Blindspot: Authentic Flirt Recap

Synopsis: Jane and Weller go undercover as a married Bulgarian assassin duo, and David gets himself into trouble.

Rating: ★★★★★

This episode of Blindspot did two things that kept me glued: First, it took a classic gimmicky episode and let it play almost all the way out before jamming in like six major plot developments in the last two minutes. Second, those two minutes, and actually the entire secondary storyline of the episode, were done completely without dialogue of any kind.

After breaking up with her boyfriend David in the previous episode, Patterson runs into him getting coffee. He declares his undying love for her, and asks if she feels the same. She clearly does, but she reminds him how much trouble they got into last time, how much danger she is surrounded by, and that she will not risk her career, especially during the most important and exciting case she’s ever worked.

In the lab, she discovers that a bunch of random letters tattooed all over Jane’s body spell out the name of an online message board for dog lovers, that is actually a coded way for criminals to communicate unnoticed. After a visit from a US Marshall (Weller’s ex, incidentally), they discover that the Wit-Sec database has been hacked, and a list of over two thousand cover identities has been stolen, to be auctioned off for millions of dollars per copy.

They track some of the messages to an old house, in which they find a notorious pair of assassins hiding out. Thanks to Jane’s abruptly realized ability to speak Bulgarian, they’re able to get the drop on them, but are forced to kill them both in self-defense. In the house, they find tickets to a fancy gala in the city, supposedly where the list is to be sold. Since the pair are dead, two of the team must pose as them to get into the gala and arrest whoever’s selling the list.

Naturally, Weller is chosen, as leading field agent and resident renegade cop archetype. And Jane, as an amnesiac FBI asset with technically unknown intentions only gets the job because of her convenient and newfound ability to speak Bulgarian – which there is no reason to assume will even come up, but we certainly would’t want to miss a chance for our heroes to go undercover together, so I digress.

The two take an adorable telegraphed moment to admire each other in black tie, before heading to the party. There, they touch base with charismatic internet mogul Rich.Com (seriously, that’s his name), who sells them the list and tells them he’s sold it to one other person at the party. Weller and Jane break into the security office to search for the other buyer on the surveillance cameras, and manage to pin him down. Rich.Com finds them, but they convince him the other buyer is the one who’s working for the feds, and Rich kills him. There’s an awesome fight, and Jane and Weller arrest the hell out of him. Go team.

After this, everyone is hanging out at Jane’s safehouse drinking beer, eating pizza, laughing hysterically and just generally having a slow motion montage-worthy good time. Alongside the mirth though, we see Zapata, tasked with bugging Jane’s place under threat of losing her job and reputation, toss the bug down the sewer instead – protecting Jane, but throwing herself at the mercy of the CIA director Carter.

Simultaneously, Guerrero, just minding his own business in prison, gets straight-up shivved in the hallway. Carter gets a text telling him the job is done. He had Guerrero killed, even though Mayfair insisted it wasn’t necessary, and they had enough leverage to make him cop to whatever they wanted.

Near the beginning of the episode, poor David, hanging out at the Brooklyn Historical Society, sees a woman reading from and writing in the coded book he and Patterson found last week. He follows the woman out of the building and spends multiple cut scenes trailing her around the city, while another man trails him. At the very end, he follows the woman down an alley, but when the third man arrives, David is dead.

Did the woman kill him? Was it the person she was meeting? Someone else? Maybe David was a plant the whole time. What happens to someone who directly disobeys Carter?

A whole episode of the all-dressed-up and fake-married gag, and then BAM. Blindsided by rapid plot acceleration. Jane even told Weller about her memories of the man with the tree on his arm.

The final sequence of the episode, cutting between every event, and every scene that saw David following the mysterious woman around, was silent. There was music and ambient noise, but no dialogue was required to convey that level of information. That’s filmmaking in it’s purest form, and it was done incredibly, hypnotically well. It’s much more than I’d expect from a network procedural, if we’re being honest, and I’m entirely impressed.