before, Jane rallies. She puts on a brave face for Weller, manages to crack a few small jokes here and there, and she keeps going.

And then there is the note from Roman. I am so glad that this was a part of this episode. If there had been no note, Patterson and Rich would still have been able to crack the map. It wasn’t essential to solving the puzzle. The note is just for her; for Jane, but mostly for Remi. Roman calls her “sis”—not by name. Because really, her name isn’t important. She’s been Alice, Remi, and Jane. Her name has changed, but she’s always been Roman’s sister, and under it all, no matter how angry he may have been with her at times, Roman always loved her, and this note tells her that. Yes, Jane got forgiveness from him in her hallucination, but it wasn’t real. This is. This is Roman telling her that even as angry as he might have been, even as far apart as they were during the end of his life, he was still trying to save her, still wanting her to live a long and happy life. And really, while Jane would certainly have appreciated that gesture, it is the most meaningful to Remi, who was close to Roman her entire life, and who never really got to say goodbye to him.

Y: You love Jane? Funny… you’ve never mentioned that, at least not to me.

Dammit, that woman… how can you not love her! She’s exceptional in so many ways, inspiring in so many ways, and still so human and so relatable. She’s the perfect balance of tough and vulnerable, of strong and soft, of fierce and compassionate and in this episode, she’s all these things. That dichotomy of strong and vulnerable has always been one of my favorite things about Jane and one of the things that makes her so… Jane. The vulnerability that Remi lacked, which she believed made her better and stronger than Jane, is actually what makes Jane that much more powerful and unbreakable. In admitting her weakness and her fears, she knows she needs to find the strength and the will power to fight back and to stand back up, and sometimes this strength comes from within and often it is okay to seek it from someone else.

Watching Jane go through all the emotions she goes through as she stands face to face with her own mortality and watching her come through it all was a beautiful, emotional journey in this episode. And it also made me think of something that has been a recurring theme in Jane’s story so far—the idea of rebirth.

Just like the theme of loss or losing loved ones has been recurring theme in Kurt’s journey, Jane has constantly been “reborn” in one way or another, each time getting a fresh start as a new reincarnation of herself—we start the series with her coming out of the bag, no memories of her past and a literal blank slate beginning, she then comes out of the black site as Jane 2.0, a hardened and darker version of the innocent and naive Jane of season one, and then she returns in season three with a newfound purpose and an understanding of who she wants to be, and then wakes up in season four as Remi, an angry version of her old self, bitter and seeking revenge, and then Jane reconciles with Remi and wakes up as a melded version of both. And now, she wakes up again, her system cleared of the ZIP, having all her memories as Jane and Remi, forgiven by her brother…

So, what’s in store for this new version of our heroine? What new challenges lie in her future and what new battles will she have to fight?

This has been one of my favorite themes on this show, and I cannot wait to see where they take it and how it will develop.

And speaking of Roman, every time we think we finally said good bye to this tragic, heartbreaking boy, they find a way to sneak him back in and punch us in the gut with another emotional reference or moment. Bringing up the coin alone would have been enough to wreck us emotionally as a reference to their past, their connection and the love they shared that would always be there despite everything. But they had to go and throw in that note which was the definitive proof that we and Jane needed to finally believe that Roman had truly forgiven her and that his love for her had never disappeared. Even when there was no hope left for him, he continued his search for a cure for her. Even though she had not shown any symptoms, he was not taking any chances. She had gotten a chance at a better life and he wanted her to live it—for her and for him—to enjoy the one thing they’d spent their entire lives thinking they would never get.

And yes, one could argue that he maybe could have made it easier for her and instead of a whole complicated game of puzzles and treasure hunts he could have just told them what to do. But that just wouldn’t be them, would it?

Our favorite couple got put through the emotional wringer in this gut-wrenching episode. How do they handle these emotional extremes?

Y: Look, if I have said it once, then I’ve said it a million times. Jeller is one of the most epic ships ever and they just keep getting better and better. Their story just keeps getting better and better. And their relationship, their connection, their love… it’s just… it’s everything I could ever ask for in a fictional couple, and I am so grateful for them.

And also for Jaimie and Sullivan who are just beyond words. Those two action stars are mind-blowing when they’re asked to do fight scenes and action that you forget just how good they are with the drama and the romance and the emotions. All you need to do is watch one scene from this episode, and you wonder why they haven’t won all the awards. They’re just so good. So so so damn good!!

I honestly don’t know what else to say. They continue to throw everything at them and they continue to survive against all odds, to fight back and come out of it victorious and that much stronger. I just cannot wait to see how their story will develop and evolve, and I cannot wait to see this unbreakable pair take on more and more and watch them fall more and more in love with each other.

This is the story of two individuals who suffered so much in their lives and had given up hope on anything like that, but then when they came together, it was like something out of this world. In each other, they found the person to fit all their broken pieces, to put together the parts they had long given up on, to complete them and make them stronger, the only person who could break through and make them better, the people they had always been meant to be and in each other found love and peace and redemption and that one thing they had long given up on. What more do you want from a ship?

Oh, and they’re also super hot and flirty and adorable and they are so badass. So unbelievably badass!

L: I can’t and won’t argue with any of this. They are both badass and also incredibly tender, sometimes almost simultaneously. I am not sure how this is even possible, but they pull it off.

And yes, all the kudos to both Jaimie and Sullivan, who are always good, week in and week out, but managed to be even more amazing this week.

Kurt and Jane have been through so much, over the four seasons we’ve watched them, and especially these past few episodes. But they’ve never given up on each other. No matter what life (okay, the writers) throw at them, they face it together, and they just come out stronger in the end. They’re kind of awesome that way.

And frankly, now that they’ve gotten through this, I just want to see the two of them back in action together. Because no bad guy on this show stands a chance against the Wellers!

That’s all from us! How did YOU survive this emotional roller coaster? How did you metabolize all that chocolate? But there’s nothing but smooth sailing ahead now, right? Right? No? Come visit our ask box and talk about what you expect from the rest of this season!

—Laura & Yas

#blindspot: episode review #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: patterson #character: rich dotcom #character: edgar reade #character: tasha zapata #character: madeline burke #character: boston arliss crab #ship: Jane/Kurt

[more--than--anything]

Episode Review: "Patterson, do your thing! Do your thing and your stuff!" [S04E13]

We had another doozy of an episode before heading into a three-week hiatus: hijacked planes, interrupted vacations, and large building demolitions. What did we think of this week’s wild ride?

Y: It certainly kept me at the edge of my seat! This is definitely going down as one of my favorites, especially since it gave us more Tasha/Boston scenes, a pairing I never knew I would love so much, and of course Jeller’s little attempt at a romantic getaway. After a couple of weeks of angst-induced chocolate overconsumption, this week I suffered from fluff-induced chocolate overconsumption. I like to blame Blindspot for my chocolate problem, but I think it looks like the problem is me? Oh, well.

L: The episodes in the back half of this season flow so naturally (and so immediately) from the prior episode that this one again feels like the second half of a two-hour episode, this time filling in what Tasha and Boston were up to while the rest of the team was worrying about Jane, while throwing in a bit of worry about Weitz. Is it too much to ask that everyone just be safe for an hour?! Wait, don’t answer that. Just pass the chocolate…

Our case this week is a continuation of Tasha’s undercover mission to bring down Madeline and thwart her plans to crash a plane. How does our team rise to meet this challenge?

L: When we last saw Tasha and Boston, Mad Maddie had collected their cell phones to transport them to “someplace invisible” where “Del Toro” can complete his hack. The location looks pretty unimpressive until we get to the server room, which is about as high tech as it comes. (Mad Maddie sure spent a lot of money on tech—including two “hacker central” setups—for a building that’s about to be demolished. Forget her interior designer, I want her disposable income. She takes “money to burn” quite literally here.) Tasha realizes that Madeline will be watching every keystroke (although apparently not via camera) and tells Boston that he needs to complete the hack for real but stop short of causing any real damage.

Meanwhile, back at the NYO, Reade and Rich are getting a bit antsy waiting for Tasha and Boston to check in. They decide to pay Madeline a little visit to return the many boxes files she gave Weitz (because that’s not suspicious at all). But it does give them the opportunity to swap the “sniffer” Boston installed for them with another innocuous paperweight (do they sell them by the case?). The sniffer grabbed all sorts of documents from Bradley Dynamics showing that their “ARVO” aeronautics system failed major safety tests, along with an internal company memo that shows they were aware of the flaws and told employees to falsify test results so they wouldn’t lose the contract. The team realizes that if the plane crashes and these memos are leaked, Bradley Dynamics will lose any contracts they are bidding on, which will allow the aeronautics division at HCI to land them instead.

Reade and the Wonder Twins bring in Garret Young, head of safety at Bradley Dynamics. They show him the documents they obtained from Madeline’s office, but he tells them they are fakes. He has records that show that ARVO passed every safety test, along with the FAA officials and independent safety experts who witnessed the tests. When the team mentions that Madeline must have planned to use the falsified documents after she crashes the plane, Young cracks and admits that project ARVO was designed for one plane only: Air Force One, which is currently in the air en route to DC, to prepare for its “maiden voyage” tomorrow. (And I have to say that, as crazy as Mad Maddie is, it seems to me like she’d wait until tomorrow to crash the plane, with the president aboard, to really make her point. Unless she can be certain that he’s in the White House when she crashes the plane into it. Or unless said president is already in her pocket, in which case he’s more useful to her alive. Sadly, I guess Matthew Weitz isn’t more useful to her alive. Does Madeline even know that her “malleable” FBI Director is on the plane? Which reminds me: Did Weitz ever officially turn down her offer to make him president?)

The team (now joined by Weller and Jane, who continue their streak of getting interrupted every time they try to steal a few minutes alone) tries to make contact with the plane, but all signals have been blocked by Mad Maddie and her henchmen. Even the Secret Service and air traffic control can’t get through. Fortunately for the team, Weitz is allergic to rules, so he still has his phone turned on even though it’s supposed to be off. (His deadpan, “Okay. That’s worse,” when Patterson tells him the plane is going to crash is one of my favorite lines in this episode.) Weitz is able to convince the President’s Senior Advisor to let him into the cockpit of the plane, where they tell the pilot that she doesn’t have control of the plane. Young walks her through rebooting the system, but Del Toro is one step ahead of them and depressurizes the cabin while preventing oxygen masks from deploying, thus knocking unconscious everyone aboard.

Boston is making progress with his hack when he notices that someone is spoofing the SSL for all traffic that passes through this network—in other words, Madeline knows that they aren’t actually doing what she wants them to do and is limiting their access to the network. This knowledge gives them the slight advantage they need to be ready when Madeline’s heavy comes in to get them. (And this isn’t the first time or the last in this episode that I think that Tasha and Boston are the dynamic duo I never knew I wanted.) Tasha discovers that the whole building is rigged with explosives, and the two of them are on their way out when they find the real Del Toro, conducting a real hack of the airplane. Boston distracts the guards by pretending to be holding the switch to a bomb, while Tasha shoots one and then nails the second with the empty pistol in a seriously cool move. She takes him out and then shoots Del Toro, who was going for the gun the dead henchman dropped. And now I really want a Tasha-Boston buddy cop show.

Young and the team figure out that the hacker is accessing the plane via an analytics server, so they cut off access, just as Boston realizes that the plane is set to crash into DC. He figures out that Rich was the one who cut off the access, so they need to get in touch with the team and tell them to give them access again. Tasha finds a phone on one of the dead henchmen, but there is no service this deep in the building. And then we get this amazing scene where Tasha sends Boston out to make the call while she waits—in the building rigged with explosives—to regain access and undo Del Toro’s efforts. The team restores access, Tasha hits “enter,” Weitz and the crew wake up, the plane is saved, and for one moment we can breathe. Yay! And then the building explodes, and we get a few tense seconds with Boston and the team before we find out that Tasha got out safely before the building went down.

So this week was definitely a win for our team. They save Air Force One, Tasha and Boston escape unscathed, and they manage to foil Madeline’s nefarious plans, at least for the moment. And they save Weitz’s job too—bonus! I love how Weitz always manages to come out of bad situations smelling like a rose. Or maybe it’s more like he has the survival skills of a cockroach. Either way, Aaron Abrams has been an unexpected delight this season, and I hope Matthew Weitz sticks around.

Mad Maddie gets away, for now, but I guess she’s not leading quite such a charmed life, now that the FBI and who knows what other agencies are after her. Plus, I wonder how happy Cortez is going to be when he discovers that Madeline blew up the hacker he loaned her? But she doesn’t seem to be too deterred by these events, announcing that they need to focus on something called “Helios”: “They may have won the battle, but the war is far from over.” I just wish we knew what the hell war Mad Maddie is fighting.

I feel like the term “flying blind” kind of summarizes this episode. No one really knew what was going on anywhere else. The team didn’t know if Tasha and Boston were safe, or if they were managing to thwart Mad Maddie’s plans, Tasha and Boston didn’t know that the plane in question was Air Force One or that Rich and “the very nice” Garret Young were on the case, no one on Air Force One knew the plane was in danger... but because our team knows and trusts each other (and Weitz trusts them with his life), everyone was able to do what they needed to do in order to save the day.

Y: Before I dive into the episode case, I would like to mention one little thing. If you know me or have read any of my random, often pointless posts, you know I love the NASA lady, Eileen, from the season two finale. And one of the reasons I love her is that comment about scale that she makes when Patterson drew the sketch of Earth and the International Space Station. That’s probably one of my favorite comedic moments from the show. And this episode has brought me my second—when Rich points out that it’s not called Air Force One if the president is not on it. Yes, this is my level of humor, and I do not apologize for it.

Anyway, moving on. Another moment that had me cheering this episode was towards the end when Kurt says they need to figure out what Madeline’s endgame is. Finally! It’s what we’ve been saying for weeks! I’m glad someone has finally said something about it on the show. Madeline continues her reign of evilness with one evil plan after another and with one mythologically inspired name after another, and we still have no idea why she’s doing any of these things. Evil for the sake of evil is never convincing enough and not something we’re used to on Blindspot. All our villains have had strong reasons for their actions and ideologies that regardless of how skewed they were at least justified their actions. But that’s not the case with Madeline. And it’s been maddening.

And finally, another part of the story this week that echoed our thoughts was the firing of Weitz. While we love seeing the smarmy director—and Aaron Abrams—we won’t deny that we’ve questioned him being the director and his qualifications. And while I don’t want him to be fired because, like I said, it’s fun to have him around, it had to be brought up on the show to acknowledge the situation.

As always, our team sticks together, no matter what threat they face. How are they holding up under all this stress?

Y: I think my favorite team moment this week came from a scene where Tasha was all on her own. It’s when she’s down with the computers, the building rigged to blow up, Boston is out on the street talking to Rich and the team on the phone as they remove the block they had put on Boston’s hack, and Tasha whispers, “come on, guys, you can do this.” And although they are physically separated from each other in that moment, it’s the closest we’ve seen them all season. I just loved that moment—the faith Tasha has in the team and the faith the team has in Tasha—and how even when broken they are still such a strong team that believe in each other and depend on each other and are unstoppable.

Tasha has not seen any of them—except Reade—since she walked out of the NYO last season and yet when she says those words… it just gave me goosebumps. And I always go back to Patterson’s comment about the tangram from season one—this team is more than just a team. They fit together so perfectly and so seamlessly. They’re a family and they’ll always trust each other, and that moment right there was a perfect example of that. I don’t know… it just… it gets to me. Every time I watch it, hearing Tasha whisper those words knowing that they’re all doing their part to save the day and save each other—and also save one of their own since Smarmy Matty was on the plane—it just gives me goosebumps.

L: I agree. “Trust” was a big theme in this episode—Tasha losing Madeline’s trust and working to regain the team’s—and no one trusts each other more than the members of this team. They instinctively depend on each other to do what needs to be done, without question. In one scene, we see the team in the lab, reasoning through the case... If Boston is doing the hack, he won’t really hack the plane, but if Madeline realizes that Boston isn’t Del Toro, then she’ll find someone else to hack the plane for real—which is exactly what has happened, even though they don’t know it yet. And then on the other end, Boston and Tasha figure out that the team has cut off their access, so they know exactly who to call to restore it. This team works seamlessly together even when they’re physically separated. Throughout this entire episode, we see them going on basically just pure blind faith that the others will come through for them—and they do.

Which is why it’s so damn hard to watch Tasha go off on her own again at the end of the episode. Time and time again, we have seen members of this team try to deal with things on their own—Reade with Coach Jones, Weller with Avery’s “death”, Jane with almost everything—and every single time, they have fared poorly on their own. They’ve only managed to triumph over these issues when they’ve come back to the team and accepted help. It’s been a hard lesson for each one of these control freaks. Jane’s been the one who has struggled the most with accepting assistance, but we saw her realize in her “ZIP dream” that she needed the team—and that she could depend on them to be there for her. Tasha is the only one who hasn’t apparently gotten this memo yet, so it figures that her journey is going to be one of the most painful to watch.

Which isn’t to say that she doesn’t have her moments. Tasha Zapata is still a badass. We spend a lot of time talking about what a badass Jane Doe is, so it’s easy to overlook how amazing Tasha is. But the scene where she had one bullet left, used that to shoot the first bad guy, then threw the pistol to stun the second guy long enough to take him down, then grabbed his gun and took out Del Toro, who had gone for the first guy’s gun? That was every bit as badass as Jane. (And we can’t forget Boston there, either, setting the whole thing up with his fake bomb. Rich, I love you, but yeah, Boston is giving you some serious competition as our favorite former felon.)

Y: And speaking of Tasha, I think I was more disappointed than Reade himself when those elevator doors opened and Tasha was not there with Boston. Don’t get me wrong, I was ecstatic to see Boston and am so happy for him getting off house arrest, but for a moment, I just held my breath hoping Tasha was in there, finally coming back home to her family. But she was not, and I swear I was ready to cry. I just want her to come back! I am so glad she’s no longer caught in her soul-sucking undercover op, and I am sure she’s going to survive that little attack at the end—because it’s Tasha—but I am so ready for her to come back.

Although, that little darkness she still finds herself in, and her commitment to prove herself to Reade and the team is also understandable. She has been through a lot lately and I think she needs this to prove things to herself before anyone else. Also, all this is giving us so many good Tasha scenes, like we said before giving her the spotlight that she has long been denied and giving Audrey the chance to shine, so I won’t complain.

As long as she comes back, though. Please? The team needs her, and she needs them.

But I have to say, it’s great to finally talk about Tasha in the team section of the episode review. And to be able to include Boston here like it’s the most natural thing.

I realize my focus was mostly on Tasha in this episode because honestly she was the one in the thick of things but this doesn’t mean the rest of the team didn’t do their part just as brilliantly. Patterson once again did her thing and her stuff and once again was the MVP of the team. Because let’s be real, no matter who rises up for the challenge on any given day, Patterson is our LeBron. That’s just a fact.

And then there is Rich. Our favorite evolving ex-criminal found himself having to bring out all his old playbooks and tricks to counter hack the Del Toro hack and showed us once again the talents that made him the legend of the dark web back in the day. It was great seeing how happy it makes him, even if it means getting touch with his former self, but I have enough faith in his journey to know that he will only be using his skills for good and never for evil again.

L: As usual, Rich’s “slightly less than legal” approach to the problem at hand is the one that saves the day. It reminds me of the adage, “it takes a thief to catch a thief.” For all of Patterson’s skills, I don’t think she’s quite as able as Rich to put all rules aside. (Or maybe it’s just that she spends so much time designing secure systems that she—like Young—can’t quite see the flaws.) Rich’s “hacker code” zipped lips as Young stood there—gaping at how quickly Rich was able to break into his “highly secure” system—cracked me up.

But Rich isn’t just tech smarts. Somehow he has also picked up on the fact that Reade and Tasha are more than just good friends. We know that Patterson knows (or strongly suspects) that there is something between them, but I kind of doubt that she shared that information with Rich (especially when her own feelings about Zapata are so conflicted). So it caught me by surprise when Rich throws his arms around Reade and says, “Here’s to the people we care about still being alive!” We already knew that he was a Jeller shipper, but I think he’s basically a team shipper. He loves all of them and takes a vested interest in their happiness, and somehow he picked up on Reade’s happiness being tied to Zapata’s wellbeing. I really want Tasha to come home so he and Tasha can snark at each other and Rich can be totally inappropriate while also lobbing truth bombs at her and Reade like he did at Jeller. (“He loves you, he’s just confused!”) Pretty please with sugar on top??

Y: Speaking of skills, Matthew Weitz is a man who possesses not so many shining ones but somehow manages to find himself in coveted positions quite often, mostly down to luck and knowing who to surround himself by.

L: Weitz may be smarmy and snarky and totally out for number one, but he’s smart enough to know that when his life is in danger, the people he wants watching his back are this team. And really, you can’t fault that kind of judgment. After all, Pellington shut down “the Jane Doe Project,” and look how things turned out for him. Weitz might not have been the boss this team wanted, but he might turn out to be the boss they deserve—a boss who has the confidence in them to just get the hell out of their way and let them do what they are meant to do.

Weller has Jane back, and she’s finally healthy again. Is it safe to say this is the happiest that we’ve seen him all season?

