One of the things I liked so well about the Blindspot pilot was how emotionally resonant the story was, and that Jane was really distraught about what might have transpired to get her to this point.
This week, we saw Fuller’s side of that emotional arcing as he was forced to face an old case, and admit that perhaps Taylor, the missing girl in that case — whom his father was accused of kidnapping and murdering 25 years earlier — might in fact be Jane. He bases this on her neck scar, her eyes, and her age.
While he’s wrestling with that, they tackle this week’s tattoo case, unraveled by Patterson through one of Crane‘s fancy Vigenère ciphers, which leads them to a disgruntled drone pilot who starts killing people in New York, all while absconding with and stashing away the daughter of one of the program’s techs to ensure he has access to the drones.
Borden administers a Rorschach test on Jane and that triggers Mexican/South American looking flashbacks of her shooting a nun in the back of the head, in front of a church altar. She spends the episode reliving that and struggling with the idea that she was a no good, very bad, terrible person. She puts that forth in general terms to Fuller, and he says from what he’s seen, he doesn’t think that could be true. As her flashback doles out more information, she realizes she killed someone dressed as a nun, from whom she retrieved a secure thumb drive, so perhaps not a nun, then.
I was so happy to see Jordana Spiro — I still miss My Boys — as Fuller’s sister, in whom he confides his theory about Jane. She’s overjoyed because it would exonerate their father, who she tells Fuller is now dying of lung cancer.
Also in there, Reade questions the notion of essentially prioritizing Jane’s tattoos over all their other cases, and Mayfair unintentionally, hilariously deflates Patterson, who’s so proud of her complicated research bot until Mayfair pronounces it to be similar to a Google alert.
Jane also gets a glimpse of Whitworth’s character on the street in the current timeline, but she doesn’t tell Fuller she’s remembering him or has seen him again — and then he comes calling at her safe house in the last moments of the episode. Fuller also tests his theory about Jane’s physical memory and isn’t disappointed when she can assemble and successfully fire a range of weapons, and take him on in hand-to-hand combat.
I like the balance of the personal with the case of the week, and I’m with Reade, too, that you wouldn’t divert an entire unit to this one case — no matter how tantalizing the idea of a super secret female special ops maybe Navy Seal with no military record is, so I expect that to maybe ramp down at some point, or they’ll rotate Reade and Zapata in and out now and again so they work other cases.
Here are a couple of sneak peeks of the next new episode, which airs Monday night at 10/9c on NBC in the U.S. and 9 pm e/p on CTV in Canada.