Blindspot: Older Cutthroat Canyon Recap

Synopsis: A rogue from Oscar’s team is out to get Jane – and won’t stop until she’s dead. He makes himself known through the blackmail of a reclusive street artist, while Reade finds his loyalties tested.

Rating:★★★★★

The puzzle pieces are finally coming together. In a fast-moving, beautifully crafted episode that moves the story forward by leaps and bounds, Blindspot has unexpectedly tossed out what is by far its best installment to date.

After one of Jane’s tattoos (a really cool one of a burning rose) leads the team to a recently-robbed art installation by anonymous, Banksy-esque street artist Zomo, they discover it was actually an elaborate trap set for Jane. A bomb hidden inside a sculpture is set off as Jane gets near it, but it’s Weller who takes the brunt of the explosion, landing him in the hospital.

The rest of the team manages to track down Zomo’s studio, and finds him tied to a chair, dead. Before they can take two steps into the room, a sniper from across the street tears the room apart, and Jane takes two bullets in the vest.

While the team goes after the sniper, he escapes from his perch with a convenient FBI disguise, and goes after Jane again on the street. Realizing the danger she’s putting the team in, especially on the heels of what just happened to Weller, Jane takes off, drawing him away and removing herself from the situation.

Back at the ranch, Mayfair visits Weller in the hospital and explains that an assassin is after Jane, and she’s gone missing. Weller, naturally, jumps right out of bed and takes off to find her, realizing immediately that she’d gone AWOL on purpose to protect the team.

Jane goes to Oscar, who explains that the man coming after her is named Cade. He used to be part of the organization that Taylor and Oscar work for, but he went rogue after Oscar somehow had a hand in killing someone he loved. As retaliation, he wants to kill Jane/Taylor – someone Oscar loves. And now that’s she’s doing  – whatever it is she’s doing, with the FBI, she’s put herself back on his radar.

Together, they go on the run, and stop in to see Danny, an old friend who Jane vaguely remembers and seems to like. He’s thrilled to see them and happy to help, offering them a (really badass) car, along with weapons and burner phones. He wishes them well and opens the garage to let them out – and is immediately gunned down by Cade. He dies in Oscar’s arms, telling him it’s not his fault, and telling Jane that it’s alright because he owed her, and they’re even now.

Oscar is clearly horrified and distraught, covered in Danny’s blood, but Jane gets him on his feet and they make a run for it. When they finally pull over, she calls the hospital to check on Weller, and when she hears that he checked himself out to look for her, and realizes the danger the team is about to walk into, she insists on going back for them.

Oscar stops her, saying that she can’t go back and she’s better off without them anyway. When she protests he says he won’t let her face Cade because he can’t lose her again. She relents, but when he turns his back she holds him at gunpoint and steals the car.

The team interrogate Zomo’s assistant, who admits that a man – Cade – blackmailed Zomo into meeting him, where he gave him a sketch of Jane’s tattoo, and insisted he put in in his installation. The assistant goes on about how Zomo – who she claims she’d never actually met, he just sent her notes when he needed something – loved the idea of his art as currency for blackmail, and secret clandestine meetings. Weller asks how she could know so much about his feelings if she didn’t actually know him. She starts to cry, and Weller correctly guesses that she is actually Zomo.

She tells him the whole thing started as a silly art project she and her boyfriend came up with, and they wanted to see how far they could take it. Her boyfriend was the one who met Cade in the park, and he was the one they’d found dead.

Patterson finds an old ship where Cade has been squatting, and the team goes after him. Jane tracks them there with their car’s GPS and tries to free them, but Cade finds her first, pulling her out on to the deck to execute her, while the team watches, trapped behind glass as she’s dragged away.

On the deck, Jane and Cade tousle, and before he can kill her, he’s shot in the stomach by Oscar, who’s arrived in the nick of time. Cade doesn’t go down though, and Weller’s team has gotten free and is coming up the stairs. With no other choice, Oscar runs across the deck and tackles Cade into the water, disappearing from view once again, in the nick of time. Jane tells Weller she shot Cade and he fell.

At the office later, Jane notices Weller bleeding through his bandages and asks if he’s okay. He says he’s not, that he’d lost her once before and spent most of the day believing he did again, and he’s furious with her for being reckless and refusing the team’s help. She asks what he’d have done if the situation were reversed, and he says he’d have done exactly the same thing.

Blindspot has done surprisingly well at hardly ever succumbing to the gender binary. To my memory, there isn’t a single character or relationship on the show that would cause much of any impact on the story if it were gender-flipped. There’s a (relatively) even mix of character representation across both race and gender and it’s wonderful.

For a show that went around in circles a bit when it started off, things are finally becoming clear and lines are being drawn. Almost everyone is essentially “good,” but they all have something to hide, and they’re all doing things against their better judgement to protect what matters to them. There’s no clear villain and no easy answers. That sounds like a mess or even a cliche, but Blindspot consistently does it well.

Chillingly, when Jane tells Oscar that she doesn’t trust him and nor does she trust the person she was before, he tells her they have contingencies in place for that. They were prepared for her to feel that way, and so, if she doesn’t do what they ask, they’ll kill Kurt Weller.