Y: I thought his beautiful face was going to split in half from all that sexy crooked smiling. And just like the old saying of “when Sully cries, I cry” is extremely true, so is the one that says “when Sully smiles, I smile.” And when Kurt Weller is happy, we are all happy. We just hope it happens way more often and lasts way longer. A frequently-smiling Kurt Weller is just one of the many things that have changed over the years, all for the better and all part of this “man that Jane makes him.”

I had joked during the episode how Kurt Weller nowadays is a man who ditches work to spend the day with his wife and just shrugs and says things like, “if they need us, they can call us.” And that is something that the Kurt Weller we met early on in the show would never have said. And honestly, that is just one of the many things that are worth mentioning about the changes that Kurt has gone through and a testimony to the journey he is on. Yes, we say they are all thanks to Jane and that they would not happened if she had not come into his life, but also credit to the man himself for allowing himself to grow and change because nothing is more terrifying than leaving your comfort zone, more terrifying than changing who you are and allowing yourself to grow like this.

And it is not like he went from being one person to being a totally different person. The beauty of it is that the things inherent to his character and who he is have just shifted from their negative implications to more positive ones and that is what has made him such a better person and a happier person. He went from being a workaholic to someone who is devoted to his job but does not allow that to consume him or define him—as he told Jane last episode, he is her husband first and an agent second. He also went from being an overprotective person in a way that is overbearing to someone who is protective and caring but also allows other people to breathe, to let him know what they need and give them space—as he told Reade when he asked how Jane is doing or what he told Jane herself that he doesn’t want her to do anything for him or tell her what to do but for her to trust herself and he would be there for her. He’s gone from someone who shuts out everyone else and builds walls to someone who is still private but also acknowledges that he has friends and people who care about him and who he can open up to and lean on when he needs to—which was what he did when Jane was sick and he opened up to Patterson and Reade and trusted the team to come through.

I just really love Kurt Weller and his story and his journey and how he’s this perfect balance of tough hardcore agent who throws fridges out of windows and sweet, loving, caring husband who just wants to cook for his wife while she takes a nice warm bath—who takes his girlfriend to Venice to propose to her and looks at romantic cabins to celebrate their anniversary.

I hate him.

L: There, there. We know you do.

But yes, all of this. His character has changed, but as you pointed out, it’s not so much an about face as it is a subtle growing into the potential he had all along, a potential that was kind of locked away after the scarring effects of his childhood. His evolution isn’t quite as dramatic as Jane’s was, maybe because his childhood wasn’t quite as horrific as hers, but his journey is no less powerful. And once again, I love the fact that they needed each other to achieve these individual transformations. A good relationship shouldn’t try to change who you are, it should make you feel truly at home in the person you are inside.

Along this same note, I really loved the little beat where Jane wanted to light a candle for Roman. You can tell that Weller is caught off guard. From his perspective, Roman died weeks (months?) ago and was their adversary at the time. But Weller is able to quickly rise above this view to see things from Jane’s perspective: Roman is the only family she had left, and for her, his death is just as raw as if it had just happened. With her Remi memories restored, the connection that Jane felt to her brother is even stronger. We don’t know if Jane told Weller about seeing Roman in her hallucination, but from his reaction, I’m guessing she didn’t. So Jane’s most recent interaction with Roman is the note that he left for her in his cache, which accompanied the clue that got them the Book of Secrets and thus, the stem cells that saved her life. And because Weller loves Jane, and because he understands her, he immediately understands how important it is for her to acknowledge this gesture in some way. It was a really sweet moment between the two of them, and quietly illustrated how much they support each other.

Jane has been through a lot lately. But she finally has a clean bill of health, a future, and a little time off to spend with her husband and his sexy crooked smile. Nothing can go wrong now, right?

Y: I know I say this in every review, but I love Jane. I really love Jane. And I really admire Jane.

As rare and beautiful as sighting of a smiling Kurt Weller is, so is one of a carefree and relaxed and un-haunted Jane Doe is. I talked in the last review about the theme of rebirth when it comes to Jane and this week we see her truly embracing her second chance in a way we’ve never seen before. And I know at this point it’s an eighth or ninth “second chance,” but you know what I mean. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Jane be so confident in what she wants and going after it. Things seem so clear to her at this point—who she is, what she wants in life, what she wants to do and who she wants to be—and it is absolutely refreshing to see that.

But we know this can all mean one thing, right? Jane’s going to come face to face with something that will challenge all this—her happiness, her confidence and her view on her entire existence. At this point, it might look like Jane has made peace with Remi and her past, but I don’t think we’re done with this yet. I think the more Jane remembers, the more it will haunt her and have the power to get to her, to break her spirit and make her question and doubt everything. And as infuriating as this might sound—because we all love Jane and just want her to be happy—I think it is going to be an important part of her journey and her story. And it is going to be an exciting journey for us as well, watching this badass woman overcome yet another challenge and watching Jaimie Alexander shine like the star she is.

L: I kind of feel like the Wellers should replace their front door with a sealing hatch like the ones between watertight compartments in submarines. That way no one can ever slip anything under their door again. (And also maybe they couldn’t hear fake babysitters/terrorists knocking on the door.) You know that whatever secrets Shepherd’s puzzle is hiding will bring nothing good for Jane and will likely put her through the same sort of tailspin that learning about Avery did.

Dammit, can’t the girl catch a break for once?!

But yes, I loved seeing her being light and untroubled for a few too-brief moments, able to put everything in her past behind her for a little while. Because of course reality isn’t as easily resolved as events in her ZIP hallucination. We are reminded of this when Boston sees Jane in the bullpen. He immediately recoils, and you can see her kind of panic as she rushes to reassure him that she’s Jane, not Remi. But you know that Boston likely isn’t the only one who is skeptical that she can be trusted again. “We’re just all, just cool with her again?” How many other people has Jane encountered at the FBI who ask the same question, either to her face or behind her back? How hard does she feel like she has to work to earn back the trust that she lost? That has to add an additional layer of stress to every interaction at the FBI.

I kind of doubt that the team would be able to hide everything that she said and did as Remi, but we haven’t seen her facing any real repercussions for her actions, as neither Reade or Weitz are likely to punish Jane in any way. But the agents in the bullpen observe everything that goes down in their midst. They saw Briana being suspended for sharing non-confidential information. Would they feel that Jane is benefiting from favoritism? Would they resent her for it? We know that Jane has worried about this before, when Reade brought Zapata in. “She used to be as much a part of this team as I am. Why should I get special treatment?” Jane knows that true forgiveness takes work and time.

Even though she may be out of the woods, health-wise, there’s still a lot of healing ahead.

Our favorite couple doesn’t get too far with their getaway plans, but they don’t need to go away to be together. Who do you think is happier—Jeller, or us watching Jeller be happy?

L: Can’t we all just be happy for a little while? Well, maybe a slightly longer while? I mean, they try to go away overnight—not even for a weekend, mind you, just one lousy night, after one of them almost died—and they get a flat tire, have to hike five miles to the cabin, and then don’t even get inside the front door before they get dragged back to work.

Honestly, what does the universe have against them??

But you have to admire how they both take it in stride. And that’s really what I took away from their scenes in this episode: These two really are perfectly suited.

In the hospital, we see Jane worrying about the case, and Kurt knowing that Jane would worry about the case (just as he would) and having an answer ready for her. And then when they get stopped, just a few feet away from the long-overdue getaway they were both looking forward to, they just kind of smile and shrug their shoulders and go back to work without complaint. They are two peas in a pod who will always put everyone else’s safety above their own personal needs.

Imagine if they weren’t both like that. What if one of them was in law enforcement, but the other one wasn’t? You know there would have been a major scene and some serious marital repercussions. The partner who didn’t share that job commitment would question the commitment of the other to the relationship. There would be hurt feelings, anger, resentment. But with these two? They are so similar and so much on the same page that there is no question that both of them are going to do whatever the FBI needs them to do. They don’t even need to discuss it, they just roll up their sleeves and go back to work, side by side.

And as Jane points out, they don’t have to go away to be together, and as long as they are together, they have everything they need.

Y: What a disgusting pairing. I hate it.

I would also like an entire spin off of Jane and Kurt attempting to go on dates and then dealing with things going very very badly for them. They made plans to have drinks in season one, Mayfair got arrested. They went to the fancy Mr. Velvet, hired assassins came after them. They book a romantic getaway, they get a flat and Air Force One gets hijacked. I can totally see a show—five seasons and a movie—of those two trying to have a nice romantic time together and then their plans getting thwarted and they end up having to kick ass instead of get naked.

But seriously though, I just love seeing them so happy. Those smiles when the doctor gave them the good news were shining brighter than the sun. And the way they just accepted things also with a smile when they got the flat and found no spare and no cell signal. They’ve been through so much and yet all it takes to make them smile is to be together, even if it means a walk through an abandoned country road. Like Jane said, all that matters is that they’re together, alive and healthy and safe, and they’re just so darn cute! I mean for a couple who can kill a fully-grown man with their bare hands, how do they get to be so cute? There’s something very not fair about this whole situation.

And speaking of unfair, can we just talk about how little Jane and Kurt actually had to do in the whole “stopping Madeline from crashing the plane” situation. Yes, they did offer their fair share of help, but it was mostly Rich and Patterson working along the Bradley Dynamics guy—who’s really nice, I’ll tell you about him later. I know Jane and Kurt are an important part of the team but in this specific situation their role was very marginal. Which is to say, they could’ve very easily have left them to enjoy their romantic little cabin getaway and not dragged them back to the office! That’s probably the rudest and most unnecessary Jeller interruption in the history of Jeller interruptions!

I’m so mad right now.

We’re also mad that we have to wait three weeks until the next episode, which seems terribly unfair, what with all of these new mysteries unfolding. So let’s talk about how this second half of the season is unfolding. Are you enjoying it? What do you want to see in the remainder of the season? What tips do you have to help us get through this new hiatus? Come talk to our ask box!

—Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: edgar reade #character: tasha zapata #character: rich dotcom #character: patterson #character: boston arliss crab #character: madeline burke #character: matthew weitz

[more--than--anything]

Feature: Always with the questions, mid-season premiere edition

As usual, the more we watch this show, the more questions we have! So here's our list of most burning questions as we head into the second half of the season:

Does Remi believe she was undercover during the years she lived as Jane Doe?

Does Remi have any memories of being Jane?

Will she ever have all of her memories back?

Will Jane face consequences for her actions as Remi?

What will Shepherd do, now that she is out of CIA custody?

Did Roman really have a cure for ZIP poisoning or know where to find one?

What the heck is the Book of Secrets?

Who will be in charge of the NYO now that Reade has been "fired"?

Will Weitz manage to survive his tenure as Director of the FBI?

Is Frank Davenport the same person who was the White House Chief of Staff who introduced the Daylight program?

Will we ever find out what Orion was?

Will Patterson ever date again?

Was Roman really just talking to a disconnected phone number? Who did he think he was talking to?

What is Madeline Burke's end game? What is she trying to do? Who is she seeking revenge against?

Has Tasha really gone rogue, or is she deep undercover?

Is there any way Reade can forgive Tasha?

Will Keaton pull through and wake up from his coma??

What the hell is Sophia Larren up to and why?

Will we ever see Avery or Bethany again? Or Sarah and Sawyer for that matter?

Was Claudia really MI-6? And does that mean Tasha has murdered “a good guy”?

Who was the third kid in Jane’s flashbacks in South Africa?

Will Boston become a more permanent presence on the show?

Will we be seeing Borden or Cade again this season?

Will Nas pass by for another visit?

Any chance Bill Nye will make another appearance?

Will we ever find out what happened to Kurt’s mom?

Where is Sofia Varma? Is she on the run or in CIA custody?

Will we find out why Remi originally had no choice but to take the ZIP?

Will we get more insight about the sick person from Rich’s life/past?

Will we ever learn Patterson’s first name?

And last but certainly not least, where is Kurt’s damn thigh holster?

One more week! What questions are keeping you awake at night? Come talk to us about them!

-- Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: feature #blindspot: theories and metas #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: edgar reade #character: tasha zapata #character: patterson #character: rich dotcom #character: matthew weitz #character: jake keaton #character: Shepherd #character: roman #character: madeline burke #character: boston arliss crab #character: Nas Kamal #character: Robert Borden #character: cade

[more--than--anything]

Episode Review: "I'm having the time of my life." [S4E08]

Mid-season finales always tend to end on a major cliffhanger, and this one was no exception. We have Tasha and Reade pointing guns at each other, Kurt and Remi on the brink of hand-to-hand combat (with Remi’s health rapidly declining), and Shepherd is on the loose again. Did this episode live up to expectations?

Y: I love Blindspot’s midseason finales. They always have a way of thwarting one threat only to make way for something bigger and more sinister and more dangerous. We thought Remi was dangerous? Well, now Shepherd is on the loose. We thought Mad Maddie was all kinds of crazy? Well now she’s teamed up with the biggest most dangerous man south of the border. Nothing says happy holidays like sending you on a four-week hiatus spent eating your weight in all kinds of foods while you get more and more worried about your fictional characters day after day.

L: Blindspot definitely does cliffhanger finales right. I love how we wrap up a few loose ends, but still manage to end on this great sense of motion, like we’re paused on an indrawn breath, but we have to wait until January to exhale. Once we’re done stuffing chocolate and cookies and other holiday treats in our faces, we can use the paper bags they came in to hyperventilate into!

It’s just another day at the FBI... until NORAD reports that a nuclear missile is heading toward New York City. Well actually, someone trying to blow up New York is a pretty ordinary day at work for our team, but something about this attack is just a little different than the other ones they’ve thwarted. How does our seriously-decimated team rise to meet this new challenge?

L: “Kind of feels like we’re due for some good news right about now,” says Rich, just before all the screens at the NYO turn red and announce, “Ballistic missile inbound to New York. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” Our team is certainly no stranger to dealing with nukes and terrorists who’d like to remodel the New York City skyline, but the threats they usually tackle are of the “preventing the launch” variety. The CIRG team has 32 minutes before impact to try to minimize casualties. They immediately mobilize, sending teams out to halt incoming traffic into the city and get people into shelters.

Fortunately, our team isn’t easily fooled. Patterson discovers that the launch coordinates point to a US Navy submarine, just as Weller informs them that the Navy says all of their warheads are accounted for. Rich immediately figures out that NORAD has been hacked, their sensors tricked into detecting a missile that isn’t there and sending out an all-too-real emergency alert. (I love the callback to episode 2.07 and Rich’s fascination with the movie War Games. Also I love that the writers of this show apparently grew up on the same movies I did.) Rich goes looking for the source of the hack, but instead of being sent on the wild IP goose chase he expects, he finds a single device, at a location inside the FBI. In short order, he finds the disguised ethernet cable that Boston had Remi install, which he recognizes as his own invention.

Working backwards from the device, Rich identifies two locations that used it to access the FBI network: Boston’s safe house and the warehouse where Weller tracked Remi. They realize that Remi intended the attack as a diversion. Looking at the files that Boston pulled off the FBI servers, they discover he retrieved the locations of CIA black sites, although not the specific individuals held at each one, as well as CIA protocol in case of an emergency such as a nuclear attack. Weller calls the CIA to warn them that they are about to ambushed, but without sharing Remi’s involvement in the scheme. The CIA, of course, doesn’t need the FBI’s help (aside from our tiny joint task force, do any federal agencies on this show ever play nicely?) and go ahead with their plan to move Shepherd.

Boston is missing, so they figure correctly that Remi still needs him for something... like turning the traffic lights green so they can escape the traffic gridlock in the city. (Although the color of the traffic lights doesn’t usually seem to have much impact on real New York City gridlock.) The team finds a line of traffic lights that have been turned to green and then left at blinking yellow. Following “the yellow brick road,” Weller sets out to intercept them. He’s too late to stop Remi and Violet from freeing Shepherd (and it’s very convenient that although both Remi and Violet shoot at the CIA agents, Violet is the only one who actually hits one, while Remi just knocks the other one unconscious—thus keeping her “no killing of federal agents” record clean). Remi shoots out one of the tires in the car Weller’s driving and sends it tumbling down a hill before she heads off with Shepherd.

Boston convincingly plays possum and gets left behind when Remi departs. He is concerned about Kurt, but this is the same guy who was mildly annoyed by an explosion that punctured his jugular, so a car crash/head wound barely rates “minor inconvenience” on the Weller injury scale when Jane’s safety is at risk. Boston tells Kurt that Remi is hallucinating Roman, and they realize that time is running out to find a cure for Remi’s ZIP poisoning. Rich uses his “Deep Fake” software to create a video of Roman telling Remi that he has something she needs and sends it to the encrypted email address she was using to communicate with Boston. And fortunately for them, Remi is so lost in her hallucinatory reality that she doesn’t stop to wonder exactly how her dead brother is Skyping her from the great beyond.

Weller and Remi face off and then run at each other in what the entire internet immediately agreed appears to be the lead-in to the iconic dance lift from Dirty Dancing. (We’ll have to withhold judgment until January 11th to see if it surpasses Eli Manning and Odell Beckham’s NFL version.) But I think it’s pretty clear that putting Baby, I mean Remi, in a corner (or a cell with four corners) isn’t going to be an easy task for anyone, no matter how good your dance moves are.

So another draw for our team this week. They sort of stopped a nuclear attack that wasn’t really happening, but not in time to prevent widespread panic (and a few confessions of undying love, so hey, it’s not all bad news). They are unable to prevent Remi from freeing Shepherd, who is now on the loose. And they still don’t have a real cure for Remi’s ZIP poisoning. So basically, everything is going to hell in a handbasket (and we haven’t even gotten to Reade and Tasha holding each other at gunpoint yet), which is how we know this is the mid-season finale, right? Bring on the second half of the season. I’m ready!!

Interesting side note: With Reade suspended (and Weitz out of the office for unspecified reasons), Weller has apparently resumed the mantle of AD of the NYO. He is the one directing the tactical teams before they leave SIOC and updating the governor on the situation. But as much as we like looking at him in a suit, he has kind of a lot on his plate right now, what with both stopping and saving his wife, as well as concealing everything from the FBI, CIA, NORAD, and everyone else. The last thing he needs right now are the pressures and time commitment of the AD job. I told you, they should have put Patterson in charge. We know she is more than capable of bossing around the people in her lab, and I’m thinking she’s ready for the larger stage.

Y: I honestly do not know what they are waiting for. Appointing Patterson as boss seems so obvious. I think the suits upstairs are just worried she might be a little too good for the job. But seriously, can you imagine her as the boss? I need that. I desperately need that!

Although I am also secretly hoping this position would eventually be Tasha’s. I’ve been holding on to that since her scene with Mayfair in 1.21, and I know we’ve come a long since then and Tasha has been through so much, but I really think she’d own that position and make Mayfair so proud.

But back to our episode, it’s been a while since we’ve had a nuclear threat case of the week. And even though this was a fake one it was just as exciting watching the team solve it and get to the bottom of it as it would have been watching them stop it. I mean, we’ve already done that and we know they can pull it off—although seeing the two NASA reps again would’ve been nice. I miss Eileen.

I think my favorite thing in all this is that it took a real nuclear threat to lock Shepherd up and a fake one to get her out. I also loved that Shepherd’s initial getaway/nuclear vehicle was an ambulance in season two and her actual escape vehicle was also an ambulance. Kind of poetic in a terrifying way of you ask me.

To be honest, I never really expected them to go through with the Remi getting Shepherd out plan. I thought somehow she would get close but never be able to get it done. And now that it has happened, I won’t lie, I don’t know how I feel about it. On the one hand, I don’t want the rest of the season to become a repeat of the second season with Shepherd as the villain and the team trying to stop her again. But then again, Shepherd is one of the most interesting and compelling characters that has ever been on this show and getting her back would be incredible. And, I mean, Michelle Hurd is a rock star and having her on the show only makes it so much better. So the question is, will Shepherd be playing a big role this season? Is she the new villain? Will she somehow cross paths with Mad Maddie? And how can we have her back in a new and refreshing way that is not a repeat of the second season?

Poor Boston finds out the hard way that you can’t trust everything a non-FBI-agent noncommittally hints at to you. How does his bad day go from worse to worst?

L: I have to admit, I’ve been low-key worried about Boston ever since Remi recruited him. The odds seemed pretty evenly divided between Remi killing him to shut him up and the FBI throwing him back into supermax for the rest of his natural life. So I might be almost as happy as Rich that Boston escaped both of these fates.

Y: Oh yes, absolutely! The moment Remi showed up at his door step, I was almost 100% certain things were going to end up extremely terribly for Boston so you can say I am insanely beyond relieved that he survived all this. All the signs were pointing towards a terrible fate for Boston but I guess he was lucky that Weller is so blinded by love for his wife and the need to protect her that he somehow got under that blanket of protection. I just hope this also serves as a gateway for him to be more involved in the future somehow. I think he proved his usefulness, not just in this episode, and we do need more snarky, wise-ass, former criminals on this team, don’t we?

L: Always!

Boston has apparently moved from his narwhal period into his kiwi period. The greatest threat to the narwhal is their isolation, but the greatest threat to the flightless kiwi is apparently invasive mammalian predators. So if the greatest threat to Remi is her isolation, the greatest threat to the under house arrest and therefore (in theory) flightless Boston is the very predatory Remi. As Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” Unfortunately for Boston, his art didn’t make him realize that he’d been played just a little while sooner.

