After last week’s fairly by-the-book case in the field and IA investigation at home (pretty much covered in the preview, hence, no recap), this week’s Blindspot takes a closer look behind the badge as Jane’s alliances are tested on multiple fronts and Weller gets an awakening of his own.
The case via tattoo in “Scientists Hollow Fortune” takes a page out of The Bourne Identity and Beauty and the Beast as an amnesiac, and murderous, assumed-dead soldier, Charles Napier (Gaius Charles) pops up outside the city with no knowledge of his identity but seemingly programmed to kill due to a heightened state of fight or flight.
Patterson pieces together the man’s identity and learns that he was a model soldier supposedly killed in action a year prior. As she digs deeper she finds out a military contractor hopped to on the recovery of his body, which points to harvesting live specimens for their experiments (and, ewww).
This is intriguing for the team, and Jane, because one of the drugs in his brain-rewriting cocktail identical to the one that wiped Jane’s memory. Jane starts to feel a kinship with him as a fellow test subject when she watches his reunion with his mother, which cuts through all of his reprogramming. She fights for him when the military takes custody and then he’s kidnapped by the mercenaries who were experimenting on him.
Things go badly when he attacks her and Weller kills him. Mayfair hands her her ass for talking against her in front of the (now-dead) military liaison and that’s enough ammunition that Jane honors a request by Oscar to swap Mayfair’s pen. So far, that’s all it was, a pen swap as a show of faith. In return, she asks about Orion, which she remembers in flashes as the reason she washed herself out of SEAL training. He tells her they’re who killed her. Last week, he also confirmed that she is in fact Taylor Shaw, but he doesn’t tell her where she was for 25 years.
Weller is agitated — moreso than normal — because Jane stood him up at the end of last week’s episode, when he wanted to discuss the kiss, so he gives her an out that he was a no-show and she hedges that she was, too, because they didn’t want to make things awkward (too late). This week, they’re all kinds of awkward, and then when he kills Napier, she’s not happy.
Finally, he goes home, where his dad is babysitting and they bond over juicing and reminiscing and Weller finally asks his dad to come clean about the night Taylor disappeared. After a bit of hemming he admits he tried to kill himself that night, and that he stopped only because he thought about what he and his sister and mom would’ve dealt with afterward. He breaks down sobbing that he never wanted Kurt to be like him. Weller puts one hand over his dad’s and one on his neck and weeps with him.
Meanwhile, Sarah’s revealed to be out on a date with Reed, and it looks like it’s already serious and they’re discussing telling her brother. Oh my.
I liked that we saw Jane filtering her own memories through Napier’s–between what Oscar is parceling out and her own flashes, it dawns on her that however she programmed her own reset, it could have all gone so differently if she’d come out swinging in Times Square instead of arriving passively. She’s empathetic and sympathetic to what he goes through because none of it was of his own design, but if she’s to be believed (via Oscar), hers was.
Oscar’s planting seeds of distrust in her team, to the point that she’s willing to do what he asks, but again, I’m never wholly sure what I’m supposed to trust here. I trust Kurt. I trust Jane, as shown in the current timeline. Zapata rounded back, but that looks like that may still bite because annoying IA dude is back next week. Reed and Sarah feels like a left field addition because I don’t recall Reed acting sneaky or Sarah mentioning a guy, but maybe I missed the cues. Either way, OK. Anything that uses more of Jordana Spiro is OK by me.
I think we can trust Patterson and Mayfair, too, but I have no doubt that Mayfair is in a bind about some of her loyalties and past allegiances. They have a quiet non-chat about Patterson still needing to take time because her grief will bite her if she doesn’t. It reminded me of a great line from Curly Sue, of all things, by the late great John Hughes where Fred Dalton Thompson tells Kelly Lynch, “You keep going 190 miles an hour, you’re going to hit something.” 25 years later, that’s still a great line. Patterson’s meltdown will be epic when it comes.
Blindspot airs Monday night at 10/9c on NBC in the U.S. and 10 pm e/p on CTV in Canada.
Photo Courtesy of Paul Sarkis/NBC