Blindspot: Cease Forcing Enemy Recap

Synopsis: The team flies to the Dark Isles and discovers the passengers of a plane that disappeared. Patterson is interrogated about her contact with David, and a new adversary reveals himself. Jane’s identity is revealed.

Rating: ★★★★★

Jane is having a rough couple of days.

It also occurs to me this is not the first time I have begun a Blindspot recap with that sentence. In fact, it summarizes the show on the whole pretty neatly.

After being captured, interrogated and waterboarded by Carter, Jane is rescued by her mysterious former fiancee Oscar, whom she only remembers in fragments. He shows her a video of herself, confirming that she chose to have herself tattooed with puzzles, and the entire operation was her idea. That she’s running it, and he’s just following her orders.

Of course, he can’t tell her what that operation is, and he can’t tell her why he can’t tell her what it is. He has some cryptic plan that’s actually her plan, about revealing her own information to her on some specific timetable. Honestly, I have a hard enough time with the tattoo story engine if I think about it too much, but this is just absurd. I’m choosing to roll with it, though.

Oscar asks Jane to get the FBI to drop her security detail, and meet him in a designated spot if she does. He doesn’t think they’ll do it though – he’s trying to prove that she’s under their thumb and they cannot be trusted, even though she insists they are her friends.

Jane has barely escaped from all that and is hiding it, when Weller corners her at work, wanting to discuss the whole thing from last episode where they accidentally a little bit made out on his porch. She doesn’t even get a chance to talk to him before a ping on the database of her tattoos sends them to some tiny uninhabited islands in the middle of nowhere.

With her nose still bleeding from the waterboarding she’s pretending never happened, they walk right into the clutches of a rebel group looking to knock out all US military communications, who have diverted a passenger plane thought to have disappeared, and are holding all the passengers hostage in a bunker and forcing them to build satellites.

Weller’s team gets dragged – literally – into making a video for the US government about the terrorist act that’s about to happen, and to escape and save Weller, Jane breaks her own thumbs, before sneaking onto the previously missing plane, to try and stop it from reaching 60,000 feet and launching the satellite. With Patterson’s help, Jane manages to “safely” crash the plane back onto the tarmac, after it’s engines won’t ignite.

Sounds kind of like my day, too.

Meanwhile, Patterson is being – rudely – questioned about her involvement with David in the wake of his death and her own misdeeds. Fisher, a pasty little weasel with a stupid mustache who’s after Mayfair’s job, throws the book at her. Twisting her words, intentionally upsetting her, asking personal questions, and forcing her to confess to everything and make it sound as bad as possible, while implicating Mayfair. He suspends a distraught Patterson, and a furious Mayfair tells him to stick it, because she needs Patterson.

Which is further proven when she singlehandedly saves the say, while Fisher watches, and he relents, whining the whole time. It’s amazing.

In the end, Mayfair actually does – fairly readily – agree to pull Jane’s detail when she asks. With her newfound freedom, Weller asks if she’ll meet him in the park later that night. They’re interrupted before she can answer, and Weller has to walk away, assuming it’s a yes.

He waits for her in the park while she appears to be walking to meet him, but instead she meets with Oscar. He tells her that yes, she is Taylor Shaw, but it’s not time yet for her to know where she’s been the past 25 years. He tells her he has missions for her, and things to tell her and it’s all just beginning.

Personally, I’m pumped as hell for the rest of the season. I make fun, but the show is undeniably compelling, unpredictable and fast-moving. I love that Jane has some leverage now. She’s skilled, but she’s pretty much always been bumbling around, unsure of literally anything.

Now, she knows she’s Taylor, she’s learning about things from her past and she can’t  – or won’t – tell anyone. She’s, presumably, going to have this whole other life she’ll be dealing with and be loyal to. An updated Sydney Bristow if you will. And I’m into that.

I also loved the entire setup on the island. It was great that the plight of the hostages fed the story without being the story. There’s so many movies and shows out there about people getting captured, but these guys were already captured.

They weren’t panicked, it wasn’t about the plane crash or any of the other tropes that might have been used. They had been there for awhile. They were resigned, and a little defeated but the status quo had been established. They were calm and knew each other, and prepared to help the FBI. It was a familiar story through a slightly different lens and it came off perfectly.

On that note, when the team was first captured and were being tortured for information, not one of them said a word. No one weak link had to fold under torture just to advance the plot, and even better, no one relented at the sight of the others being tortured.

They wanted to of course, but they implicitly trusted each other not to talk, and to be tough enough to handle it. Literally none of them said a word the whole scene. They used Reade’s secret understanding of Urdu to move the story along instead.

Hell yes.