But he is a survivor (just like Rich is, which might explain their mutual attraction). He does whatever he has to do in order to survive, whether it’s playing dead or immediately letting go of his anger at being played by Remi in order to try to curry favor with Remi and Violet and finding ways to show them how useful he can be. Roman warns Remi, “He will rat you out the first chance he gets,” which is pretty much exactly what Boston does when he ends up in FBI custody. And to be honest, I did kind of wonder if Boston was playing on Rich’s sympathies there at the end. The little smirk on his face could mean that he’s happy about being free, that he’s happy about Rich, or that he got his way. Like Rich, he’s just a little bit ambiguous in the morality department. I hope we see more of him this season!

And I’m not gonna deny it, Boston and Rich may be individually a mess and possibly even worse together, but the parallel of the two of them torturing love confessions out of each other (Rich when Boston faked the missile attack and Boston when Rich lied to him about his fate) is kind of precious, and I am really invested in the two of them getting some heavy-duty counseling and working things out between them. I mean, how often do you go from “I love you” to “You are a horrible human being. You’re a monster. You’re a garbage person” in just a matter of moments? Those are some strong, deep emotions there. How can you not ship it??

Y: Patterson was not wrong when she called their relationship toxic and she is very much right in so many ways but I think they can also be so good to each other. Just like Rich and Boston themselves, there is always a comedic element to how their relationship will be represented but it will always carry a layer of true, honest emotion. And there’s also something very real about the relationship between those two and something very true to who they are. I mean, doesn’t every relationship go turbulently between I love you’s and I hate you’s? I loved how those two take their competitiveness everywhere they go, from wanting to be the best hackers to competing for the FBI job and in who can give the best love speeches and who can trick the other into confessing their feelings. It’s different and it’s fresh and it’s fun and it keeps adding layers to these characters and make us want more and more of them.

Meanwhile, Patterson hooks Weitz and Reade up with fake passports for their trip to Mexico City. Does this dubiously dynamic duo have any success in their hunt to bring in Zapata?

L: Weitz and Reade continue to be the oddest couple of all, although we sadly don’t get to spend as much time this week with the buddy cop show. Patterson pretty much sums it up for us: “You and Weitz? Weird.” And she shares our reservations about Weitz’s abilities as a backup. He does carry a gun in this episode, but we don’t see him fire it. (I’m just gonna go out on a limb and guess that he’s not nearly as accurate a shot as Madeline is.) But nonetheless, our good cop/bad cop team is off to Mexico.

Y: This definitely is the strangest pairing we have ever had on the show, more even than when Rich and Kurt ended up as a married couple in a creepy sex-crazed underground college cult, but that’s what I love about the show. The richness of these characters gives us all these fun possibilities of pairings and they are always an opportunity for something new and fresh and to send these characters on exciting journeys and new and challenging tests to add to their journey.

I kind of expected we would see slightly more of the two than just them finally ending up crossing paths with Tasha but we don’t. And yet somehow they end up in the exact right corner of the market where she is. I am not doubting Reade’s abilities and skills to track her down but the investigation must have been fun with Weitz as his partner. I just rue the missed opportunity of Weitz sitting there watching Reade do all the hard work while he undoubtedly used every chance he got to enjoy the new toy he’s been issued.

L: I wish we could have seen a little more of the two of them tracking Tasha down, too. But whatever they are doing seems to be working, as not only do they find Tasha, they manage to neatly corner her. And frankly, if I were Weitz, I’d probably be a little nervous. Because, as Patterson would say, Tasha is for sure a better shot than he is. (Although he does appear to at least be holding his gun correctly.) And she hasn’t been a big fan of his since he manipulated her into digging up dirt on Mayfair. Then again, killing/injuring the Director of the FBI might make it hard for Tasha to get her job back, once she makes it through this mess, so maybe that’s a point in his favor? Either way, he definitely must seem like less of a threat than Reade, because Tasha immediately turns her back on him to point her gun at Reade.

To be fair, shooting the AD of the NYO isn’t a much better plan, career-wise. And even though Tasha might have been quick to shoot Jane, I’m betting that she’s not quite as eager to shoot the man she loves. But for all his tough words (“This ends with you in cuffs or one of us dead”), I don’t think Reade is any more eager to shoot Tasha than she is to shoot him.

But honestly, I’m rooting for Reade right now. If anyone can save Tasha from herself (whether she’s deep undercover or just turning to a life of crime), it’s Reade. No matter how angry he is at her right now, he’s still the person who cares about her the most.

Y: I don’t think I have ever rooted for anyone on this show like I am rooting for Reade at the moment to be able to pull Tasha out of this—regardless of what this is. And honestly, she’s saved his ass so many times before over the years that he owes her big time and it’s about time someone had Tasha’s back like she’s had everyone else’s all this time.

And even if he’s driven by anger and betrayal at this point, we know behind all this is love and friendship and a connection and partnership that goes deeper than anything. I have faith in Reade, almost as much as I’m terrified for the both of them right now of how all this is going to unfold. And no matter how things end, there are only more obstacles along the way. Let’s not forget who else is also in the picture here, whether it’s Madeline and her new bestie or Larren over at the CIA who’s probably out there measuring body bags for Zapata’s homecoming.

Speaking of Zapata, she and her new “partner” politely request a meeting with a Mexican crime lord. Are they able to convince him to let them borrow his ace hacker?

Y: Before we get into how dark and sinister and scary their little trip south was, can we please just take a moment to appreciate Tasha/Audrey speaking Spanish. Look, don’t judge me but that was insanely hot, okay? I need more of that, please.

Okay now, let’s focus on the other things that happened...

L: If Reade and Weitz are an odd couple, I don’t even know what to call Tasha and Madeline. The minute Tasha sees the alert about the missile heading toward New York City, she assumes it’s Mad Maddie’s doing. And really, that does seem like a logical conclusion; with the casual disregard for human life that Madeline has demonstrated thus far, nuking New York City doesn’t seem too far out of the range of possibility. I’m not sure which of them seems crazier: Mad Maddie or the woman who is determined to make all her crazy plans become reality??

I can’t decide if I am impressed by Madeline’s resilience or terrified by how blithely unconcerned Madeline is about the attack. I’m going to go with door number two, because as Tasha points out, HCI Global headquarters is in New York, so if the city is destroyed, HCI will take a huge blow as well. If the success of HCI was truly Madeline’s goal, this news should concern her. But it doesn’t. Like Remi, Madeline’s madness is showing. (Although unlike Remi, this isn’t exactly a new development.)

Y: I think the one thing we can say we have learned in this first half of the season is that Madeline’s brand of crazy is a whole new level for Blindspot and that we should always—always—be terrified by everything she does and says. We’re maybe starting to get some indication as to what is driving her, but whatever it is, it has pushed her to a point of complete disregard for human life, no matter who it is, and made her so blindly focused on it that she does not care what else happens around her as long as her to-do list is on track. We’re still not crystal clear on her endgame or why she’s even doing all this, but we at least know that we should be scared. Very, very scared.

And mostly for Tasha, who, the longer she spends time with Maddie, will find herself surrounded more and more by crazier and more terrifying people and find herself falling deeper and deeper into this dark pit.

L: Crazy Train, Inc. finds Franco Cortez’s accountant and politely ask him at gunpoint to arrange a nice luncheon with Franco. Unsurprisingly, this approach isn’t successful, but then very surprisingly, Tasha turns her back on him. That seems like a really out-of-character mistake for her to make, but then again, she was standing with her back to Madeline, which was probably even more unnerving. Miguel goes for a gun hidden under his desk, but Madeline neatly puts a bullet in his shooting arm. I feel like we’re supposed to be surprised that Madeline is a good shot, but I’m not. She’s clearly spent the past thirty years working on her doctoral thesis on “how to kill people who piss you off.” Marksmanship seems like an intro class in that program.

Team Bad Girls get their lunch with Franco and sit down for an awkward chat at gunpoint. Madeline tells him that they can help him with a rival cartel in Bartoba. Franco is unconvinced until Madeline asks him to check his phone, where there is a news blurb about a non-fatal hit on the president of Bartoba (right below the nuke heading for New York), which she tells him is a “proof of concept.” “You’re crazy, you know? I love it,” Franco tells her. Oh Franco, you don’t know the half of it. Crazy doesn’t begin to cover her. Franco offers to swap Del Toro for Tasha. And I don’t know, but part of me is sorry that deal didn’t go through. I feel like Tasha would be safer pretty much anywhere other than beside Madeline, even in the custody of a Mexican crime lord. Franco agrees, and Madeline sends Tasha off to fetch Del Toro in Canada.

Y: Oh, I also wanted that swap deal to go through only to see how Tasha will handle this one. She just finds herself going from one terrible situation to another and it has been amazing watching Tasha handle it all and watching Audrey being given all these amazing opportunities to shine.

Also, working with Franco would have meant more Spanish speaking moments from Tasha and I am shallow like that.

But back to that lunch—how amazing was that scene? The back and forth between Madeline and Franco was so incredibly written and so chillingly evilly played by both actors. Hats off to everyone in that scene, seriously, I was blown away. Seeing someone like Franco comment on Madeline’s crazy but also be in awe of it was great, especially considering that that someone is a feared drug lord himself, so I am sure he has his own brains of crazy. When one crazy is left in awe of another, you know things are about to get very interesting.

L: There is nothing about this partnership that is remotely comforting. I wonder if this will be a one-shot deal, or if we have to worry about Franco too now in the back half of the season?

I do have to say that Madeline avoiding Canada, the land of the most apologetically polite people on earth, cracks me up. I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that she’s allergic to the words, “I’m sorry.” But Madeline opting out of a trip to the frozen north means that Tasha is on her own now. I love the way they filmed the chase scene: Tasha looking up to see Reade and then taking off through the market before being cornered by Weitz and Reade. Weitz does manage to point the business end of his gun at her in a convincing fashion, but there is no way he’s as good a shot as Madeline, so it’s fortunate for Weitz and Reade that she’s already departed. But it’s unfortunate for Tasha, as there is no one to help rescue her from this predicament.

Which brings us to Tasha. My husband turned to me at the end of this episode and said, “She’s not convincing as a bad guy. She just looks like she’s about to cry all the time.” And I have to admit, I don’t disagree. I know they are walking a fine line with this character (just as they are with Jane/Remi), trying to make her evil enough to convince you that she’s turned to the Dark Side, yet still leave the door open for some sort of redemption later. But if I’m honest, it’s not quite working. Even Madeline doesn’t buy it, telling Tasha, “If you’re getting cold feet, I can handle it.” Tasha is obviously not embracing the Super Villain lifestyle. As with Madeline, the problem here is motivation. We’re currently assuming that the CIA set up the phone theft to frame Tasha, then offered her this undercover gig as a way to clear her name and restore her career. And yes, that’s a powerful motivator for Tasha, but ultimately, it’s just a job. Yes, she’s dedicated herself to a career in law enforcement, but there are other things she could be doing to earn a buck. Things that don’t entail killing fellow agents and pointing guns at the man you love. What is keeping her from walking away from this madness? I need to know that it’s something bigger than just her job. Did they threaten Reade’s job too? His life? Her family? The team’s safety?

I am actually hoping that Reade wins this round. One, Tasha won the last round, so it’s his turn. But two, I think Tasha needs an intervention. Whatever trouble she is in, it doesn’t seem to be something that she is willing or able to get herself out of. The longer this goes on, the bigger the hole she digs for herself. She’s already killed a fellow intelligence agent and terrorized a poor tech geek. Next on her agenda is crashing an airplane with who knows how many innocent people aboard. Someone needs to stop her, and Reade might be the only person who can.

Kurt was dealt a pretty massive blow last week, when he discovered that Jane had reverted to Remi. But the news just keeps getting worse for our favorite special agent, doesn’t it?

Y: Kurt Weller isn’t having a great week, is he? This poor boy just goes from one horrible week into another without catching a break.

There is so much to unpack with Kurt in this episode, for starters he has to deal with the Remi running off and how to handle that first situation, and then there’s that inconvenient nuclear threat, on top of that Remi is trying to get Shepherd out of CIA custody, then there’s the revelation that Remi/Jane’s condition is getting worse and finally the information about the potential cure. I don’t know about you, but that is enough to keep me busy for about two years and Kurt has to handle it all in one day.

L: Kurt makes some interesting decisions in this episode. First, to conceal Jane’s reversion to Remi from everyone but Rich and Patterson. We can’t fault his motivation: He knows that working with the team is important to Jane, and he wants her on his team, at work and at home. If the powers that be get wind of her realigned loyalties, I’m not sure they’d be willing to accept the ZIP poisoning explanation, even if she can be “cured.” There is no way they would permit Jane to continue working as an FBI asset and part of their premiere CRIG team. But on the flip side, that’s a lot of secrets to be keeping, from everyone at the FBI, and by the end of the episode, NORAD and the CIA too. Which means that I’m not just worried about Jane’s career now, but Weller is putting his own on the line as well as Patterson and Rich. I am sure that Weller would give up his career in a heartbeat to have his wife back, but there is a good chance that he ends up with neither his wife nor his career at this rate.

But that decision is eclipsed by an even more questionable one he makes later. Patterson uses Roman’s research and enlists the help of a neurobiologist to design a treatment that might re-awaken Remi’s Jane memories. But an earlier trial of the treatment was shut down because a patient died, and Patterson doesn’t hold back when she tells Weller about the risks: There is a good chance that this procedure could kill Remi. Weller doesn’t hesitate. “If there’s even a 1% chance that we can get Jane back, we have to do it,” whether Remi is willing or not. And this is a very interesting parallel to the conversation that Remi has with Shepherd about the risks of the ZIP she was injected with. Shepherd admits that she knew that the ZIP might be fatal. Remi tells her, “If you had told me the truth, I still would’ve gone through with it on my terms. But you robbed me of the chance to make that decision for myself.” Just like Shepherd, Weller wants to rob her of the chance to make this decision for herself. And it also contradicts what he told Remi in the previous episode: “Jane has exactly what you don’t. That’s the choice to be whoever she wants to be.” Choice is supposedly the difference between Jane and Remi. But if Weller takes this choice away from her, the choice to live as Remi or as Jane, then he’s no better than Shepherd in the end. It might be different if this procedure could cure Remi’s ZIP poisoning and save her life, but Patterson makes it clear that it will not. Jane took choice away from Roman when she injected him with ZIP, and ultimately destroyed any chance of having a loving relationship with her brother again. By going ahead with this plan, Weller might be able to bring back Jane’s memories, but he would do so at the expense of her trust and probably his marriage. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

I also want to talk about how calm and collected Kurt is about the whole imminent-death-by-nuclear-bomb thing. I mean, maybe he’s just used up all his stress on Jane, but he has no reason to doubt the intel he’s received, and he still takes charge of the situation and takes a few precious minutes to calm Rich down. And then immediately calls Jane to tell her he loves her—just in case he doesn’t survive. (And I’m gonna feel some kind of cheated if Jane doesn’t listen to that message at some point, either as Jane or Remi.) And it’s moments like this that remind us why he was the head of the CIRG group at the NYO. He’s a natural leader and completely cool under fire. His wife is dying and has run off to resume her former terrorist lifestyle, he’s facing imminent death from an incoming nuclear warhead, and he’s all, “Take a minute, Rich, and pull yourself together.”

And also, this may be why he’s Remi/Jane’s soulmate. I mean, who else is going to take all the bombs (both literal and figurative) that she lobs at him in stride and just keep going?

Y: Shepherd was not wrong when she said that Jane was tailor-made for Kurt. Honestly, it’s not just Jane as Jane. I think no matter what version of her she is, ultimately those two will always be perfect for each other. I think Shepherd may have always known it somehow and now it’s time for the two of them to realize it.

Back to Kurt’s laundry list of things he had to do this week—one of which by the way, was tumble down a cliff in a car, let’s not forget—I just need to talk about Kurt Weller as acting AD for a moment. How awesome was watching him take charge again? It was so good to see him stand there and lead the FBI, to give out orders and be a leader once again. There was something about that scene that gave me flashbacks to the Pilot episode and also to season two. Kurt has grown so much since then, both as an agent and as a person, and it reflects in how he talks to the team and to his agents. I love Reade as AD, but there is just something special about Kurt Weller in that position. And I do realize that at this point in this review I have voiced my support for four different people taking this position.

But speaking of how much Kurt has changed—thanks mostly to Jane coming into his life—the fact that he takes a moment to tell the team to be careful and then to help Rich calm down just goes to show what a great arc this character has been through and just how he’s a natural leader. His scene with Rich was absolutely precious, especially that it led to that voicemail that, let’s all come clean right now, we’ve all watched over fifty times already and cried every single time. And yes, I will feel cheated if Jane doesn’t hear—whether as Jane or as Remi, I don’t care.

I don’t know how and when this will happen exactly, considering the episode had those two running towards each other with every intention to not embrace, kiss, and make up. So, we’ll wait to see how this plays out—I am so torn between seeing another epic fight between the two or something completely unexpected.

My main concern with Kurt this week is, like L pointed out, the whole “give Jane/Remi the cure no matter what.” That raises so many flags for me, and I was worried they might not address it, but I am glad they did and I am glad that it was Rich who brought it up. Choice has been a huge theme in this show from day one, and we have seen them tackle it repeatedly and in various ways, and especially in this episode and the last. I can understand Kurt’s point of view. No one can fault him for wanting to cure his wife, to save her from dying, to do whatever needs to be done to get her back. And I think at this point, it doesn’t matter if getting her Jane’s memories is an option. Her body and her mind are failing. We need to save her from that before anything else, right? What’s the point of getting her Jane memories back if she only has hours to live anyway? I honestly cannot blame Kurt and I understand his desperation at this point. But this does not mean it will be okay to do any of this without her consent—and once again, thank you Rich for mentioning it.

Kurt said it in the previous episode, the difference between Remi and Jane has been Jane having the freedom to choose, so I really hope that he will not rob Remi of her choice. The parallels with Jane taking Roman’s choice away and Shepherd taking Remi’s choice away and the repercussions are absolutely perfect here, and I want more than anything for them to handle this properly when the time comes.

Remi’s plans to free Shepherd have been all that’s been keeping her going since she got the ZIP poisoning diagnosis. But you know what they say about being careful what you wish for... How does their mother/daughter reunion go?

L: There is no question that Remi’s health takes a turn for the decidedly worse this week. Her headaches are back with a vengeance, as are her hallucinations of Roman. She begins to talk to him in front of other people, unable to remember that he isn’t really there. But her subconscious mind just won’t stop, pointing out that Weller was right, she did fail in her plan.

Y: I loved how they played the deterioration of Remi’s health and how it was portrayed on screen both physically and mentally and how it reflected on her emotionally. She kept getting weaker physically as the episode progressed but more interesting was how her grasp on reality similarly started to fade away. Roman’s return is clearly the strongest evidence of that and watching how she completely crossed the line between what is real and what is not was done really well. And through all that, Remi knows one thing is certain, she is dying, and that she has only thing left to do.

L: She has one final hope of redemption: Freeing Shepherd. But as Remi quickly discovers, sometimes getting what you want doesn’t actually give you what you need. She has been clinging to the thought that “Shepherd will have a plan. She’ll know exactly what to do.” Only Shepherd doesn’t. And that is the worst outcome that Remi could possibly have imagined. She has no one left to take up the cause for which she is literally giving her life, inch by painful inch. Even her paid muscle, Violet, is dead, yet another victim of association with Remi.

Y: That mother-daughter reunion was just awesome and the impact of certain revelations only helped worsen Remi’s condition. Shepherd is not the driven revolutionary she expected her to be. She’s broken and tired and hopeless. She also admitted that she was aware of the fact that the ZIP was going to eventually kill Remi and all the promises in the world about how she had hoped Remi would have returned to her by then could not make things better for Remi. Not only is this another instant in her life characterized by someone taking her choice away from her but in more ways than one, this is a form of abandonment, something that has been a constant in Remi’s life.

L: This is another situation where not having access to Jane’s memories puts Remi at a disadvantage. Remi was trained to resist interrogation, but she has no memory of being held by the CIA. She doesn’t remember what it was like to go through that. And even if she did... Jane was tortured for three months. Shepherd has been in CIA custody for more than two years by now. She is not the same person she was when the FBI arrested her. What we see instead is a broken woman who has given up, the righteous fire that drove her extinguished by prolonged abuse. Even though she’s been rescued, her only ally is someone who might be her daughter or might be the enemy who locked her up, but either way, is definitely losing her mind. I can’t blame Shepherd for wanting to just get away from all of this, find a little of the peace she’s been denied for so long.

I must admit that I am still mildly amused that death metal is part of CIA torture. Although maybe that depends on the prisoner? Do other prisoners get elevator music? Or static-y hold music, interrupted by advertisements?

Y: Well, I would have voted for elevator music, or maybe the endless holiday mall jingles? Don’t get me wrong, they’re great, but why do they now start in October? Isn’t that slightly overkill?

L: October? They’ve got decorations on display by the start of September! But I think you might be on to something. It must be a CIA plot. I’ll tell them anything to make them stop!

