Blindspot recap: 'Technology Wizards'

Blindspot loves its mysterious cold opens, and the one that begins “Technology Wizards” is no different. A naked man runs through the streets of New York, all while onlookers laugh and take pictures. Eventually the man stops, out of breath, and shouts “I did what you said! Now leave me alone!” It’s a fun, promising start to the episode. The problem? It immediately goes downhill after that. The storyline involving Jane’s daughter, and the tension it’s caused between Jane and Weller, has been a troublesome one all season long. What was once intriguing is now a mess of unearned soap opera emotions that the show struggles to pull off.

After the cold open, we’re instantly transported back to where last week’s episode left off, as Jane sits in Clem’s hotel room, talking about her daughter and Weller’s betrayal. Clem is clearly hoping Jane is coming back to him, but he’s not pushing her. Instead, she goes on and on about how she can’t look at Weller anymore, and that even if killing Avery was an accident, his lying wasn’t. This from the woman who just up and left her new husband and his kid in the middle of the night! Jane disappeared for months and never once contacted Weller, and now she’s upset that he felt it was best to not tell her about the daughter she didn’t even know about? I understand that emotions can be irrational, but this kind of stretching of character logic and motivation always bugs me.

It’s especially a problem this season. Of course Blindspot, like any other show, is going to dive into more romantic story lines. That’s totally fine. But the execution this season has felt sloppy. It feels like conflict just for the sake of it, from Jane losing it on Weller and immediately leaving him, to Zapata’s uncertainty about her feelings for Reade. I mean, the most honest emotional moment of the season comes from Rich and a returning Boston at the end of the episode, which says a lot about the relationships of the characters we spend much more time with.

Anyways, on to this week’s two major cases. The first sees Patterson and Weller learning that Avery met with Roman quite a few times before Weller ever did, which suggests that Roman used Avery against him. Shooting her was no accident (and good luck telling Jane that). Now Avery, whose distress call gets Patterson’s attention, is being held by Dedrik Hoehne, leader of a German gang. The other case involves Patterson’s Wizardville app getting hacked. Somebody has found the backdoor fault, which means they have access to the phones of the app’s 80 million users.

It’s troubling how quickly Blindspot seems to breeze through the idea of Roman using Avery’s fake death to drive a wedge between Weller and Jane. When Weller posits that theory, Jane is pretty quick to agree, and yet she still spends the entire episode making sure Weller knows he’s the worst person on earth. When the team confirms Avery’s identity and Reade begins making plans to extract her from where she’s being held in Germany, Jane insists that Weller be left off the mission. She says she wants Clem by her side. Reade reluctantly agrees to send Clem on the mission, but refuses to remove Weller. Thus, the show’s love triangle is sent into action with guns. What could possibly go wrong?

When the three of them get on a plane to Berlin, they immediately start to clash. Clem and Weller disagree about how to approach the situation; Weller wants to cover all the exits and go in hard and fast, while Clem thinks they should stick together and take it slow. Jane sides with Clem because her favorite thing right now is punishing Weller over and over again. When Weller learns that Clem and Jane were romantically involved for awhile and says he’s hurt that she didn’t tell him, she shrugs it off like it’s nothing and says he has no right to play that card. Can’t you both see that you did things wrong? Get over it!

Anyways, the slow and quiet approach doesn’t end up working. They take out one man but the gang makes off with Avery, moving her to a new location, and the team has to track her down all over again, which means more panic from Jane because she’s suddenly very maternalistic. I’m not saying her intense emotions aren’t in some way justified, but rather that the show hasn’t spent much time teasing them out. Jane went from being a mercenary on the run, all too happy to remove herself from life with Weller, to a woman hell-bent on getting back the daughter she never knew. It’s jarring, and feels like a contrived shift in character in order to spur conflict. (Recap continues on next page)

Alright, let’s talk about Wizardville. Way back at the beginning of the season we learned that Patterson’s code had opened up a backdoor into people’s phones. She only told Rich about it, meaning that at some point it would come back to haunt her. It finally happens this week, as someone is using that flaw to blackmail people into doing strange things. From the naked man in the cold open to someone trying to rob a bank in their underwear, every incident is related to the hack.

Trying to track down the hacker ends up being relatively easy. When Rich notices that the code contains Boston’s signature, Patterson admits that she hired him to do some work for her. Rich doesn’t want to believe his former boyfriend and the love of his life is responsible for blackmailing people, but it’s hard to deny the evidence. Then, out of nowhere, Boston shows up at the FBI headquarters. It turns out that he and his new boyfriend Sanjay have been using the hacked information to punish bad people; for example, the naked man running down the street was taking money from a charity for children with cancer. Now though, Boston suspects things are getting out of hand, and that Sanjay is going to do something more nefarious.

Boston points the team to Johnny Sheridan, someone Sanjay is supposed to meet with. The team finds out that he’s a defense contractor with access to a lot of weapons. When they bring him in for questioning he tries to play dumb (and entitled), but Reade and Zapata show him one piece of evidence after another until he talks. He admits that he sold white phosphorous bombs to Sanjay, and in turn he’s planning on selling them to terrorists who want to attack New York. Boston offers to wear a wire to the meet, which is a great plan until they all learn that the meet is happening in Boston and Sanjay’s apartment. The bombs are in the loft, the terrorists are on their way, and because of Sanjay’s preparations for the meet, Boston has no way to signal the team.

Eventually, once the terrorists show up, Boston purposely overheats a tea kettle and sends smoke billowing out of the loft, a signal to the team to raid the apartment. They take down the terrorists, arrest Sanjay, and Boston’s put under house arrest, a light punishment considering he hacked 80 million people. Rich, having seen his true love in danger, proclaims his love for him, saying that he never appreciated him but that he loves him with everything he has. It’s too late though. “You should have said that two years ago,” says Boston as Zapata looks on, contemplating her own fears about telling Reade how she feels.

While all of this is going on, Clem, Jane, and Weller manage to save Avery. They find her in the tunnels under Berlin that were once used to transport people from the East to West side under the Berlin wall. It takes some convincing to get Avery to go with Jane, but she eventually determines that it’s her only option. More interesting though is the face-to-face meeting between Weller and Roman. The only thing keeping them from tearing each other apart is the wall of bulletproof glass between them. Roman promises that more surprises are coming, and Weller hits him with an emotional insight, saying that Roman has turned into Shepherd, the very woman he hates for manipulating him and ruining his chance at a normal life.

So now that Avery has been rescued, where does that leave us? With a bunch of messy relationships, apparently. The episode ends with Clem telling Weller that Jane still loves him, Roman insisting that Jane will regret getting her daughter back, and Zapata working up the nerve to tell Reade how she feels about him, only to be confronted with an engagement ring for Megan. Blindspot is struggling to make these emotional beats matter, but hopefully these scenes suggest we’re moving toward something different in the near future.