Blindspot: Evil Handmade Instrument Recap

Synopsis: The team begins a relentless search for David’s killer, and uncovers an international conspiracy. Jane finds herself in a very tight spot.

Rating: ★★★★★

Something interesting that Blindspot does much more than other shows, is have it’s secondary characters functioning as a unit that is always together. Every procedural has a “team” but Blindspot‘s team not only has extremely realistic interactions, but they are all present almost all of the time and even when they’re not, they get almost equal screen time. Considering that the show is about Jane specifically, and the entire inciting incident is Kurt’s connection to her, you’d expect the show to revolve entirely around them, but it doesn’t.

Sure, the team itself is built around Jane’s tattoos, but that’s merely a story engine. Each tattoo leads to major crimes and conspiracies that affect the world at large and the team takes it all on. Jane, for all her importance and skill is sort of the bottom rung of the team, since no one knows for sure what her skills and intentions and loyalties are – not even her. And Kurt, for all his broody antihero splendor, and clout with the FBI, is NOT the team leader. I love that. It makes it feasible to work in any storyline imaginable.

The midseason finale, for example, focused a lot on Patterson. Reeling from David’s death, she’s on something of a bender trying to solve the case.The team tries to talk her down and when she won’t budge, they just back her the hell up with no qualms. It’s amazing. They use the coded book that  David and Patterson discovered to find a latent fingerprint that unravels a network of female Russian spies, posing as American housewives in order to carry out assassinations and other anti-political activities. They catch one of the spies, who puts them on the trail of Kate – the woman who killed David. They mean to question her when they find her, but the fight gets ugly and she’s killed in the process.

Back at HQ, Patterson finds Jane in the locker room to thank her for bringing David’s killer to justice, and for being there for her. It’s a very emotional (and wonderfully acted) scene where Patterson says she thought solving the case would make her feel better, but it doesn’t. She says she always thought there would be time, so she never appreciated how this great guy was right in front of her, and she pushed him away for reasons that seem stupid now. She asks Jane if this lost, vaguely grieving feeling is how she feels all the time, not knowing who she is or what’s happened to her. Jane says it is, and they cry and hug. Simultaneously, Zapata is considering her ultimatum from CIA director Carter – bug Jane’s place or else all Zapata’s dirty laundry will be publicly aired. Rather than betray Jane, we see Zapata print and sign a letter of resignation.

Later on, inspired by her conversation with Patterson, Jane ditches her security detail and sneaks out of her safe house to see Weller. He’s worried to see her there alone in the middle of the night, assuming something must be wrong, but she just kisses him. He’s surprised, and she says she just wanted one real moment alone with him. He’s all for it. They make out a little more before Weller’s young nephew interrupts them. They laugh, and it’s companionably awkward, so Jane heads home, smiling.

Before she gets there though, she’s jumped by a bunch of guys in a skeevy van who knock her out and cart her off. When she wakes up, she’s tied to a bench in a nasty basement being straight-up waterboarded by none other than CIA director Carter himself. The scene is brutal and frustrating – he demands to know who she is, and doesn’t believe her when she says she literally doesn’t know. While he’s in her face, she has a memory flash; seeing him at some kind of military-related event, where she overheard him talking to someone about something called “Orion.” Dazed, she says the word out loud, and he gets scarier, wanting to know how she knows about it.

It looks like it might be the end, when a guy just busts in and shoots Carter, point blank, approximately way too many times. Dude is dead with a capital “D.” Not that anyone’s crying about it. The guy looks at Jane, who recognizes him as the man with the tree on his arm who she thinks she was engaged to. He shows her a video on his phone of herself, telling herself that the man is named Oscar and he can be trusted. The younger, long-haired Jane in the video also says that the person who did this – who tattooed Jane with intricate, encoded conspiracies and who wiped her whole life away – was her.