I am excited to have Shepherd back again. She was such a satisfying villain because she was so calculating and rational about achieving her goals. It is interesting to compare her to Madeline, who is almost her polar opposite, crazy where Shepherd was sane, over the top where Shepherd was pragmatic, driven by revenge versus driven by a misguided sense of protecting the public. It will be interesting to see what Shepherd does next. She seems to rally and get with the program after Remi’s little tough love talk, but she still seems a far cry from the ultra-villain we saw in season two. (And that scene was amazing. Jaimie Alexander has done an incredible job portraying the Remi/Jane dichotomy this season, but this scene might be her best yet.) Somehow I doubt that Shepherd is going to become the leader that Remi expects her to. I can’t help but wonder if Shepherd will ultimately die this season, too, effectively destroying Remi’s last tie to her past.

I really love the role reversal we see between Shepherd and Remi in this scene. In the scenes we saw from earlier in Remi’s life, she was a little more than a tool wielded by Shepherd. Shepherd had a goal, and Remi was simply a piece of that plan. Shepherd used her, expected Remi to do what was asked of her, regardless of what Remi might really have wanted. So instead of marrying her fiancé, Remi had her memory erased and was delivered to another man. But in this scene, we see a tired, faded Shepherd who just wants to run away and find somewhere she can live in peace, and a Remi with no sympathy for her, totally focused only on what she wants to accomplish. She is her mother’s daughter, as Kurt said, exactly what her mother made her to be.

Shepherd tells Remi that Roman was looking into the work of someone named Kallisto. But the last time Shepherd saw Roman was in the brief window between retrieving him from the FBI lockup and her arrest in the wake of Phase Two, more than two years ago. Long before Roman launched his plans to punish Jane and bring down Crawford, probably before Roman even showed any signs of ZIP poisoning himself. In other words, this is seriously old intel, almost certainly superseded by whatever information was on the drives Roman hid. If Remi has to choose between whatever information she and Shepherd can dig up and whatever the FBI can find, she is clearly choosing the harder path by sticking with Shepherd.

Y: But back to Remi/Jane, I have a confession to make here. You’d think since it has taken us so long to get this review done—which I admit is 93% my fault—that we’d have some deep analysis to share with you, but the longer it has taken me to get this done, the harder it has become to put my thoughts on Remi/Jane down. There is just so much here to discuss and to talk about. The seven episodes leading up to this have been huge, monumental even, in Remi/Jane’s journey. It has put her through so much, unraveled so much for her and for us, and given us so much to work with and unwrap about her journey, her mental state, her emotional state, etc.…

We have touched upon so many themes and topics that have been an integral part of Jane’s story from day one in the first half of the season and I just feel like to truly grasp it and give it justice we need to take a step back and dissect it one by one. There has just been so much to take in, it sometimes feels a little overwhelming. We’ve seen Remi confront demons from her past such as abandonment, being dispensable and having her free will taken from her. We have seen her have to confront the life Jane has been living in which she has everything that Remi never had. We’ve seen her have to face her own mortality, to stand face to face with people who represents two completely opposite sides of any spectrum in Shepherd and Kurt, and we have seen her have to confess to her own failures.

Honestly, looking back, I just cannot believe it has only been eight episodes and all this has happened. I don’t know how things will go forward from here but I think this has been the most exciting stretch of episodes for Remi/Jane, the most challenging, the most telling and the most revealing. Whatever happens from here on, one thing is for sure, nothing is ever going to be the same for her and she is never going to be the same again. She can’t go back to being the old Remi, and she can’t go back to being the old Jane. Whoever comes out of this ordeal is going to have to be a new person who rises like a phoenix from the ashes of both women.

And I cannot wait to see Jaimie Alexander shine as she portrays all of this.

And finally... Jeller. For a couple that doesn’t even talk to each other until the final moments of the episode, they still manage to have a massive impact on one another. Is there any hope left for our favorite couple?

L: Well, Tasha and Reade are pointing guns at each other, so Kurt and Remi running toward each other for hand-to-hand combat is maybe slightly better? I’m not going to lie, I loved the fight scene between Kurt and Jane at the start of season two, so I am kind of excited about this development. And I think it’s going to be a pretty even match: Remi has an advantage because Kurt won’t want to hurt her, but as we saw in this episode, Remi’s health is declining rapidly, which gives Kurt an advantage.

But as we’ve seen both Kurt and Remi acknowledge, this fight isn’t really Remi versus Kurt. It’s really more Remi versus her Jane self. Kurt merely represents everything that Remi is fighting: Her failed mission that took away everyone she cared about; a government that betrayed her; and a life as Jane that gave her all the things she wasn’t supposed to want out of life. Remi gave up her chance at a marriage, a family, a normal life, even a normal life expectancy when she was injected with ZIP. Jane had all of those things: A loving husband, a family with a daughter and a step-daughter, an extended family of close friends, a rewarding career that gave her purpose. Remi has just begun to realize everything that she had as Jane, and part of her is angry that she would want it. But she does want it. That’s why she couldn’t kill Weller. If her ZIP poisoning hadn’t given her the urgency to set her plans in motion, she might have been tempted to stay in that pretend life for even longer. And the fact that Jane’s life was tempting to her is what makes her so angry.

I’m excited to see what happens next, especially how Remi deals with a Weller who still refuses to see her as his enemy.

Y: One thing we’ve learned on this show is never ever give up on Jeller. And that every time we find ourselves in a place where things cannot look more bleak, we come out of it stronger and eventually realize that part of the journey was necessary to take them to this next level of their relationship where they are better and closer. Watching Remi hate Jane’s life but also envy it at the same time has been great but more so has been watching how these two, no matter what they are going through or what version of her identity Jane is, that they will always gravitate towards one another, how they will blindly trust each other and how they will always protect and save one another. That is why Remi could not take Kurt out even though she has had many opportunities to do so and she might not admit it yet, but she has grown to care for him, not just as a residual of Jane’s feelings for him, but as Remi. If she had enough time, she would definitely have fallen for him as hard as Jane fell for Kurt.

I’m just as excited to see what happens next. I’m confident that these two are endgame and will always end up back together, but what makes them fun and one of the most exciting ships I’ve ever shipped is that every season is a new journey and a new adventure to find their way back to each other. Because that’s just the way they are. They’re inevitable.

How are you holding up after that massive cliffhanger ending? Did you have enough chocolate? Do you have any advice for surviving the next two weeks without Blindspot? Please, share your secrets with us! We’ll be here, probably curled up in the fetal position, until then!

—Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: kurt weller #character: jane doe #character: edgar reade #character: tasha zapata #character: patterson #character: rich dotcom #character: boston arliss crab #character: matthew weitz #character: madeline burke #character: Shepherd #ship: Jane/Kurt #ship: tasha/reade

[more--than--anything]

Episode Review: "Try and stop me." [S04E02]

I am going to go out on a limb here and say, aside from 3.14, this episode probably had the lowest death toll of any Blindspot episode. And I guess after the premiere, it’s a good thing. But other than that surprising development, how was the second episode of this season?

Y: That was so much fun!! I mean aside from the fact that Remi continues to be evil and manipulative and also dying and Tasha is off sightseeing in Europe and also being evil, I suppose, the episode was all kinds of fun! I think this season is shaping up quite nicely and finding the right rhythm between fun and humorous, action and explode-y, and angsty and heartbreaking.

L: Maybe they have a quota on deaths, and they’re close to hitting it for this month? But yes, I enjoyed this case and watching Remi be all... Remi-ish. Even if she is scaring me on lots of levels. Plus we got Boston back, although the Dotcrab ship isn’t in much better shape than Jeller. But at least everyone there is officially alive, unlike the other half of Reade’s ship. This show is so hard on relationships. The B in FBI is for “broken-hearted,” right?

This week’s case has been under the team’s nose since long before Jane Doe appeared with her body of clues. It’s been sitting innocently in the corridors of the NYO for thirteen years but only just came to light—and not a moment too soon if you ask Remi.

L: The team is guided to this week’s case via a literal map, the bas-relief map of the world installed just outside the door of the NYO. Rich notices that the shape of the Tasman Sea matches one of the puzzles they found on the drive they retrieved in Tokyo, and the color and texture of the stonework is different from the rest of the map. He suggests that they bring in Boston Arliss Crab, his art forger ex-boyfriend who is also a sculptor. (I was a little confused by the initial animosity between Boston and Patterson. I thought they had parted on friendly terms after their undercover venture in 2.14, since she apparently hired him to work on her Wizardville app?) Boston figures out that the inlaid stone is magnetite, and they measure the level of magnetism from each inlay to get a series of numbers that, when combined with the numbers in the original tattoo, gives them a web address. The web address, in turn, gives them a physical address, and Remi and Patterson set off to check it out.

The location appears to be abandoned, with the exception of an ATM machine. (Sadly, it does not dispense cash from the Bank of Terrorism the team closed last week.) It prompts them to make a transaction, and Patterson figures out that the design on the screen reveals the PIN. But when she enters it, instead of serving up money, the machine pumps gas into the room that knocks both women unconscious. When they wake up, they are in a server room, and their weapons and phones are missing. They are greeted by a man named Jason Stack who claims to work for the NSA in Zero Division, where he has supposedly been tasked with running a secret “inter-agency intel sharing program” that enables agents from all branches of the intelligence community to share and compare data. He tells them that “the government is handcuffed by bureaucracy and ego,” and frankly, he’s singing Remi’s song there. He asks them to bring him three FBI case files to help stop a militia group that is plotting an attack on the country.

Back in the office, Weller calls Nas, who tells him that she has no knowledge of Stack or his group. Boston tracks down the original sculptor of the panel, Andrew Jackness (amusingly named after Blindspot’s production designer), a professor of Art History at Georgetown University. Jackness has passed away, but digging into that time period at Georgetown University, they find that Stack was also there, posing as a visiting professor. Keaton’s CIA database helps the team identify Stack as Russian Agent Boris Sokoloff.

And honestly, at this point I am seriously concerned about our intelligence community. I mean, Zero Division is an off-books department that is so secret that the FBI didn’t know about it until Nas showed up... but apparently Russian spies know all about it. And now this guy has been masquerading as an NSA agent for thirteen years, recruiting agents from every intelligence agency, and none of the agents he recruited to help him were able to do the same research our Team Fed did in a few hours, tops? I love how this show always makes me feel so safe!

The team decides their best bet is to play along with Sokoloff and send Remi and Patterson back with the files he asked for. Patterson’s lab is working to identify the gas that he used in order to develop an antidote that will allow them to remain conscious and figure out where they are being taken. Keaton shares some more intel with the team: The CIA helped Sokoloff’s wife and daughter defect to the US in 2000 by staging an explosion that Sokoloff believed killed them. Remi immediately realizes she can use this to her benefit and snaps pictures of the two of them off Patterson’s screens. She then tampers with Patterson’s antidote pill, replacing it with sugar.

They return to the ATM, and Remi and Patterson are both gassed again. As Remi planned, she remains awake after Patterson passes out and gets the jump on Sokoloff. She tells him that she knows his real identity and offers him a deal: She will protect the location of his hideout if he provides her with the information he has on CIA black sites. And then she tells him that his wife and daughter are still alive, showing him the photos she snapped from Patterson’s lab as proof. If he gives her the information she needs, she will tell him where his family is. He goes along with the deal and starts downloading the black site information to a USB drive but then triggers an alarm under his desk that Remi can’t see.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Keaton tells the team that a Russian hit squad the CIA has been monitoring has been activated. Rich and Boston track the goons to Sokoloff’s location, and the FBI heads out to rescue Remi and Patterson. Remi tells Sokoloff to take her hostage, assuring him that the FBI won’t shoot him if she’s in front of him. The team bursts in, Remi gives Kurt a tiny nod, and he shoots Sokoloff. Remi pockets the drive, but she got only part of the data she needed. The FBI seizes Sokoloff’s server farm (and presumably his ATM gas chamber, so they can trap the agents who were sharing information with him?), so Remi might have a second chance to grab the data she needs from the seized servers... if she can get to it before the CIA realizes that information has been leaked and moves all their prisoners.

So a victory for Team Fed. (We don’t know what happened to the Russian hit squad. Did they arrest them, too? I hope?) And a partial victory for Remi, who at least knows where she can get the information she needs. Which is probably more alarming than fake off-book NSA divisions running around gathering classified intel to report to the Russian government.

Y: I agree that Patterson’s initial aversion to having Boston brought in was a bit weird, especially since apparently they became good friends while he was working on Wizardville with her. But I guess you can be friends with someone and still be irritated by them, right?

With that said, I thought the little magnet trick Boston did with the map was one of the coolest things they’ve ever done. It was just so aesthetically pleasing to watch. Another cinematically beautiful scene was the standoff between Remi and Sokoloff and then when Kurt and the team joined. There was just something about the way that was all filmed that was beautiful visually and also added to the tension in the scene and in the characters. Amazing directing right there.

I also loved that this episode gave two of my favorite Blindspot go-to tropes. Have my mentioned how much I love that this show loves it tropes? Because I do. Anyway, nothing wrong with an episode that uses both “Evil Russians” and “Shady NSA” in its plot. How could you go wrong with that? And this time it’s both the FBI and the CIA falling victim to the evilness and the shadiness. Hand me that popcorn because I am here for all of it. I know the NSA was innocent on this occasion, but just the fact that no one doubted their shadiness makes it all that much more fun. And Nas being mentioned was great—I already miss her and want her back. The team are lucky to have this awesome shady lady on their side even though she works with the NSA.

I think more importantly for this case—and I am assuming for all the upcoming cases in this part of the season—is how it affects Remi and ties in with her endgame both logistically and emotionally/mentally. This episode reminded me a lot of the other Russian spy episode way back in season one and how that had resonated with Jane then, at a time when she was still unaware of her true identity. Back then, she wondered if the Russian spies ever regretted their decisions of giving up their whole lives for their cause and reflected on the fact that one of the spies had genuinely fallen in love with his wife/target. It would be interesting to see Remi’s reaction to that now. But instead, we got to see her deal with a spy who, not unlike her, had his entire life turned upside down when he lost his family. Hearing Remi talk to Sokoloff about getting a second chance to be with his family tied in perfectly to her situation, and when the show does things like that I get excited. These small moments are necessary for the character’s journey. They may not necessarily be monumental moments, but they slowly start getting through their small cracks, breaking them up from the inside.

L: I loved the parallels to the earlier Russian spy case, too, especially the part where Remi told Sokoloff, “You’re gonna get a second chance to know your kid again.” But honestly, it also made me sad that we haven’t seen Avery yet this season. It’s one thing for Remi to continue her Jane act for the team, whom she claims to hate. But to do that with the daughter she longs to connect with for real? I think that would have really thrown Remi for a loop and forced her to question her priorities a bit more than we are seeing.

Y: But that is not the only thing that tied in with Remi. She now has a thumb drive with very very dangerous information on it and while it may have been corrupted when Sokoloff removed it from the computer, luckily for her, she met someone on this case with advanced computer skills and questionable morals who I think won’t mind lending a hand for the right price. Not good. Not good at all.

The team welcomed back one of their members this week, Kurtis I-Don’t-Know-His-Middle-Name Weller, along with two familiar faces who assisted with the case. How did everyone work together this week, especially with Remi still lurking undetected in their midst?

Y: It’s good to have Kurt back with the core team. It isn’t the same with him lurking like a sad puppy in the background. Like Remi said, he’ll be back to barking orders in no time, and he certainly did not waste any time. But the MVP in the office this week was not Stubbles, it was Boston Arliss Crab!

Before we get to Boston though, I want to talk about the other three core members. I just love the dynamic that has developed between Rich, Patterson, and Reade. These three have clearly found a rhythm for working together and communicating that’s working very very well for them. I cannot say I do not enjoy the banter and rivalry between Patterson and Rich in the lab, and I am glad this is still there but also now with the added layer of how seamlessly they work with each other and off of each other. Rich is finding his place in the team in such an organic and natural way, and it’s hard sometimes to remember where he started. But then he reminds you, so it’s all good.

Rich being the one to bring the information about Tasha to Reade this week instead of Patterson was an interesting decision on the writers’ part. I know that it’s Patterson and Reade who are the closest to Tasha and the emotional impact of whatever her fate is will fall hardest on these two, but I think they’re easing us into it—or rather easing the characters into it. First of all, I loved how gentle Rich was in delivering the news of Tasha’s name being on the manifest. And Reade’s denial is to be expected. I would assume he would not believe it until he gets to identify the body himself. And Patterson not knowing anything about this yet is going to make it interesting when she does find out. Granted she was a little too busy with other things this week, but pretty soon she’s going to have to be looped in, as will Jane/Remi and Kurt. And that is not going to be fun.

L: I loved this dynamic, too. It adds more depth to Rich’s character. He may still refer to Tasha as “What’s her name,” but you can tell by the way he handles the situation, especially the way he is so uncharacteristically subdued when he gives the news to Reade, that he is affected by Tasha’s supposed death. And maybe it was just me, but I loved the way the whole thing reminded me of 2.03, when Kurt was in the AD’s office, and Jane was missing (while a terrorist group was setting off bombs around New York City), and Tasha was the one Kurt tasked with looking for Jane’s name on the list of casualties. And I wonder if maybe Reade asked Rich—rather than Patterson—because he knew he couldn’t handle someone being really sympathetic about it. He needed someone who would stay detached and unemotional about it, so that he could too.

But I am really dreading the moment that Reade and Rich have to share the news about Tasha with Patterson.

Y: Speaking of Tasha, her supposedly former boss at the CIA, Jake Keaton, everyone’s favorite love-to-hate-hate-to-love character came back this week to assist with the case since it overlapped with CIA interests, and Reade took the chance to ask him if he knew about Tasha’s recent activity. I’m not going to lie, I still firmly believe Tasha is working with the CIA in her deep deep undercover op but of course Keaton is not going to admit to that, and the story he provides for Reade feels just a little too rehearsed if you ask me. But I cannot help it, I still love that guy. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. And somehow, Keaton too has found a way to work with this team whenever he shows up. After a rocky start to their professional relationship, Team FBI and Keaton have found a way to almost always fit in together and do the best job possible when he comes in. His out-of-the-box thinking or at least his different approach to things seems to have fit into their system, and while they still may not agree on a lot of things, it’s no longer an obstacle when he shows up but rather, it makes them all better.

L: I can’t disagree about Keaton. As much as I want to hate him, I can’t. He’s doing his job, as best he can, for the same reasons our team is doing theirs. And once again, he is helpful, providing intel the FBI doesn’t have access to and enabling them to rescue Remi and Patterson.

That said, for a guy who supposedly worked undercover for years, Keaton is a really crappy actor. I didn’t believe a single word of his little speech that the CIA was worried about Zapata’s loyalty and he was just looking out for her. If I wasn’t sure before that Tasha was undercover, that performance confirmed it for me. Keaton wants to know if she has successfully infiltrated HCI’s inner circle—and if anyone at the FBI knows that or suspects that she was still working for the CIA. And Reade, our poor lovesick straight-shooting puppy, immediately confirms that the FBI didn’t know what Zapata was up to or how to get in contact with her. Oh, Reade, you’re the assistant director of the FBI, picking up on suspicious vibes is your job. Even Rich suspects that Tasha is still with the CIA! Please put two and two together and get four and show us why you’ve got that nice office!

Y: Keaton was not the only controversial figure to come and help the team with their unorthodox way of thinking this week. It’s always a special treat when Boston Arliss Crab makes an appearance, and I am pretty sure this one is my absolute favorite by far.

It’s always fun to have Boston around. Ever since he showed up in 1.18 and helped Rich con the FBI and get away with millions of dollars worth of paintings, I’ve had a soft spot for him in my heart. I have to admit I was slightly worried that his return might give us a Rich who is all sad and pining throughout the episode. But after managing to convince Patterson to bring him on and spending some time excited to have him back and being as sweet to him as possible, things shifted and we got a Rich who was jealous and a new layer of their relationship came to the forefront. I never knew I wanted to experience the rivalry between those two as much as I now know I do. That was such an interesting and fun dynamic that brought their relationship to a new place altogether. Rich has been used to being the resident shiny new toy and reformed bad guy that seeing Boston get his moment really brought something new from him.

I don’t know how far they will take this whole “Boston gunning for Rich’s job” thing but if it gives us a chance to see Boston more often, then I am all here for it.

I’m just worried that pretty soon SIOC will be mostly former criminals turned consultants and actual agents will be an endangered species!

L: I absolutely adored having Boston back. I wasn’t sure how things would work out between him and Rich, but I loved the office rivalry that ensued. (The little glint in their eyes as they both reach for their keyboards and Boston says, “Race you”? I mean, that’s right up there with Jeller defusing bombs as foreplay.) If I’m honest, I’m not quite sure about him suddenly being a hacking genius every bit as good as Rich, who is supposedly world-class, as well as being an expert sculptor and art forger. It seemed a bit... much? But I’m also a little worried that it might give him less place in the narrative in the future. Patterson and Rich have similar skill sets, but they are just different enough to justify keeping them both around. We don’t really want to trade Rich in for Boston, so is there really room for two ex-con hackers in Patterson’s lab? I’m not sure, but I sure hope so!

Tasha continues gallivanting across Europe, for a new boss this time, collecting even more frequent flyer miles. But Madeline isn’t keeping Tasha around for just her wicked sense of snark, she also has a few assignments for her. How deep is our girl? And do we really know why she’s doing what she’s doing? Because I’ll be honest, I’m terrified.

