Blindspot: Scientists Hollow Fortune Recap

Synopsis: While the team races to unravel the mystery of a super soldier gone rogue, Oscar tests Jane’s loyalty.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

When a soldier that’s been presumed dead for years, turns up in the middle of a road, violent and amnesiac, insisting he’s been trapped in hell, it comes out that a private military contractor has been faking the death of soldiers overseas and abducting them to experiment on in the hopes of creating a fearless, emotionless, completely pliant super soldier.

Aside: Why is everyone always trying to do this? I understand the applications, but has it ever succeeded, let alone ended in anything other than complete and catastrophic international disaster? RIDDLE ME THAT, BATMAN.

Anyway, our solider Charlie, is the only one who’s survived the process long enough to show any sign of increased abilities, and it seems the process used to wipe his memory and sharpen his skills is a watered-down version of exactly what has been done to Jane. The same cocktail of drugs, at a lower dosage. Hence, he’s currently running around batsh*t crazy – going so far as to shoot three innocent bystanders in the face for trying to help him. The FBI takes him in and reunites him with his mother, and he tries to help them find out what happened to him, but he can’t remember much.

His name, and the names of the other soldiers in the experiment, are also found, after the fact, to be tattooed in pieces on Jane’s body. Apparently Patterson had decoded the names before, but since they were all supposedly dead and unrelated, she’d let it go for the time being.

This felt like a weird throwaway afterthought to quick connect the story to Jane’s tattoos, when the real significance was that it was about Jane already. Given that, it’s also weird that Oscar, after such a dramatic and axis-tilting arrival, didn’t have anything to say about it beyond the fact that he wasn’t associated with them. But I digress.

The military police show up and whisk Charlie away from the FBI, claiming jurisdiction, but on the road, the same private contractors attack the van and abduct poor Charlie a second time. The team, using what Charlie was able to tell them about where he was kept, manage to find the Secret Evil Lab, but it’s too late. Charlie is gone, and all the other soldiers have been killed and left behind.

Patterson – bless her – laughs at the idea of a hard drive being useless just because the files have been deleted, and turns up enough info to figure out the location of the Emergency Secondary Secret Evil Lab – which of course, they have.

They get there in time to stop the scientists from killing Charlie, but he’s been dosed with the drugs again, and he doesn’t remember Jane and the team anymore. He attacks them, then runs and Jane gives chase, but the fight turns ugly and Weller shoots Charlie a second before he can shoot Jane.

Jane, who’s understandably been taking this case very personally, is pissed at Weller for shooting him, insisting he was innocent. Weller fights back, reminding her that’s she’d be dead otherwise. This comes on the heels of their conversation earlier, in which Weller apologized to her, pretending that he hadn’t shown up for their secret park meeting, after Jane didn’t. She doesn’t correct him, and they awkwardly agree that they shouldn’t interact outside of work.

Instead of meeting him the night before, Jane met with Oscar, who gave her the task of switching out Mayfair’s pen with a duplicate – and wouldn’t tell her why. She doesn’t want to do it, but she’s desperate for answers, and feeling less and less sure of her place on the team. She makes the switch, and Oscar confirms her suspicion that the pen was just a pen, and he was actually just testing her loyalty by seeing if she’d really do it.

When she asks how he could have known what Mayfair’s favorite pen looked like and if they had bugs or cameras on the FBI, he merely says they have “other ways.”

Given Mayfair’s ready agreement to drop Jane’s security detail, and in fact her uncharacteristically high tolerance for Jane’s antics in general, I’m starting to think that Mayfair might be in on the whole thing.

My other theory is that Orion – the group Oscar and apparently Jane work for – has a machine that can see the future – I’m just saying. (Has anyone seen Paycheck?)

Finally, when Jane asks Oscar what Orion is – after he refuses to talk about the bearded man – he just says “it’s where you died.” Taylor Shaw has been missing since she was 5 years old. Jane has mostly had flashes of memories about being a Navy SEAL (as an adult). The only thing we’ve seen about her childhood is a dank, creepy basement full of neglected-looking kids. Is that Orion? Has she been in this hamster wheel since she was 5? Her flashbacks imply that she was recruited into Orion from the Navy, but if that’s the case where was she from ages 5-18?

And so it goes.

Also Reade has apparently been dating Sarah Weller this whole time, and they’re actually super cute and happy, but when Kurt finds out it’s gonna go DOWN. Stay tuned.