Y: Can I just start by saying that if everyone else has to take a backseat to allow Tasha to finally have her moment in the limelight then I am here for this? Honestly, she has spent way too long on the sidelines, and it’s time for her to shine. Tasha has always been one of the most complex and interesting characters on the show, and she’s finally getting the screen time and storyline she deserves.

I have a feeling that this season’s reviews are all going to have the following statement for some time to come:

We are very very worried about Tasha!

And rightfully so! I may still hold on to the belief that she is deep undercover, but just how much will she be able to handle, and just how deep will she be able to go before something horribly terribly wrong happens? Before she cracks? Before she’s gone just a step too far and can’t find her way back?

L: Oh, hell yes. Tasha has been long overdue for a storyline of her own, and this one is a doozy.

I loved the cutting back and forth between Tasha telling Madeline what she’d learned about her and the team reporting their findings to Reade—and not reporting the things that Tasha ensured that they wouldn’t find. She’s good, our girl. But of course, that’s the easy part of her day.

Y: The first assignment Burke gives Tasha this week seems simple enough. Now that Madeline is taking the reins at HCI, she knows the FBI is bound to dig into her past, and she needs Tasha to polish that so that whatever the FBI finds out, nothing can make her look bad. And what could a woman like Madeline have in her past that could alert the FBI—I mean aside from killing Blake and the other board members? Well, just everyone’s favorite “kill your husband who you’ve loathed for years with a little poison in his morning coffee” infraction. Look, I’m telling you now, this Madeline Burke lady is going to be quite the handful.

But a little history polishing is not all Madeline had planned for the day. She has many fun activities on the agenda for Tasha. Including paying good old Kira Evans a visit to obtain Hank Crawford’s secret hard drive which I’m guessing doesn’t contain all his illegally downloaded movies and music. And that went well, for a while, with Kira immediately complying. But I guess a peaceful handover was not what Madeline wanted and she goes ahead and kills Kira. I’m not going to lie and say I like Kira a whole lot, nor am I going to cry much for her loss—I mean yeah, it turns out she has a little girl and that’s sad but still.

Anyway, Madeline now has Tasha setting up the scene of the murder to look like a break in and robbery gone south and that is where I think we see just how much this is getting to Tasha and that she’s not necessarily gone full evil on us. Left alone with Kira’s body and the murder scene, we finally get a glimpse of Tasha struggling with what she’s doing, a glimpse of her conscience kicking in and a ray of hope that maybe Tasha is undercover after all.

Not that Jake Keaton will ever confess to that.

L: Kira Evans has been presented to us as a bad guy, so it’s hard to feel that much sadness at her loss. But I think the way that it happened—after she’d already given in to Tasha’s demands, when she was defenseless and completely non-threatening—made her death at Madeline’s hands feel tragic and wrong.

Poor Tasha gets stuck cleaning up the mess. And for a minute, I think she had to look at this situation and wonder how the hell she’d gotten here. She started out as beat cop, coming across scenes just like the one she was setting up, but with the conviction that she could find the guilty party and put them behind bars. And now she’s on the other side of the coin, helping to protect the type of person she’d spent her whole life trying to arrest. There is no way, in my mind, that she could have flipped a switch and really be okay with this new direction—unless she was playing a longer game, going deep undercover to bring down a greater villain—and the tears in her eyes seem to confirm this.

And then she opens up the closet and sees Kira’s daughter hiding there. I’m a little confused about the sequence of events—Tasha was in the house long enough to find and hide all of Kira’s weapons, but not long enough to figure out that Kira wasn’t alone? But you can see the realization on her face that this little girl, having seen Tasha’s face, is now a witness who can identify her. There is no question what Madeline Burke would do in this situation. She’d kill the girl and move on without blinking an eye. And clearly Tasha knows that’s what Madeline expects of her. But before we can do much more than suck in a worried breath, Tasha draws the line. She signals to the girl to be quiet and then shuts the closet door. And that moment gives me hope that Tasha isn’t completely lost, either to us or to herself.

But that’s this week. Who knows what she’s going to have to do next week, as long as she’s still hanging out with Madeline? How long until Madeline expects Tasha to do the actual killing for her? How far is Tasha willing to go?

I am honestly not sure how to react to Madeline Burke. She’s clearly crazy, which actually feels a bit disappointing. Shepherd and Hank Crawford were such good villains because they were so sane. They had a goal and a solid motivation for achieving it. And because they were so rational about it, you could almost understand where they were coming from. And that almost is what made them so believable, and thus, so chilling. So far, Madeline Burke hasn’t given us anything that we can relate to or really sympathize with. Yes, her husband was a jerk, but presumably she could have divorced him rather than killing him. I really need to know what her endgame is, besides poisoning or shooting everyone who ever disagreed with her.

Y: Cannot say I disagree on Madeline Burke. She is absolutely terrifying and clearly has no moral compass whatsoever so the extremes of evil she is willing to reach are apparently boundless. Like you said, Shepherd and Crawford were excellent villains because they worked from a terrifyingly logical ideological foundation. Sure, it was insane and evil, but it was an ideology that guided their actions and decisions and made them all that much more scary. But so far Madeline Burke seems more like a bored housewife who finally found a hobby rather than an ideological mastermind after a defined endgame.

I hope that is fixed soon and we get to understand more what drives her because what has made Blindspot so awesome so far is that their villains have never been cartoonish but rather chillingly sane and rational.

Weller is finally back at the office, but Reade has him watching from the sidelines. How does he handle still being out of the center of the action? And now that he’s around Remi more often, is he starting to sense that something is wrong with his wife?

L: We finally see Kurt picking up on the fact that something isn’t quite right with “Jane.” And while I get that “my amnesiac wife has been hit with a second case of amnesia that wiped out the most recent three years while restoring the time period that her earlier case of amnesia wiped out” would be a bit of a stretch for Weller (or anyone else for that matter) to deduce, it’s definitely time that the world’s foremost expert on Jane Doe notices that... she’s a bit different these days.

So I was happy that he saw her taking pictures of the screens in Patterson’s lab, and even happier that he confronted her about it. Remi’s ability to come up with a convincing cover story on the fly is definitely medal-worthy, but when that didn’t immediately appease him, she turned the tables on him, and that should have set off even bigger warning bells in Weller’s mind. Aggressively attacking people has never been Jane’s style, and even Remi realizes that she’s playing it too strong and dials it back a notch, switching to appealing to his desire to help people. It works... for the moment. But when he returns home to their apartment that night, he’s a little more suspicious and a little less willing to be blown off.

And possibly a little more likely to get himself killed?

Gulp.

Y: Gulp, indeed!

Look, we all know that Kurt Weller is not just a pretty face. I mean, it’s quite the pretty face, but there’s more to him than just that. Let’s not forget he is the hotshot agent who was the star of the NYO when we first met him. And he still is that same excellent agent that he once was. If this was anyone other than his wife, I bet you that he’d already have picked up on a dozen more red flags, but it’s not the same when it’s someone you love, especially when that someone is also very sick with an illness that apparently has no cure.

I don’t blame him for still trying to find excuses for her odd behavior, but I also appreciate so much that the writers already have him picking up on things and confronting her about them. Like you said, coming to the conclusion that his amnesiac wife has reverted to her pre-amnesiac self is kind of a long shot for anyone, but we can at least be slightly comforted by the fact that he won’t let this go.

He is, as you said, the Jane Doe expert, and he’s bound to realize that the woman he’s sharing a bed, home, car, locker room, work place, etc.… with is not the same.

Remi knows she’s running on borrowed time, so she’s wasting none of it. Did she make any progress toward her goals this week? Is she still managing to keep her true identity hidden from Weller and the team?

L: Hallucination Roman is back again this week, egging Remi on to kill Kurt and to formulate a plan to break their mother out of prison. It’s interesting that out of all the people Remi could have imagined, Roman is the one who shows up. Not Oscar, the fiancé she is supposedly mourning, and not Shepherd, the mother who directed so much of Remi’s life. It’s a lovely parallel to Remi showing up in Roman’s hallucinations last season, and I think it speaks to the connection that Roman and Remi shared—that he was the other half of her whole. In this case, Roman is urging Remi to stick to her plans to bring down the FBI, just as Remi urged Roman to stick to his plans to bring down Crawford.

I love the way Roman gives voice to the doubts lurking in Remi’s subconscious. When she asks about the ZIP poisoning, “If you had the cure, why didn’t you use it on yourself?” Roman replies, “Maybe I didn’t have it. Maybe I just knew where it was and I ran out of time to get it, but it’s not too late for you.” Now, this Roman lives only in Remi’s head, and there hasn’t been any evidence that what he says is actually true. But Remi wants desperately to believe it—maybe she even needs to believe it in order to keep going. Later, we see Roman asking her if she’s sure she’s up to carrying out her plan to use Stack to get the black site data, which she assures him she is. And then of course, at the end, while Remi is mixing up her little syringe cocktail for Weller, Roman tells her, “Not a bad plan. I mean, if you can actually do it.” Remi immediately insists that she can, saying she despises everything Weller stands for. But as Shakespeare said, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Remi tells Roman that Weller is starting to see cracks in her Jane Doe persona, but maybe Remi is the one noticing cracks?

On first viewing, I was a little underwhelmed that the only plan Remi manages to come up with is “break Shepherd out of jail.” I feel like Remi should be more resourceful and independent, and should be able to come up with her own plan without Shepherd’s guidance. But on second viewing, I think it makes sense, especially if we consider that her subconscious is basically a battleground right now. Even though she may not consciously recall everything that happened to her as Jane, all of those memories are still in there, and we see the struggle they are causing when it comes to what to do about Kurt. Remi is used to following Shepherd’s orders, and having Shepherd around calling the shots again would keep Remi on track and keep those Jane impulses subdued. Remi might have been Shepherd’s second-in-command, but Phase Two (and probably Phase One, Remi infiltrating the FBI) was clearly Shepherd’s vision. Remi might have been moved to participate after two attacks on her life (which killed both her team and the doctor who rescued her), but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is fully willing or able to concoct a plan on that scale herself.

Along the same lines, I also thought that Remi was fairly obvious about photographing the screens in Patterson’s lab. She’s supposed to be super slick, right? And that was anything but. But this could also be her subconscious wanting her to get caught (as Kurt immediately does). Could this be another sign of Jane peeking out from somewhere deep inside her? Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

I think part of the problem here is that we don’t really have a good sense of what Remi’s motivation is. We know she wants to destroy the FBI team, but we don’t know why. Didn’t Sandstorm need them to investigate these crimes? I can understand targeting government corruption, but didn’t Shepherd (and Remi) choose this team because they weren’t corrupt, and she knew they would pursue these cases instead of burying them? How does destroying an honest team help the Sandstorm cause of ending government abuses?

Y: Okay, I’ve gone back and thought a little more about Remi’s motivation and why it looks like all she wants is to get Shepherd out without having any vision or plan for what happens next. And I agree with what L said that Sandstorm’s entire agenda was Shepherd’s brain child and that Remi only jumped on board after what happened with her through Orion. The disillusionment and the anger and betrayal she felt was enough for her to go back to her mother who she abandoned as a teenager. She may not have had the same unshakeable conviction that Shepherd had or the long game vision she had but she had been angry enough to participate after everything that she saw.

Which brings us to Remi today. She has woken up after three years or more having agreed to be the Trojan Horse of her mother’s master plan and found herself in a world that looks nothing like the one she was willing to sacrifice everything for. Their plan has failed, and everyone she has ever cared about or loved is gone—either dead or incarcerated. I don’t think they had a plan B for this outcome, and that is why Remi needs Shepherd to figure out what to do next.

But that is not all. She has also woken up to the news that she’s dying. She literally has nothing to lose at this point. All she sees from this world around her is a group of people who helped the other version of her ruin the plans she gave up everything and everyone for and spent the better part of her existence hunting them down and causing their death or capture.

She is pissed off. She is livid. Mostly, if you ask me, she’s pissed off at Jane. And because she can’t do anything about it, she’s letting it all out on the people Jane cares about—Kurt and the team. She’s driven by emotions—anger and betrayal and pain—and she is a woman with nothing to lose, living on very borrowed time, so the way she sees it, she might as well burn everything in her way.

I don’t think she believes she will be around to see through whatever Shepherd will plan for a Phase Three, and since she’s dying anyway, she might as well take everyone with her, the people who took away everything from her.

It’s not sane or rational or grounded in anything beyond a triggered emotional response to losing everything and having nothing to live for anymore. She may claim that she is doing this because she hates what Weller stands for, yada yada, but I don’t think she really cares about ideologies at this point. She just wants people to suffer and feel the pain that she’s feeling and get revenge for herself before anyone else.

L: I agree. Even though she seems so cold and controlled, there is a lot of anger in Remi that is just looking for a way out. We see that in the way she snaps at the people around her before she remembers her Jane Doe act and tones it down. (And again, massive kudos to Jaimie Alexander for so convincingly conveying two such different personas in one character.)

I think another problem here stems from the time jump. Because we didn’t see Remi finding out about Roman or Oscar or Shepherd, we don’t know what or how much she knows about what happened to them. I would think that the case notes in her file would have told her that she was the one who killed Oscar when he tried to wipe her memory again, but we don’t know for certain that she knows this. So when she blames the FBI for his death or for Roman’s, we don’t know if it’s because she’s just blaming them in general, for “poisoning” her amnesiac self against them and setting her at odds with them, or if she truly believes the FBI is somehow more responsible for their deaths than herself (in Oscar’s case) or Roman’s own actions (which ultimately led to his demise at Blake’s hands). If she’s blaming the FBI for what she did as Jane, she can also blame Shepherd for the things she did as Remi—both of which leave her conscience (either conscious or subconscious) relatively clear.

Any way we look at it, our heroine’s mental issues aren’t getting any smaller or easier to resolve. Or any less dangerous to the people around her.

Y: I think L pretty much said everything I’m thinking and a little bit more. See, she’s the brains of the operation, I just sit here and eat chocolate and nod. But really, I cannot disagree with anything there.

I just want to talk a bit about Remi’s manipulation techniques and the way she is handling Kurt and his confronting her about things. Like L said, when he first confronts her, whether in this episode or last week, Remi first tries to be Jane, arguing with him as she assumes Jane would, but then when he pushes back, she switches. She’s aggressive and she turns it around on him. I’m actually loving seeing this side of her because you can see how in some ways she is very much like Jane abut also very different. When the triggers are the same, Jane reacts compassionately and logically whereas Remi is defensive and aggressive. This reflects so much on Shepherd’s training of her, I believe, and it sheds a lot of light on how Remi got what she wanted back in the day. The fact that, in the scene in the lab when Kurt confronts her about the pictures, he eventually apologizes, shows how good she is at making him feel like he is the one in the wrong, how manipulative she can be in planting guilt where no guilt should be and then getting people to do or say what she wants.

There’s another thing that caught my attention which I think other Alias fans might have noticed. And I’m sorry, but I just need to share it because my fangirl heart did cartwheels in excitement. Blindspot hasn’t shied away from its Alias references over the seasons and this was another one. I’ve noticed over the last two episodes that Remi often uses kissing Kurt as a diversion or a way to punctuate a conversation. On Alias, Jack Bristow described a very similar thing his wife—an undercover Russian spy—used to do. He described it as such:

It was easy being with her. There were times, moments when I became curious. How had she occupied her morning? What were her plans when I was out of town? Usually she told me, but occasionally she’d stop what she was doing, walk over, and offer me a kiss. A spontaneous gesture. But on one occasion it struck me. This impulsive kiss, what if it was an evasion, camouflaging the truth in an expression of love? Of course, I dismissed my concern immediately... merely professional paranoia. After all, she was my wife.

Come on! I mean, come on!!

That’s all. I rest my case.

Our favorite couple has... hit a difficult time in their relationship. I’m not even sure that marital counseling can help these two, when half of the couple is intent on killing the other half. Is it time to consider giving up on them?

Y: Oh my Jeller… I really never thought it would ever be so hard to write this section because, I mean, technically Jeller is not dead, of course, but it’s just stuck in this very weird place, isn’t it? One half of our ship is acting perfectly shippy and giving us all the beautiful feels and wonderful moments and being so wonderfully in love. And the other half of our ship is… well, she has memory issues. She’s terribly confused and it’s making everything so damn confusing! Somehow we’ve managed to achieve a new stage of shipping and that is the abundance of fluff that is actually angst but it looks and feel like fluff but it’s actually really horrible heartbreaking angst.

I really do not know how to explain it!

I know they will be fine eventually, and I do look forward to how Kurt will react when he finds out Remi is back. I know he will be heartbroken but she is still his wife. And his sick wife for that matter. I have no doubt that Kurt Weller will continue to be caring and wonderful and sweet and supportive despite his own pain because that’s just who this beautiful man is.

And honestly, I don’t know if we’ll see it, but I also cannot wait to see Remi begin to let Kurt into her heart. She fell in love with him once before and I know she will again. Once her animosity and her anger manage to step aside for a moment to see just who he is and she stops fighting it, Remi can very much fall in love with him more than she ever has before.

It’s this journey that I look forward to the most, but as is always the case with this show, we must suffer the angsty angsty angst first. It’s the price we pay for shipping these two tragic humans.

L: Such angsty angsty angst indeed!

Yes, things are a bit grim for Jeller right now. Remi clearly isn’t willing to admit any feelings whatsoever for Kurt besides murderous rage. And she’s pretty convincing, especially when she’s arguing with Roman. But then we get to the moment when she nods at Kurt, silently telling him to shoot Sokoloff while Sokoloff is holding her in front of him as a shield.

It’s a great callback to the pilot episode, when they didn’t really know each other, but Kurt still trusted Jane to shoot Chao and save his life. But even if Remi doesn’t consciously remember the things she went through as Jane... It takes an enormous amount of trust to let someone take a shot like that, without flinching, without hesitating. Remi might claim to hate Kurt, but she doesn’t hesitate for even a second to trust him with her life. And that goes deeper than any act she could put on.

For the moment, that’s where I’m gonna hang my hope. Remi trusts Kurt, even if she won’t admit it. And maybe there are other feelings that she’s not admitting.

Feelings that will keep her from using that syringe on him. Another gulp.

And on that angsty note... Let’s all go stock up on chocolate. Friday is coming, and we need to prepare!

That’s all from us this week! How are you holding up under all this stress and angst? Should we draw up a schedule to make sure that we worry about all the characters equally in turn? Come talk to us!

—Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: edgar reade #character: patterson #character: rich dotcom #character: boston arliss crab #character: tasha zapata #character: madeline burke #character: jake keaton #ship: Jane/Kurt #ship: Rich/Boston #character: roman

[more--than--anything]

Feature: Will the Questions Ever End...

We’re at the halfway mark of the season, and after yet another short hiatus, the show returns this week with its back half set of episodes. And of course, that would be our cue to slide in with our never-ending list of questions, updated with all the twists and turns and confusion that season 3 has brought to us so far:

Why is Roman going after Hank Crawford specifically? What is the one crime that has Hank Crawford at the center of Roman’s plan?

Why does Crawford want the land in Morocco so badly? What does he plan to do with it?

Is Roman finishing Shepherd’s original plan? Or is this entirely his own plan?

Has Roman regained all his memories?

What happened to Roman’s scar?

How many more secrets is Roman keeping?

Did Roman kill all of Tom Jakeman’s relatives?

What is Avery’s role– beyond playing dead– in Roman’s master plan?

What really happened to Avery’s father?

And what really happened to Bertrand Keele? 

What was Jane up to before she took up K&R? And why/how did she end up in Nepal?

What is the significance of the dragonfly tattoo, and why are Keaton and Zapata so afraid that the team will discover it?

Will we see Shepherd ever again? Or learn what Nas managed to get out of her?

Where is Cade now and will we see him again this season?

Will we see Rossi again?

Is Blake just an innocent pawn being used by Roman or is she involved in her father’s shady business? Does Blake understand the extent of her father’s business dealings?

Are any of Roman’s feelings toward Blake genuine?

Who’s ahead in Wizardville, Tasha or Reade?

Questions about what’s going to happen:

Is Roman willing to hurt the team if it helps him get to Crawford?

How will Crawford explain Victor’s disappearance to Blake?

Will Kurt and Jane be able to get past Clem and Avery and all of Roman’s meddling?

Will Jane ever be able to build a relationship with her daughter?

Have we seen the last of Clem? And is there more to his story than what we saw?

Will Meg get deported? If the fact that she’s in the country illegally becomes common knowledge, will it hurt Reade’s position at the FBI?

Will Kurt face any consequences for working with Roman and jeopardizing the case? 

Has the team learned everything they can from Hirst? Will Crawford have her eliminated in CIA custody?

Is Tasha’s loyalty to the CIA going to get her in trouble with the team?

Will Boston come back at some point? Will he forgive Rich?

Will Rich’s loyalty to the FBI be tested? Will he be lured back into his darker ways or is good guy Rich here to stay?

Have we seen the last of Smarmy Matty Weitz or will he be popping back again this season?

Will the team have to join forces with Roman at some point? Or will the two parties continue on separate yet parallel paths to take down Hank Crawford?

Is there any hope at all for a Kruger family reunion in the future?

The questions we will never stop asking:

What happened to Kurt’s mom?

Why did Bill Weller kill Taylor Shaw?

Why was having her memory wiped Jane’s “only choice”?

Will we ever learn exactly what Orion was, what it had to do with the CIA, and how much Mayfair knew about it?

What happened to Sofia Varma?

Will Sarah and Sawyer ever come back?

Will we see more of Bethany? And Allie and Connor?

What is Patterson’s first name?

Where is Kurt’s thigh holster?

Where is Felix?

What questions are keeping you awake at night? Come talk to our Ask box about them! – Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: theories and metas #blindspot: feature #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: roman #character: patterson #character: edgar reade #character: hank crawford #character: blake crawford #character: avery #character: tasha zapata #character: nas kamal #character: shepherd #character: rich dotcom #character: boston arliss crab

[more--than--anything]

Episode Review: "I have a type." [S03E11]

This week brought us two cases for the price of one. They promised us a “HUGE” episode. Did they deliver?

Y: It did feel like we were watching two separate episodes and although there were some thematic parallels, the two “cases” were both worthy of having their own episode because that was how huge they both were.

L: It definitely qualified as “huge.” There was so much to love about both of these storylines, but if I’m being honest, I would have preferred them in two separate episodes, so we could spend a little bit more time on each of them. Both of these stories felt very rushed, and there were times I almost resented the time that one took away from the other. I feel like we might have hit the point where the “biggest episode ever” finally got just a little bit too big.

Our first case of the night turned into an all-expenses-paid trip to Berlin to rescue Jane’s daughter. Did everything turn out the way Jane planned?

L: When we last saw Weller and Patterson, they were digging around looking for information about Avery to help Jane find some closure, only to discover that Avery met with Roman the day before Weller encountered her in the hotel lobby. After pulling what appears to have been an all-nighter, they find that Avery also met with Max Kohler, the gangster that Weller thought he was shooting when he shot Avery. Except that Max is actually Dedrik Hoehne (but still a gangster). Patterson locates the farm where he lives and discovers an emergency call made from an adjoining property four days ago by a woman who claims to have been kidnapped, and Weller immediately identifies the caller’s voice as Avery’s. Jane walks in just as Weller announces this (though we’re denied the moment that Jane hears her daughter’s voice for the first time), and they realize that Roman must have persuaded Avery to fake her death just as he convinced them to fake Jane’s death in 3.01. Unfortunately, proof that Avery was alive four days ago isn’t proof that she’s alive right now.

Jane is determined to take charge of her daughter’s rescue. She insists on bringing in Clem Hahn, a K&R expert she worked with during her time on the run. Reade agrees to vet Clem, but insists that Kurt go to Berlin too, thus forcing Jane to grudgingly accept the help of a highly-trained, experienced FBI agent who would also lay down his life in a heartbeat to save her life or her daughter’s. (Sometimes Jane, you’re too stubborn to use good sense. This is definitely one of those times.) Jane one-ups Allie in the “thoughtful delivery of potentially upsetting news” as she dumps the news on Kurt that she and Clem had a relationship that went way beyond K&R work (in one of too many scenes in this episode that happened mostly off camera and was rushed through without enough time to process the emotional fallout), and the trio set off for Berlin.

Dedrik’s farm has been abandoned, but Clem’s contacts tell him that Dedrik’s crew uses a factory in Berlin as a front, so they head there first, after a brief debate about how best to approach the facility. Kurt takes out one thug who is about to shoot Clem, but before they can locate Avery, Dedrik and company blast a hole in the wall, shove Avery in a van, and take off. Kurt uses the dead thug’s thumbprint to unlock his phone so they can call Dedrik. Dedrik demands that they lift the AMBER Alert for Avery and provide him with a plane so that he can leave Germany, but turns the camera so that Jane can see that Avery is still alive. Clem is only able to trace the call to within a one-mile radius, but Jane notices that Avery is signaling “23” with her fingers, and they figure out that she means Tunnel 23, a series of tunnels constructed to escape from East to West Berlin during the Cold War.

The dick measuring between Kurt and Clem in these scenes was priceless, and I loved the interplay between them. Really, when you get right down to it, they’re a lot alike. Just like Boston, Jane clearly has a type, and her type is stubbly, strong, smart, reliable, and good with weapons and hand-to-hand combat. And she’s right-- they’re both great guys. (I know the fandom is out for Clem’s blood, but let’s be fair; he showed up to help out a woman who dumped him months ago and turned him down again the night before, to work a job for free. Kurt was there on the FBI dime-- and presumably Jane is getting paid as well in her capacity as a consultant, in addition to bringing home a daughter-- but Clem risked his life as much as they did and got nothing out of this gig except more rejection from a woman he clearly still has a thing for.)

Our trio hits the tunnels and splits up. Jane and Clem find Avery being held by two guards, whom they quickly dispatch, and then Jane tells Avery to hide in a closet while they make sure all of the guards are taken care of. After completing her sweep of the tunnel, Jane returns to find the closet empty, but Avery holding a gun on her. Her daughter doesn’t trust Roman anymore, but she doesn’t trust Jane either. She’s obviously been well-coached on what Jane was likely to say, and she is unmoved by Jane’s entreaties. Jane uses her powers of persuasion to appeal to Avery’s practical nature (a quality mother and daughter share, along with stubbornness and a dislike of being manipulated), pointing out that she is the only one who can get Avery out of this tunnel safely, and Avery lowers the gun. Once again, though, we have to rush away before we can register the emotional impact of this exchange on either mother or daughter.

Meanwhile, Weller turns the corner and fires his gun at a shadowy figure who turns out to be Roman on the other side of a thick sheet of bulletproof glass. (So much for turning it into a museum. How much do you think it’s going to cost to fix those bullet holes? Maybe “Tom Jakeman” can make a nice donation to the cause.) Weller tells Roman that he’s told Jane everything so Roman doesn’t have any hold over him anymore, but Roman taunts him with the results of that honesty. Weller is disgusted that Roman would manipulate his own niece like this, but Roman tells him that “unlike you and Jane, she understands what has to be done.” This statement has me wondering what else Roman has up his sleeve. As we’ve mentioned before, everything that Roman is doing seems to work on two levels: torturing Jane and bringing down Crawford. Faking Avery’s death, abducting her, and poisoning her mind against Jane is a lot of work just to upset Jane. So how does Avery figure into bringing down Crawford?

Our team arrives back in New York, where we see Kurt and Clem saying goodbye but not Jane and Clem, yet another unresolved moment. (Presumably he’s still open to her coming back to working more K&R jobs with him in the future.) Jane accompanies Avery to the hospital, where she receives a call from Roman, warning her that “getting your daughter back might feel like a victory, but that will change. Enjoy it while it lasts.” Clearly whatever he planned with Avery isn’t over yet, which leads further credence to the idea that Avery will continue to tie in to Roman’s plans in some way. (And I must admit, I really love this twist to the “secret daughter” plot line, as it makes Avery much more interesting as a character in her own right and not just a prize to be contested between Jane and Roman.)

The whole season has been building to this case, and while it was every bit as exciting as we’d hoped, I really wish it had been left to fill the hour (well, forty-two minutes) all by itself. As it is, it felt very rushed, and there was little (if any) time allowed for any emotional resonance to the events. Yes, Jane got Avery back and Clem (apparently) departed, but viewers are left trying to fill in the blanks for all the moments that were left off-screen. I wanted to see more of Jane’s reaction to the knowledge that Avery’s fake death was all part of Roman’s plan to break up her marriage. Does it change her feelings toward Kurt at all, to know that she was a victim of this plot as much as he was? Clearly Roman counted on her being so stubborn and unyielding and unable to forgive Weller. I also wanted to know if Clem knew that Jane was married before she showed up at his hotel room for a chat? Did she drop that on him as casually as she dropped their affair on Kurt? Clem certainly seemed surprised to find Kurt on the plane, but yet seemed to know that Jane wasn’t trying to keep their relationship a secret from Kurt. The earlier episode with Dwire implied that Clem might have a problem if he learned that Jane was affiliated with the feds (especially since the cases he works and his approach to them are probably not all in perfect adherence to the law). Did Clem know that Jane was working with the FBI, and that Kurt was an agent? We don’t know, because all of these reveals happened off-screen. The biggest end left hanging was Clem’s departure from Jane, which also happened off-screen. Regardless of what he may have said to Kurt, Clem clearly still had feelings for Jane, so did he leave because she sent him away? Did he think he might have a chance with her later? How did Jane take his departure? The whole Clem storyline felt so rushed-- we got a reveal last week, and now it’s apparently over, another hurdle leapt over in the sprint that this season is beginning to resemble.

The worst victim of all this rushing was that we never got to see Jane breaking the news about Clem to Kurt. All we got was a very quick “so deal with it” attitude from Jane after the fact, with almost no time for Kurt’s reaction at all. And dammit, I am not invested in this show because I want to win the race to the end of the season. I am invested in this show because I care about these characters, and that means I want to see what happens to them, not just count how many sets they can run past in each episode. A revelation of marital infidelity is a big deal and should be treated as such. Many marriages never recover from such a blow, and to have a potential death blow to the relationship that has dominated the screen time in this show for two and a half seasons delivered mostly off-screen felt hugely unsatisfying to me as a viewer. This episode was so good in so many ways, but I can’t help but think how much more fulfilling it could have been if the emotional moments had been allowed more time to breathe on screen.

Y: I really don’t have much to add to this except that Jane’s attitude aside, I really really loved those three working together and would totally watch a spin-off of them running around the world saving innocent people and bickering over how to do things. I loved the chemistry between Kurt and Clem-- and it does not hurt how pretty they both are-- and how quickly all three picked up a rhythm in the field and worked well off each other.

Our second case of the day involved video games, an old flame, terrorists, explosives, and public nudity. That just screams Rich to us, doesn’t it?

Y: Look here, Blindspot, I did not sign up to having Rich Dotcom make me cry, okay? Rich is supposed to make me laugh and giggle and occasionally cringe, but he is not supposed to make me cry, dammit!

L: Our second case comes to us courtesy of a glitch in Patterson’s Wizardville app. (It seems like a grave omission on Roman’s part that there hasn’t been a tattoo yet specifically pointing to the backdoor in the app. Maybe he’s saving that one for later?) Snarky Tasha has her finger on the pulse of the problem: “Clearly, she’s spending too much time saving the world and not enough time fixing the bugs in this game.” Got that, Patterson? But the problem is more serious than users losing a few completed quests. The glitch is in the part the of the program that gives the app admin access to the subscribers’ phones (now some 80 million of them), and Patterson (with Rich’s help) quickly figures out that it’s tied to a series of YouTube videos in which people do crazy things like streaking naked through New York City, setting fire to a grocery store while wearing a pink rabbit costume, and robbing a bank while wearing only a diaper, all of them then apparently pleading with someone to leave them alone. The people in question are all Wizardville subscribers, and all of their accounts show evidence of an external breach; in other words, someone is using the Wizardville app to discover subscribers’ secrets and use them for blackmail.

Patterson shuts the app down, but the hacker turns it back on and locks her out of it. And then Rich takes a look at the code and recognizes a marker that Boston used to use as a signature in his hacking code. Patterson admits that she hired Boston to help write the app, so he either knew about the backdoor or added his own, but Rich argues that while Boston might not always be on the right side of the law, he would never do something to intentionally harm someone. The FBI needs to track Boston down, but before they can, he shows up at the NYO. He explains that using the app to hack people’s phones was his boyfriend’s idea. Initially it was just a bit of voyeurism, but then he realized that Sanjay was hacking the app on his own. Now he is planning some deal and won’t tell Boston what it is, but Boston is convinced it’s not good. The team figures out that the latest hacking victim is a defense contractor with access to all sorts of heavy artillery. They bring him in for questioning, and after our team threatens him with an IRS audit, he confesses that he gave white phosphorus bombs to Sanjay. The team deduces that he has arranged to sell them to this week’s representative of the Dabbur Zann, our all-purpose terrorist organization, who plans to use the bombs on New York, which will gain them absolutely no points for originality in the FBI’s book.

Boston volunteers to go in with a wire so they can catch the sale going down. He does a delightfully terrible job acting “normal,” then figures out how to signal to the FBI after Sanjay scans for bugs and blocks his cell service. Team Fed swoops in to nab the bad guys, leaving Sanjay and Boston miraculously unscathed, and Rich rushes in to make sure Boston is okay. The FBI agrees not to charge Boston in return for his help, but he is placed under house arrest. And then Rich delivers what appears to be an utterly honest and heartfelt declaration of love, to which Boston responds, “I have been wanting to hear that for so long. But you should have said it two years ago.” Ow, my heart hurts. And this was supposed to be the lighter side of this episode??

Can I just say how much I loved this case? As always, Rich’s dialogue is hysterical, and paired with Boston, it’s even more outrageous. I was so thrilled to see Boston come back. We’ve been getting hints all season that Rich was still hung up on Boston, but this is Rich, so it’s hard to tell how serious he was. And the answer is: Really serious. The last scene between them was heartbreaking (and really did absolutely nothing to make me feel better about the angst taking place on the other stage in this episode. Dammit Rich, you had one job on this show!). There were some interesting parallels between Boston’s blackmail cases and the hacktivism activities that Patterson and Rich engaged in as the Three Blind Mice (it really shouldn’t be a surprise that Patterson gets along so well with Rich and Boston), and the case, as so many on Blindspot do, serves to illustrate how rather arbitrary the line between good and bad can be. (So Patterson... is Wizardville back online yet? With or without your little backdoor activated?)

And I know I keep saying this, but I really do wish this had been a separate episode. As much as I love Rich, for the first time ever I found there were moments that I was kind of annoyed by his banter-- not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I felt like I was “missing out” on what was happening in Berlin because of it. Rich’s episodes are frequently nice breaks of comic relief in an otherwise serious show, and had this been a stand-alone episode, it would have been a breath of fresh air in the midst of the heartbreaking angst we’ve been dealing with lately. (And it also would have served to space out some of the “big reveals” we’ve been getting in such rapid succession.) But in the middle of such an overwhelmingly serious episode, sometimes the shift in tone from serious to comedic was just too jarring. As with the Berlin case, I really wanted to see more of this one. We start off with such an attention-getting image of a guy streaking down the streets of New York. I can’t be the only one who wanted to see the team questioning this guy about who made him do that and why. But there was no time for that, so we just get a rushed explanation from Boston later on. (“The naked guy on YouTube who went viral? He was stealing from a kid’s cancer charity to go on Alaskan cruises, so we made him pay. It was basically a public service.” Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.) These are the kind of moments that this show does so well, so it’s a shame to miss out on them.

Team Fed takes a bit of a backseat this week to all the other drama, with one small exception. What’s disturbing the still waters at the NYO?

L: As usual, the dynamic between Rich and the team is pure gold, starting with, “Hey, All-Beef Patty.” I love how uncomfortable Patterson still is when she has to ask Rich for help, despite the fact that they’ve been working together for weeks, possibly months, by now. (Or maybe it was just the unusually heavy eye makeup she put on for work this morning that was so uncomfortable? Hard to tell.) The interplay between Rich (the man with no filter) and the team (who are forced to serve as human filters) never fails to make me laugh as they struggle and fail (repeatedly) to contain him. The scenes between Rich and Boston were really quite touching, and I’ll admit that I really didn’t expect that. This additional facet to Rich’s character makes him even more endearing. (And now I am totally rooting for Boston to come back so Rich can get another chance with him.)

In addition to everything else going on in this episode, we also had to allow time for Pining Tasha. We see her and Reade watching a basketball game at his place while Meg is away. (Side note: Reade stocks Weller’s favorite “amazing Pennsylvania beer” but doesn’t even invite him over to introduce his live-in girlfriend? Ouch, that’s cold.) The next day, Tasha tells Patterson that she thinks she should tell Reade how she feels, which is every bit as bad of an idea as it sounds. But when she casually suggests that they get together after work so she can dump her unrequited feelings on him, Reade pulls out an engagement ring that he bought for Meg. Yes, Reade, please, put a ring on it and put us all out of our misery. So, um, no, this storyline isn’t growing on me. The opposite actually... I am liking less and less the changes we are seeing in Tasha’s character. She’s always been a very practical, straight-shooting, snarky and sassy kind of character, and frankly, that’s what I loved about her. This self-absorbed, middle-school, almost whiny version of her feels like a pale imitation of the kick-ass-and-take-names Zapata we know and love. Patterson asks her if she made out with Reade, and Tasha insists, “I would never,” which seems a little disingenuous to me. Coming on to Reade physically is wrong, but dumping her feelings on him and expecting him to respond is totally okay? In an episode that already had far too much going on, taking time away from the established emotional conflicts that we’re already invested in to make room for one that feels so contrived didn’t do this storyline any favors.

Y: It’s no secret we’re not a fan of that development, is it? So instead, I will focus on how much I love the team and the dynamics between them especially when Rich is around. Patterson and Rich’s relationship is this season’s best gifts. Every time these two are on screen together, it is bound to be one of the best scenes. And then there is the dynamic between all of them. Reade’s reaction to finding out Patterson had the back door in her app makes me laugh every time I watch it. There is something so parent/child-esque about how he says, “We’ll talk about this later.” There were so many small moments that had me smiling at the screen, including Rich walking in and asking if they’re talking about him. I don’t know why but these small moments fill my heart.

Another thing that lights up my soul with joy is the Kurt/Patterson relationship and this episode did not disappoint. It may have been two small scenes but they were absolutely perfect. But as much as I loved them, their sibling-like dynamic makes me miss Sarah even more. But that’s a whole different topic altogether.

Roman took a break from romancing Blake to pay a little visit to his brother-in-law. How did that reunion go?

Y: I come from a very huge family and while I love them all, the whole “family reunion with bullet proof glass” does sound rather inviting. But seriously, that scene was absolutely fantastic. Of all the reunions in the episode, including Rich/Boston and Jane/Avery, I think the Roman and Kurt reunion was the best. Luke Mitchell and Sullivan Stapleton have always had incredible scenes together, whether it was when Kurt was trying to help the caged Roman in season two, or both the face-to-face and the over-the-phone scenes from this season. And this scene in underground tunnel, separated by the glass, was a perfect throwback to the scene in season two when Kurt and Roman bonded over beer, tragic childhoods, and having shitty parents.

Kurt may have gotten the upper hand in this encounter, but that made this elaborate game of chess just that more compelling, triggering Roman to call Jane and taunt her about Avery to make up for losing that move earlier with Kurt. What is happening between these three this season just might be the most exciting power play and storyline this season and a great parallel to what we had last season.

The head-to-head battles last season pitted Jane against Shepherd and Kurt against Shepherd, and this year we are seeing the same conflicts with Jane against Roman and Kurt against Roman. I especially loved Roman’s line to Kurt about them fighting for the same endgame, paralleling what Shepherd had told Kurt last season. Roman really looks like he takes after mommy dearest-- although seeing him so affected by Kurt’s words remains a comforting thought that maybe not all hope is lost for our favorite villain.

One last parallel we are seeing this year with season two is what Kurt pointed out-- the family tradition of emotional manipulation. Shepherd last year poisoned Roman against Jane, and then Jane poisoned Roman against Shepherd, and this year it’s Roman’s turn to poison Avery against Jane. And I guess coming up will be Jane poisoning Avery against Roman.

Can we please get some therapy over here? Stat!

L: The scene between Roman and Kurt was one of my favorites in this episode. Their scenes are always powerful, agreed, and this one was no exception. And the setting was absolutely perfect. As Roman said, “They built this room after the Berlin Wall went up so that enemies could talk face to face without threat of death.” And given that Weller promised Roman that he would kill him if they were ever in the same room again, this was clearly a smart move on Roman’s part. They both got to land their shots: Kurt telling Roman that he lost his hold over Kurt because Jane knows everything. And Roman clearly picks up on what Kurt doesn’t say, that Jane can’t forgive him, and wastes no time in rubbing that in.

But it’s Kurt who gets the last laugh. “Avery was your last chance. You manipulated her, you used her, and you lied to her. You did the same thing that Shepherd has done to you for your whole life.” And just as we talked about last week, we see Roman start to lose some of his cool. And we continue to wonder if Kurt and Jane are able to bring some pressure to Roman, will he be able to hold it together in order to carry out his plans?

It’s interesting to note that if season two was Jane and Shepherd battling over Roman, season three seems to be setting up Jane and Roman battling over Avery. Shepherd sent Jane to the FBI as a Trojan horse, and ultimately lost that gamble. Now Roman has sent Avery to Jane in what appears to be the same capacity. Will he have more success? Avery might be Jane’s last family member, but she’s Roman’s last family connection, too. Jane has turned against him, so if he loses Avery in this process, he will be utterly alone in the world. And no matter how much he claims that doesn’t matter, he is far too bitter about his sister’s loss for that to be true.

I think it’s clear that the ultimate showdown that is brewing this season isn’t Jane versus Roman, but Kurt versus Roman. Jane and Roman had their showdown at the end of last season, and Jane couldn’t pull the trigger. Roman had Jane under his control for long enough to tattoo her entire body again; if he’d wanted her dead, she would be. But Kurt? Roman has already robbed him of the thing that mattered most to Kurt, his marriage. And a man with nothing left to lose is dangerous indeed. If I were Roman, I would definitely be watching my back. Because Kurt Weller is gunning for him. And he’s not a man who gives up easily.

And then there’s Jane. Nothing in her life is ever easy... although sometimes the problems are of her own making. Is her reunion with her daughter all that she hoped it would be?

L: I kind of want to just repost everything I wrote about Jane last week and add, “Ditto.” She still feels so cold and unsympathetic, and we’re still left trying to guess what’s going on in her head. What really drew me in about Blindspot from the first episode was watching how Jane could go from being so kickass to so terribly vulnerable in the blink of an eye. And since Weller confessed the truth about Berlin to her, we have seen none of that vulnerability from her. She’s been angry, and now with the Clem reveal, downright hypocritical. And as much as I love Jane, I’m having a hard time trying to find the character I love in there to root for.

To be clear: I am not upset about the Clem storyline (though I may be the only one!). It makes sense to me that Jane would have given up on returning to Kurt at some point. She’s a survivor, and the only reason she’s been able to overcome having her memory wiped, being tortured by the CIA, losing her brother, and spending eighteen months on the run is because she is able to adapt and make the best of things, no matter how horrible the situation. She survived the team’s betrayal and her time at the CIA by planning to escape and go after Sandstorm herself. And she survived a life on the run, enduring endless threats on her life, not by hiding away but by finding work that gave her purpose and a partner to watch her back.

We know that Jane is impulsive. In the field, this quality frequently saves her life and the lives of those around her. But in her personal life, it is often far more destructive (trusting Oscar in season one, injecting Roman with ZIP in season two). But in previous cases, we’ve always seen her remorse, and her acceptance of the consequences of her decisions. For example, she accepted the team’s anger and their treatment of her throughout season two, because she felt remorseful for the decisions she made which led to Mayfair’s death. Clearly, sleeping with Clem was an impulsive decision, an attempt to find some small measure of happiness in a life that had become devoid of it, but even though she apologizes to him for running out on him, she doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge to anyone that there was anything wrong with her cheating on her husband.

But the hardest thing to understand about the Jane we see now is her absolute utter lack of compassion for Kurt. Yes, she is angry. But Jane has always shown incredible compassion for everyone around her, even in the harshest circumstances. Even after Kurt turned her over to the CIA for three months of torture and then fought her and dragged her back to the FBI, she managed to have compassion for him. So at the very least, we would expect to see some acknowledgment that her confession of infidelity would hurt him. But there is nothing, just a cold announcement (that we didn’t actually see) that she refuses to let him respond to or even really absorb. “I didn’t think we could see each other ever again,” she tells Kurt in explanation. But because we have been given no idea what she went through during her time on the run, we have no idea if this is truly sincere or simply a convenient excuse that she throws at him to try to avert further discussion of the subject. (I do believe that it’s true, but I wish I had something besides gut instinct to back that up.)

I hope that we’re getting to the end of the “angry Jane” period. Clearly, she is going to have her hands full trying to build some sort of relationship with the daughter who has been so poisoned against her. I’m hoping that this struggle will bring back the multi-dimensional character we know and love.

Y: Ditto?

Just kidding. While I do agree with all of that, I’ve put a lot of thought in trying to understand why Jane is acting this way. It does seem very out of character for her-- especially the lack of compassion. And while I still do not excuse her actions or her hypocrisy, I do understand all the underlying aspects to why she might be like this.

But I still do not like it. I do not like it at all.

Last week I may have been more angry than sympathetic toward Jane, and that made me so frustrated because there was so much to sympathize with but yet her rather unexpected behavior at the time had tipped the bar towards angry. This week I have managed to find more sympathy and a clearer understanding of where Jane is now. Granted I am not saying that I excuse her behavior or justify her cheating. Also, I am not saying I like the road the writers chose to take, but given the hand we’ve been dealt I am in a much better place with our tragic heroine.

She has spent the better part of two years closing off emotionally and avoiding any real human connection and emotional connection. She’d thought she could fortify herself while on the run and focus on what she had to do. But one night with Clem and she realized what she has been missing and more importantly who she has been missing. And so she ran off to Nepal.

When Jane came back, both she and Kurt are so deliriously happy that they pretend the past two years didn’t happen. They try to go back to that moment in Colorado after Bethany had fallen asleep and before everything went wrong. It is the happiest either of them has been in so long. Jane tries to fall back into that, but the moment things start going wrong, instead of facing them head on, she closes off again because like I said, that is how she has spent the better part of two years. This time she cannot run away physically-- although she has moved out-- so she runs away emotionally. She has done it before as Jane, and she has done it as Remi. She tries to fortify herself from any real connections-- which includes rejecting Tasha’s invite-- and any real emotions, and she builds up these walls that her husband is usually so very fond of.

I think what my rambling about is trying to get to is that it is easier to be cruel and push people away than to admit to feelings and confront them and deal with them, especially when you’ve spent most of your life running away from your problems. Yeah… that’s pretty much what I think I’m trying to say.

It’s unhealthy but pretty much a normal defense mechanism, especially when the feelings are terrifying, and they include a whole range from betrayal to guilt to heartbreak. A medley of feels. No one wants to touch that. It is easier for her to focus all these on Kurt, to make him the punching bag that takes all of it. And it may not be logical, but she is not being rational now. The conflict between her head and her heart is too divisive. She has to know what she did was horrible, but she cannot make sense of what she’s feeling so pretending her thing was nothing and Kurt’s was everything makes it easier to avoid having to deal with what she’s done.

Oh, and as to her going to Clem as a friend instead of Tasha, I get it. Tasha is her friend but she’s also Kurt’s friend-- and maybe a part of Jane feels the team would always side with Kurt for all the obvious reasons, and so she goes to the one person who does not know Kurt and would most probably side with her because he will only be hearing her side of the story which is perfectly normal, again.

So the question is, what’s next for Jane?  She has to lose everything. She thinks she has Avery, but I think she has to lose her in one way or another. And more importantly she has to lose Kurt. So far this season he has been the one fighting harder and carrying them as a couple. But from the looks of it, he’s finally run out of steam and faith, and I think in this way she is going to lose him and will realize that she doesn’t want that and has to fight as well. Jane needs to be faced by a harsh reality that really forces her to change, to want to change and push her forward.

L: Yes, I agree with all of this. Since she found out about Berlin, Kurt has made all the effort to repair the breach between them. But I think that learning about Clem was too much for him. It does seem like he’s given up from what he said to Clem. So either the two of them walk away, or Jane is going to have to be the one who takes a step to bring them back together.

As I’m re-reading through all of these thoughts, I think there’s an interesting theme here. We have Jane pushing Kurt away and pretending she doesn’t need anyone. We have Roman telling Kurt that he knows he will end up alone. “I’ve seen what my life could have looked like if none of this ever happened to me. But that’s just not in the cards for me.” And we have Avery telling Jane, “I’ve survived my whole life without you. I’ve never needed you, and I’m not about to start now.” The common theme in this family is loss. Roman lost his sister to the FBI. Jane lost her brother when she chose to ZIP him to try to bring him to her side. She lost Avery when Shepherd took her away. She’s lost her trust in Kurt, lost the haven that was her marriage. Avery lost her mother as an infant, then her adoptive parents as a young adult. And no matter how much they all insist that they don’t care about the things they’ve lost, the pain from these losses is what is driving them all. Damn, this family is just a walking tragedy.

I keep thinking about Avery as this pendulum swinging between Roman and Jane. We’ve talked about fighting Crawford possibly being the one thing that could unite our estranged siblings. But I feel like Avery could be either the straw that breaks the camel’s back or the one person who could possibly draw them back together. And honestly, I cannot wait to see how all of this plays out.

Kurt’s not having a good week. And then it gets worse. How’s our grumpchkin (grumpy munchkin) doing?

Y: Oh my precious grumpchkin is not doing well at all, is he? But still, through all of this, he is still a class act in every way possible. I really love Kurt Weller, okay? I have two things to touch upon with regards to Kurt this week. First of all, I read a lot of people complaining about Kurt not being angry enough with Clem, or at least not happy that Kurt offered him his hand to shake in the end. But honestly, it just shows how much Kurt has grown and also, to me, it sort of makes sense. It is not Clem’s fault that Jane cheated on Kurt. For all we know, Clem never knew Jane was married. They spent six months working together on dangerous missions, they got along, they flirted. Can’t blame a guy for trying, right? It was not Clem who betrayed Kurt. It was Jane. And I know someone in Kurt’s position does not necessarily need to act so rationally, but he did, and I am so proud of him for being able to see things in that light.

And second, again this is a reaction to what I’ve been seeing online of how people are reacting to Kurt’s recent behavior. There is a lot of talk about Kurt not being angry enough, and that he is letting Jane get away with treating him like this. And while I agree this is slightly infuriating and does appear that his reaction is not at the level it needs to be, I actually prefer the route that is being taken. It makes more sense for Kurt to lose his shit. But it is more interesting that he is not. Instead of being angry, Kurt Weller is giving up.

Kurt Weller, the most stubborn person on this show, is giving up. Let that sink in.

Kurt’s stubbornness, his commitment and inability to let go, has been the driving force of this character, and he is now giving up. This is bigger than anything. Kurt never gave up on Taylor, for twenty-five years. He never gave up on Jane after she left Colorado for almost two years. It’s the foundation of who he is.

And now he’s giving up. This is the biggest dramatic shift in character we have seen to date.

L: Amen. This is huge. This is a seismic shift in his character. And it is something that ought to shake Jane out of her frozen anger and make her sit up and take notice.

But that said, I don’t think he’s going to achieve the same degree of frozen chill that his wife is displaying. Because there is a lot of hurt and anger lurking right beneath the surface, and I don’t see it staying hidden for long. And frankly, I don’t think it should. Lack of communication is what got them both into this mess, and honesty-- especially the brutal kind-- is necessary to get them out.

So when Jane asked him, “You really want to play that card with me?” Hell yes, I think you should have played that card, Weller. I think you should have pointed out that if that’s the cross she’s going to nail you to, she’s got a spot right next door.

But the problem here is that Weller is the one who is best at putting up walls. And if he puts them up between him and Jane while she’s still so closed off? Maybe it’s a good thing this show involves so much explosives. They might come in handy for once.

Last but never least... Do we have any hope left at all for our favorite couple?

L: Well, things definitely aren’t good between them. But I don’t think all hope is lost, not by a long shot. (Heck, even Clem hopes they work things out, so clearly, everyone around them can see they aren’t done with each other yet!) These two still love each other, but love by itself isn’t enough to keep a marriage going.

As Jane says to Kurt, “You know, maybe we should just stop working so hard to protect each other, because it just seems to make things worse.” And frankly, she’s right. When they came back to New York, they both immediately pretended that nothing had changed. Neither of them talked about what they went through while they were apart. During that time, both of them came up against parts of themselves that weren’t the pretty, polished pieces they willingly shared during their brief marriage and honeymoon period. These parts were dark and ugly and raw, and frankly, they were things that made them feel ashamed. Kurt did something horrible that he felt he should have been able to prevent. Jane gave up on her marriage and acted on an impulse that she immediately regretted. And when they were finally reunited, neither of them were brave enough to show these ugly pieces to the other. They just hid it all away and pretended it wasn’t there. And that approach wasn’t honest or healthy, and left the other feeling completely blindsided when the truth came out.

And the more I think about it, the more I think that neither one of them really has any idea what the other went through during their separation. And how could they, when they were busy pretending it never happened? Jane knows that Kurt looked for her and went broke, but she could perceive that more as stubbornness and upholding a commitment on his part, rather than desperation and heartbreak. And I think Weller thinks that she was just off “finding purpose,” working K&R (and sleeping with Clem), instead of trying desperately to plug the holes in her life and her heart. They both underestimated the depth of the other’s feelings. And it’s not fair to blame either one of them for not knowing what the other was thinking or feeling during their separation, because how could they? They weren’t together, and unlike the viewers, they don’t have the luxury of the omniscient point of view.

As we’ve said, at least now everything is out in the open. At least now they’ve shown each other the ugliness they were hiding. Remember what Jane said to Weller about Mayfair in season one? “Whatever she did, she’s more than just one mistake.” Right now, all that either of them can see is the mistake. So first, they need to figure out if they can look past that. Then they need to decide if they are willing to commit to working through their problems to build a marriage with a solid foundation. No, this probably isn’t going to happen right away. But deciding not to walk away is a good first step, and since walking away from each other isn’t something that either one of them has ever been very good at, that’s what I’m holding out hope for.

Y: We’ve been quite spoiled. I know the current state of affairs is almost unbearable, but I think it’s more so because of how good we had it earlier on in the season. The premiere and the episodes that followed were like fluffy fanfiction come to canon. After seeing Jeller as a badass partnership in the field, taking down bad guys and flirting over last-minute defused bombs, and seeing them as the disgustingly adorable married couple being domestic, cooking each other dinner and calling each other cute pet names like it’s no one’s business.

It’s because we got to live through that shipper heaven that we are suffering so much now. Not that the pain isn’t real. It is very real, but we know what we had which makes this worse.

But hear me out. We have a good measuring scale to work with when it comes to these two. I always go back to what we had to go through in season two. We started with Jane in a CIA black site as a result of Kurt arresting her. And then on their first meeting, they beat the shit out of each other, and Jane pulled a gun on her future husband. And I am not going to list all the things we had to go through before those two started to learn to be civil around each other, to get back on the track to reconciliation and then friendship, to trusting each other and confiding in each other, to pulling each other up and falling in love.

And that is why I know these two will be okay, and why I will always still have hope. They are the heart and soul of this show and will always be.

That’s all from us! One more episode before the Olympic hiatus is upon us. We mean a hiatus caused by the Olympics, rather than one that will take a great feat of strength and courage to get through... you know what? Never mind. Surviving hellatus is our Olympic event!

-- Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: kurt weller #character: jane doe #character: roman #character: edgar reade #character: tasha zapata #character: patterson #character: avery #character: rich dotcom #character: boston arliss crab #character: clem #ship: Jane/Kurt #ship: Rich/Boston #episode: 311 - technology wizards

[more--than--anything]

Episode Review: "Bless this mess" [S02E14]

RICH IS BACK! I mean, yeah, other stuff happened, but THERE WAS A LOT OF RICH AND IT WAS AWESOME!! Y: Awesome would be an understatement. A criminal understatement! I don’t think the grin was wiped off my face for that whole hour! 

L: This might be my favorite episode ever. It was just so much damn fun. Also, Best. Dialogue. Ever. I wonder if the scripts for Rich Dotcom episodes run longer, to accommodate for all the awesome lines that come at you like machine gun fire? 

This week's case had the heart of a lion. No really, it did. It also had lithium batteries, secret societies, moon colonization, and a bunch of people who really like math. Oh, and a terrorist attack.

L: So this week's tattoo is a mathematical equation whose variables correspond to real-world economic values. Patterson isn't quite sure what it means, but it has something to do with lithium, the main ingredient in the high-capacity batteries used by modern electronic devices, which hit an all-time market high. The rest of the tattoo is the symbol for a secret society at a private college... and one of the members is none other than Rich Dotcom. The team is just thrilled with the opportunity to work with Rich again (unlike the television audience who was positively cackling with glee). Turns out that this stay in prison has sent Rich on a journey of spiritual enlightenment, and honestly, religious Rich is even funnier than dark-web-kingpin Rich. Rich explains that the formula is a risk-reward algorithm used by members of the society to determine the likelihood of a venture succeeding... and this particular permutation determines that the best time to start a war is today. So someone is planning to execute a major attack and frame a lithium-rich country, giving the US a reason to invade it and seize control of its lithium resources. Rich identifies Zach Riley as a likely conspirator. Riley's company pioneered digital music distribution, which he sold for billions so he could get into everything from colonizing the moon to artificial intelligence to electric cars, which run on lithium-based batteries. Well, there's a likely connection. Riley is on campus at an alumni event, where there will apparently also be a clandestine meeting of the secret society. The FBI calls in Rich's old flame, Boston, who is also a member of the society, in order to gain a second entry into the event. 

Going to prison has apparently put a damper on Rich and Boston's romance, because Boston isn't interested in working with Rich or the FBI. The exchange between Weller and Boston was particularly good, and illustrated why Weller sits at the AD's desk. Boston doesn't want to do any favors for the FBI team that put him behind bars, but Weller coolly replies, "'Cause I can transfer you to Victorville. That's 85 miles from your parents in L.A. I know it's been a little hard for them to travel, so this way, they'll be able to visit you more often." He knew Boston wouldn't want to help the FBI, so he was prepared with leverage before Boston walked in the door. 

The other reason I really like this scene is that it is yet another nod to the theme of parental expectations. At the end of the episode, we discover that Boston was a promising artist who gave up his dreams to follow Rich into a life of crime (which was a lovely bit of added character depth that the Blindspot writers excel at). Instead of seeing his work in galleries, his parents now visit him in prison. This revelation follows on the heels of discovering that Rich turned down an opportunity to make a legitimate fortune in Silicon Valley with Riley in order to stay in school and finish his degree and please his parents. And we haven't even gotten to Mama Shepherd yet and what her children have had to do in order to live up to her expectations. The moral of this story is apparently that parents are the root of all evil.   

Two couples set out for the reunion: Rich with date Weller and Boston with date Patterson. And can I just say: these pairings are brilliant. We already knew that Weller would be uptight and Rich would be outrageous. But Patterson and Boston bicker like teenage siblings, and it is the best thing ever. Both couples have to sell their relationships to disbelieving classmates, and hilarity ensues. We get Rich and Weller (ship name: #WelCom) dancing together; Boston and Patterson bonding over failed relationships and making fun of each other's names (and teasing the audience about Patterson's mysterious first name); and Weller being referred to as Rich's husband, then a hooker, and then as a "meat trophy." Honestly, Blindspot fans couldn't ask for more than that. 

Oh, right, there's a case, too. The team works together to download the contents of Riley's laptop only to discover that he's out of the lithium car battery business and thus, out of the running as potential criminal mastermind. Turns out that he sold his shares to another member of the secret society, Thad Munson, who seems to be in league with the mysterious Northlake Military Contractors, who keep turning up in the middle of tattoo cases. Hmmmm. Munson is attempting to release a highly radioactive element and instigate a war with Bolivia, and forces Rich to help by shooting him in the foot. Weller thwarts Thad's plan by shooting Rich in the leg. And let's be honest here: That's probably the best resolution to a case ever for Weller. 

Y: Ok, I must confess something. I don’t remember much about the case this week. I’m not saying that it wasn’t interesting or intriguing or anything it’s just that… so much Rich, so much Boston and Patterson, so much awesomeness I really couldn’t pay attention to much else! I know, I know, I’m horrible but the genius of Rich Dotcom and the brilliant partnership or Boston and Patterson was just so mind blowing, I almost forgot other things were happening. 

But on a second rewatch, I focused a bit more and while I was still distracted by those other things, I tried to pay a little more attention to the weird things rich people do when they are bored. What I found most interesting is that Sandstorm once again have a tattoo that points to and incriminates someone they have done work with or are doing work with. Sure, Riley sold his company, but still, like they did with Kat and her biker gang, Sandstorm once again burn bridges they no longer need. Another interesting thing is the ever present Northlake, showing up on the show for at least the third time since season 1 episode 12. Should we paying more attention to them? Who are they exactly? How involved are they in all this mess? Because whoever they are, they keep popping up and it is very very peculiar. 

So our team is following Rich's example, seeking inner peace and getting themselves back on track, right?

Y: Oh, yeah absolutely! After waking up with Nikki, again, Reade finally confessed to Tasha about his recent affair. Of course, he left out the part where he’s doing drugs for entire weekends. Tasha lets him know exactly how she feels about that. Hint: she is not a fan. And what does Reade do? He goes straight back home and follows his wise friend’s advice? Yeah, if following her advice means doing some more drugs, then yes, this is exactly what Reade does. And this time he does it without Nikki pushing him to. Just another leap down the hellhole that is Reade’s current journey. This boy is gonna hit rock bottom and I don’t know if anyone will have the power to pull him back up or if he will have what it takes to crawl his way back up. It is going to take something huge to shake him and make him realize just how self destructive he has been lately. 

Tasha had a slightly quieter day, rolling her eyes at Rich a few times and having her wise words go unheard by her best friend. What more can this poor girl do for him? I really hope she finds out the whole truth about what is happening to him soon because she is the only one who knows what kind of mess he could potentially be in. 

L: Ugh ugh ugh. Reade, dude! Can't you just drink your troubles away, like Weller? I mean, it's not working for him either, but I can certainly understand why this team is a little gun-shy about seeing a therapist. Express elevator, going down. 

Paging Tasha. Ass kicking needed in aisle Reade. 

Y: Nas, on the other hand, had the task of babysitting the amnesiac siblings this week and take them around town to properties that they could have lived in at some point in their lives. She seems to have warmed up a bit to the idea that Roman gets to hang around these days. I don’t know how exactly she feels about Jane having the upper hand in this setup though. Very much like Tasha this week, Nas was sidelined for most of the episode, and all we know is that she knows Roman remembered something regarding that restaurant. Will she push to find out what it is or will she trust Jane and Roman to come forward if that information is relevant? So far Nas seems to be ok with taking a step to the side and let others run the show a bit. I did love her scene with Patterson. 

Actually, all the Nas/Patterson scenes have been great and I hope we get to see more of that interaction moving forward. 

Speaking of Patterson, our favorite lab lady really kicked some ass this week-- again-- proving once again that she is the most bad ass agent in the whole of the FBI. In my opinion, at least. 

L: You know how I adore Patterson! I was a little bummed that she didn't get to bring her awesome computer-clutch this week, which is still my favorite accessory in the history of accessories. But her interactions with Boston more than made up for that. And I loved the scene between her and Nas, too. 

Nas has been a little less shady the past few weeks. I'm not sure if it's just because she's not sleeping with Weller any more, or if it's intentional, to make viewers see her in a more sympathetic, more "go team!" role. To be honest, I think I enjoyed her the most when she was acting suspicious and following her own mysterious agenda. It's hard for me to trust this new kinder, gentler Nas, so she seems less effective in her role as team mom. 

I really love that Patterson was checking up on Dr. Sun, but honestly, I can't imagine why Patterson would want to talk to her. Yes, Patterson needs a therapist, one that she can thoroughly vet. (Although presumably Borden would have been thoroughly vetted before being assigned to the NYO. Given that no one seemed to have any idea that he might be working for Sandstorm, apparently there was nothing in his file that sent up red flags, either.) Maybe she should get Dr. Sun to vet a new therapist for the team? It is clear when we see Patterson that she is struggling-- and unlike both Weller and Reade, instead of denying it (or snorting questionable substances)-- she has gotten checked out by a physical doctor and is now willing to see a psychologist. You know, just in case we needed more proof that she's the smartest person in any room.

Y: Yeah, her choosing Dr. Sun is a bit strange, but I think it comes down to the fact that the people who are in the know with regards to Operation Sandstorm are very few and the only licensed therapist among them is Dr. Sun. I’m not too thrilled about it either because of how she dealt with my precious Roman, but after getting a glimpse of her backstory, I might be warming up to her a little bit. Or at least, I understand why she’d be so “hostile” towards Roman. How would she be able to help Patterson, though? I don’t know, but I sure hope so because that perfect unicorn in human form needs to catch a break soon. But hey, at least she’s not doing hard drugs… Yes, Edgar, I’m side-eyeing you so hard right now. 

Sandstorm was kind of quiet this week. Guess things aren't really moving forward for them, are they?

L: Ugh. I really, really want to believe that they aren’t going to get to Phase Two and that our beloved FBI team is getting closer, but.... Nothing about this is good. 

Despite being vindicated in this week's plot, it turns out that Riley has sold his shares in his auto company in order to focus on going into space. And he's working closely with Sandstorm, who just happen to have a giant missile laying around. I'm sure this is just a freak coincidence, though, right? Nothing to be alarmed about. Oh, wait, they can't do Phase Two without him? Yeah, maybe Rich was right: "Call your family and tell them you love them." 

Speaking of Rich, if there's a silver lining here, it's that the FBI has all the data from Riley's hard drive, and if they need help figuring it out... Well, Rich Dotcom knows "more about Zach than Zach does." So let's keep our fingers crossed that we get another Rich Dotcom episode this season. 

Y: Even when they only get one scene per episode, Sandstorm still gets more and more sinister. And I think it helps when those scenes involve Borden because his transformation is just… terrifying. From his scene with Parker a few weeks ago, to this week with Riley, it seems that creeper Nigel was really putting in quite a show to play the sweet, soft-spoken Dr. Robert Borden. What we have today is a man who seems to have really embraced the role of pure evilness. What does that mean for our hopes that Nigel/Robert will be redeemed? Is that possibility still there, or are we to accept that he is truly 100% concentrated, no additives, evil? 

But Sandstorm aren’t just sitting back and waiting. No, they’re moving ahead with their Phase Two and not wasting anytime recruiting the people they need, are they? 

Well, what about our beloved amnesiac terrorist in the basement? He's making progress, isn't he?

Y: Well, if by progress you mean discovering horrible crimes he committed in his past, then yes. Roman made a lot of progress this week. He did get to leave his glass cage this week and go on a trip around town with his sister and a government appointed babysitter. It’s really interesting watching Roman cope with his memory loss and compare it with Jane, looking at what fuels Roman to go forward versus what fueled Jane when she first woke up, especially considering that from the moment Roman came to, he was told he is a criminal whereas Jane was considered a victim. There is anger in both cases, but where Jane did not know who to be angry at, she focused on solving the tattoos. Roman does not have the privilege of focusing his anger anywhere else. Not only does he believe that Shepherd erased his memory and tried to kill him, he also believes that she was the reason he ever even became a criminal, that his path to become a terrorist was paved by her. His rage is focused on one person and one objective and until they can help him calm that rage and focus his mind on something else-- like helping the team with the tattoos and bringing Sandstorm down (and not just for the sake of revenge but because it is the right thing)-- I cannot imagine how things can be good for him. 

This boy is suffering through all this anger and he has no place for anything else at the moment. Jane needs to help him find another purpose, or at least focus that anger and use it to help them, before he implodes. 

Finding out that he is responsible for Emma Shaw’s death is not going to help, and I just hope that when Kurt finds out, he deals with this properly and doesn't blame him or project his own anger at Roman because… not good. For either of them. 

L: Oh, Roman, you bearded heartbreak. You're locked in a cage, and when they let you out, instead of dredging up memories of your childhood, you dig up one horrible memory of killing an innocent woman. Roman's grief and rage are palpable here, and these dark, tortured moments are all the more raw for punctuating an episode filled with laugh-out-loud moments. 

Nas's source has turned up property records for Ellen Briggs, and Weller sends Jane, Roman, and Nas to check them all out and see if they remember anything. (Mind you, the property records are from Wisconsin, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, Colorado, New Jersery... So we're looking at a solid week of travel, and that's without a side trip to a restaurant in Harlem, which seems pretty far from home for Emma Shaw). But anyway... 

Neither Jane nor Roman have any memories of the house where Shepherd was living (at least on paper) when she brought them to the US from Africa, an unassuming home on (no, seriously) Robin Hood Lane. Jane has gotten more accepting of her lack of memories, but Roman takes it much more to heart and breaks down. Jane tries to calm him, but he is inconsolable. "She stole my life from me. She's gonna pay." Jane is worrying about Roman, but what she should really be worrying about is how to tell Roman the truth about who ZIP-ed him. Because it's obvious now to everyone that this lie is destroying him. It's frustrating that Jane and Nas don't discuss this at all when they take Roman back to Jane's apartment to give him a little time to calm down. Not only does perpetuating this lie seem cruel to Roman, but it also seems like such an obvious future conflict: Shepherd will somehow get her hands on Roman, he'll accuse her of wiping his memory, and she will immediately tell him that it was Jane. And then Jane will have to try to win back Roman's loyalty while the entire FBI says, "Oh well, we knew we couldn't trust him." Ugh. Please don't let this happen, Jane! 

We have to wonder here: What exactly has Jane told Roman about her past? Because she says, "You killed Taylor Shaw's mother," as though she expects that Roman will know who that is. So he knows why and how Jane ended up at the FBI, but not that it was her choice to do so? The problem here is that a single lie is seldom just a single lie. It has to be sustained, so everything that Jane might wish to tell Roman, to explain why Shepherd must be stopped, must be carefully framed within the context of the lie that Shepherd was the one who wiped Roman's memory. And really, it doesn't make any sense. Jane's memory was wiped for a clear purpose: To send her to the FBI with a body full of incriminating evidence but no memories that would point back to Sandstorm, even under interrogation. But there is no purpose for Shepherd to have wiped Roman's memory, and no amount of story-spinning from Jane or trips down memory lane for Roman are going to help him find a reason that doesn't exist. 

And there's also the fact that lies aren't going to help him retrieve any more useful memories either. Jane was told that she was Taylor, and because she believed it, she tried to fit the few memories of her past that she recovered into that context... and of course, they didn't fit, so instead of unlocking her past, she was just left with the faint sense that something was wrong, but no idea what it was. It doesn't seem like a great leap to think that the lie that Roman believes is going to get in the way of his recovering true, useful memories. 

I completely agree with Yas here: The more that Roman bangs his head against this mental wall, the more his rage builds. Shakespeare said, "Truth will out," and that can't mean anything good for Jane when it does. 

But Jane is as happy as any girl getting flowers from a handsome guy, isn't she?

L: Jane misses out on the fun with Rich this week, and not getting to watch her interacting more with Rich might be the only disappointing thing about this episode.   

The show doesn’t dwell much on the fact that Jane doesn’t recall anything from any of the locations that they visit, but it feels a bit like her trying to recollect memories from Taylor’s childhood, trying to force herself to remember things that never actually happened to her. I am left wondering how much of Shepherd's adoption story was really true. The FBI has turned up Shepherd's real name, her military records (admittedly heavily redacted), and now her property records... but even though they seem to know when she returned from Africa, they haven’t found any adoption paperwork, immigration records, school enrollment records, or medical records for the two kids she supposedly brought home with her. So if the siblings weren't living with Shepherd, where were they? Clearly whatever training they were receiving at the orphanage continued well past those years, so where was Shepherd keeping them? Were there other children there with them? How many of the other Sandstorm troops had similar backgrounds to Jane and Roman, and now find themselves tied to Shepherd through a twisted mess of indebtedness and maternal expectations? 

And then there's the big lie in this episode. When Roman recovers the memory about killing Emma Shaw, he wants to tell Nas, but Jane stops him. She tells him that it will be easier for Weller to hear the truth from Jane than from Nas. And she's probably right, but when Weller asks if she and Roman retrieved any memories today, she lies and tells him no. 

Now, I hate hate hate that Jane lied to Weller. I mean, we could subtitle the first season Jane Lying to Weller Does Not End Well. I feel like this is a lesson we've all learned. But that said, I do completely understand why she lied: to protect Roman and to protect Weller. And I would argue that at that moment, she was protecting Weller even more than she was Roman. I mean, we know that Roman killed people, so one more person isn't really a huge revelation. Yes, Weller would blame Roman for killing Emma (which won't help Jane's cause of trying to convince Weller to let Roman out of jail), but even worse, Weller will blame himself. Emma was killed so that Shepherd could use Jane to get close to Weller. If Weller hadn't factored into Shepherd's plans, there would have been no reason for anyone to harm Emma. Weller already feels that he let Emma down by not protecting Taylor. How much heavier can his burden become before he collapses under its weight? 

I want to believe that Jane didn't want to dump this truth on Weller right after he witnessed Sean Clark's murder and discovered the depth of Shepherd's involvement in his life. I certainly hope that she will find some time-- away from the rest of the team-- to break this news to him gently. To some degree, it won't change things that much for Roman. The FBI already has him locked up for killing who knows how many cops and Jeffrey Kantor. Emma Shaw's death was ruled an accident, and the only evidence that it wasn't is Roman's own memory. (It probably isn't going to help Jane's dream of having her future husband and brother bonding over a nice home-cooked dinner though.) And while I hope that Jane will choose to tell Weller the truth herself-- before, say, Nas tells him that Roman had a memory of watching Weller have lunch with a women who super-coincidentally died just a little while later-- this is tv, and there's a whole lot more drama when one character discovers that another character has lied to them. Please, Jane, let’s not go there.

But the roses that Oliver sent are lovely. I'm happy that Jane has a few nice moments in her life right now. I mean, her immediate future looks like stacks of dynamite attached to a lit fuse, but at least she gets in a hot date before the earth-shattering kaboom, right? 

Y: Well, the way it stands right now, Jane has three Australian men in her life, only two of whom are about to explode. So, that’s not too bad? All things considered, things seem to be going well for Jane, which is, as everyone knows, a sure sign that things pretty soon will be not okay. Jane’s main focus is still protecting Roman, from his past, from himself, from the CIA and most importantly from the truth. The more that Roman remembers, the closer he gets to figuring out that she was the one who erased his memory and right now this is the biggest landmine for Jane. And it can go off at any moment.   

You really cannot envy Jane at the situation she is in right now. On the one hand she seems in control of her life for the first time since she woke up in Times Square. She knows what she wants, she has a purpose and she has a motive to go after that one specific goal, and yet, the circumstances around her are not helping. She never wanted to lie to Roman. She was basically forced to do that and now it’s a waiting game until this blows up in her face. And now she finds herself having to lie to Kurt (albeit to protect him as well) and we all know that cannot be good. 

Lying to Roman protects him and protects her. Lying to Kurt protects Roman and protects Kurt. And once again Jane finds herself forced into a web of lies to protect the people she loves. I just hope Jane has learned from her past, and is strong enough to untangle herself and the people she loves before it’s too late.  

Our angry munchkin was pretty stressed out last week. But this week, Rich Dotcom is making him feel all pretty and romantic. That's gotta be good!

Y: LOL! Yes, it was a nice change for Kurt this week. After a stressful couple of weeks, in comes Rich to brighten up his life and even Kurt himself admits that it was actually nice to spend the day with his favorite criminal. Kurt actually spent the majority of the episode smiling, something that has never happened before, and he still managed to take down two armed guards, stop a terrorist attack, and shoot Rich in the foot. This just might be the best day Kurt Weller has had in forever. 

Of course, it cannot all be good because back at the office, Nas is there to remind him they have bigger issues. And the little clue that Sean Clark gave him about the Truman Protocol has come back with more questions than answers. It seems like our little munchkin isn’t allowed to have a full worry-free twenty four hours. And that sounds about right because things are going to get very very not good for Weller and this was just a small break from it all before his life continues to spiral madly out of control and sends him crashing. Don’t be fooled by the smiles from this week, this is just a smoke screen. Things are going to get horrible very quickly and very soon. 

L: Yes, Weller may have smiled his way through the evening with Rich Dotcom, but it was all part of his undercover disguise. His first scene in this episode shows his real mental state a lot more clearly: He nearly breaks down describing how Shepherd looked him in the eye before plunging her knife into Sean Clark's chest, while he watched with his hands tied to a chair. 

And really, that scene is also a symbol for his life thus far: His hands are tied, and he's helpless while his father murders Taylor Shaw, while Ellen Briggs steers his education and then his career, while Mayfair is killed and his agents blown up. All he's been able to do is watch while "Shepherd goes where she wants. Does what she wants. Kills who she wants! There's nothing that we can ever do." And if there's one thing that we know about Weller, it’s that there is nothing he hates more than being helpless. He's a control freak, but he has never been in control, and that knowledge is eating him up inside. 

And I'm pretty sure things are going to get a lot worse before there is any chance of them getting better... 

What about Jeller? Any good news in that corner?

Y: You know it’s never good to ask me this question. I walk around in the most Jeller-tinted glasses that have ever existed, and all I see is good good good news for Jeller every which way I look. And yes, something big did happen this week in Jane not telling Kurt about what Roman remembered, and yes, I know people are very much annoyed by this. But I’m not, at least not as annoyed as everyone else because I can see this from Jane’s point of view, I can see why she is doing it, and I can see how this is a temporary thing. 

L: We've had a lot of people asking us about Jane lying to Weller, both on this blog and on our personal tumblrs. And I know that it seems like a huge step backwards, after all that these two have been through. And I think the thing to remember here is that: Jane was lying to protect Weller as much as she was Roman. She cares about Weller, and she doesn't want to share something with him that is only going to cause him more pain.   

And it wasn't easy for Jane to lie to him. We see this at the end of the episode, when Weller teases her about having a "hot date." First she says no, because in her mind it's not really a "hot" date, but she doesn't want to lie to him, so she fumbles around and finally admits that, yes, it is a date. And Weller smiles back at her, but as she leaves, his smile fades, and I kinda wished the camera had lingered here for just another moment, because I really wanted to see more of what he was thinking at that moment. 

Yas and I have gone around and around on whether or not Jane tells Weller the truth. And we both really hope that she will. (Yas might be a wee bit more optimistic about it than I am.) The evolution of their relationship this season has been to show that the trust between them-- that was gone at the end of last season-- has been rebuilt. And Jane telling Weller the truth about this would be an excellent way to show this. 

I'm also pretty sure that this wasn't the last conversation that Jeller has about Jane's date(s) with Oliver. And I'm not going to lie, I am seriously looking forward to the next one! 

Y: Yes! Jane did not need to tell Kurt about her date. That was something she could have kept to herself and avoided all the awkwardness that she knew would come with it. But the important thing here is that she did tell him. She knows how important being honest with him at this point is, which goes to show she is not purposely keeping the Roman/Emma thing from him. She wants to tell him! But come on you guys, this is not something you just throw at someone. Especially not someone you care about and you know how much this will damage. And she knows how hard the past weeks have been on Kurt, from Allie leaving to learning that he's Sandstorm’s poster boy. She can see he is having a good day for the first time in a long time. She is going to let him have it and will let him know later. I just know she will. 

Seriously, you guys, Jeller are doing perfectly fine! I mean, sure it might not look like it now, but they’re on the right path and they will find their way. They practically said “I wish I’d spent the day with you” at the end of the episode when Kurt told her he wished she could have been there when he shot Rich and she reciprocated the feeling. That’s true love right there. What? True love isn’t wanting to be side by side when you play with friendly fire? I guess I don’t know what true love is, then!   

And that's all from us for this week! What did you think about Rich Dotcom's return in this episode? How worried are you about the promo for next week? We want to know! - Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: patterson #character: roman #character: edgar reade #character: tasha zapata #character: nas kamal #character: robert borden #character: rich doctom #character: shepherd #character: boston arliss crab #ship: jane/kurt #ship: jane/oliver #episode: 214 - borrow or rob

[take2intotheshower]

Blindspot Fandom “Meet and Greet” #4

1.      Name/Nickname:  Heather                  

2.      Age* (don’t be shy, we’re a fandom of grandmas):  Old enough to remember when we had to record our favorite shows on VHS tapes if we were unable to watch live

3.      Where are you from*:  England

4.      When did you jump aboard the Blindspot madness:  Early 2015, before the Pilot aired (I’d heard Sully was to star in it, so I was avidly following all the news in the media)

5.      Other fandoms you’re in/TV shows you watch:  Strike Back (the Scott & Stonebridge years), although it’s not really a fandom any more. Shows currently watched: Lost (still making my way through - now on the final Season), Ransom, Lucifer, The Librarians (S1 - not sure yet if it’s fun or just childishly silly), Killing Eve, The Code (only a few more eps to go as it’s been cancelled), Hawaii 5-0, Strike Back (the new incarnation), Berlin Station, Billions. Really enjoyed The Umbrella Academy and Good Omens.    

6.      Favorite Blindspot characters (main):  Kurt Weller, Remi, Patterson, Rich Dotcom, Roman

7.      Favorite Blindspot characters (guest or recurring):  Matthew Weitz, Boston Arliss Crab, Jake Keaton, Allie Knight

8.      Favorite ship(s):  Jeller and Patterson-David

9.      Favorite episode(s):  1-01, 1-02, 1-05, 1-09, 1-21, 2-01, 2-10, 2-14, 2-15, 2-19, 2-21, 3-01, 4-05, 4-07

10.  Favorite season(s):  S1 (it was S2 last time but, with our re-watch, S1 has edged ahead again)

11.  Favorite tattoo(s)/case(s):  Still the bird on the neck, plus the way it linked to the box and new tattoos in 2-22

12.  Favorite whatever you want:  Favorite outfits - Kurt’s unbuttoned shirts in S1, Jane’s tank tops, Zapata in just about anything (but especially her S1 look), Patterson’s dress sense in S4 (but the makeup is too heavy now), Rich wearing anything

13.  If you were a Blindspot character, who would you be: I’m probably more of a Reade-Patterson mix, but I’d like to be Kurt for his leadership but with Jane’s skills

14.  One scene that left you with your jaw on the floor:  Because we just re-watched it, that moment in 1-10 when Remi tells Jane it was her idea and that she did it to herself  

15.  One dead character you would bring back:  Roman - I miss him

16.  One guest star (who has appeared in less than three to five episodes) you want to bring back:  Ana Montes

17.  One recurring character you’d love to have promoted to regular:  Jake Keaton (fascinating how he’s gone from despised villain to a reliable ally of the team)

18.  One actor/actress you would love to have guest star on the show (and who would they play):  I’d had high hopes of Kurt’s Mom, played by someone like Cheryl Ladd. Now it would have to be Ennis Esmer’s real-life Dad, Demir Esmer, playing himself  

19.  One forgotten storyline you wish they’d bring back or answer: What really happened the night Taylor Shaw was killed  

20.  One country you want the show to visit next season:  Canada (or Australia)

21.  What’s your craziest/favorite theory about the upcoming season:  An unlikely set of allies made up of Weitz, Keaton and Allie Knight will join together to support our team on the run and help them clear their names (I’m deliberately not including Brianna, as she has 3 failures vs 1 success to her career so far). Then all the team except Reade and Zapata will leave the FBI and everyone will live happily ever after, while leaving a smidgeon of an opening to bring them back if a streaming service shows interest in picking up the show. But please, MG - don’t let’s have Jane discovering she’s pregnant at the end. Too corny, and Jeller are owed some uninterrupted time together  

22.  Share a little bit about yourself (don’t be shy)*:  I am deeply into medieval history, worked in the City of London for many years, and I like furry animals, sports cars and chocolate

#Blindspot #BSHiatusProject #BSMeetandGreet