Blindspot recap: 'Two Legendary Chums'

There’s a very good reason that “Two Legendary Chums” is the best episode of Blindspot in a few weeks: it mostly sidelines the drama of the Avery storyline and instead returns the focus to the overarching story of Roman’s plan to take down Crawford, and how that might involve messing with the FBI team. There’s still a lot of Avery in this episode—it turns out she has her mother’s flair for stubbornness and impatience—and that’s okay because she’s integral to Jane’s character arc, but for the most part it feels like the show is getting back to basics here.

But let’s start with Avery, because despite being saved from Roman by the FBI, she’s not exactly ready to cozy up with them. Roman has filled her head with a lot of different ideas, and that means she doesn’t really trust anyone. Weller and Jane do their best to get some information out of her about her interactions with Roman, but she’s hesitant to say too much. She defiantly asks them if they’ll wipe her memory and lock her in a cell the way they did Roman.

Despite her anger, she does give them something. She says that while she’s been searching for Jane, it was never really part of her plan. Rather, she’s been looking for the man that ruined her father’s life and pushed him towards killing himself. When Avery’s adoptive mother died of cancer, all her adoptive father had was his work. Before long though he was pushed out of that job and then he threw himself off a bridge. Since that day Avery has been looking for the man responsible, and it’s none other than Hank Crawford.

This is the episode where everything starts to come together. The connections between Roman, Crawford, Avery, Hirst, and the FBI team become a little clearer. The knowledge about Crawford’s connection to Avery’s dad is one thing, but another tattoo case really starts to clarify what’s been going on. Roman sends a video to Patterson that once again nudges the team in the right direction. Once Patterson puts together the pieces of a tattoo on Jane’s body, revealing the picture of a ship and two words, “Donald Ley,” Weller discovers a connection. Donald Shipley was his old partner before the guy took a job with a private weapons contractor.

A little digging reveals that Shipley had a ton of debt that was recently paid off, meaning that someone is using him to gain access to weapons. Weller insists that he go visit Shipley on his own, despite the fact that their relationship didn’t end on good terms. Weller finds Shipley, but his timing isn’t the best. Shipley claims that he’s working undercover for Homeland Security, meeting with a dealer looking for an EMP device. So when the terrorists show up, Weller has no choice but to play into the act and pretend to be an EMP expert.

While Weller brushes up on putting together an EMP device under pressure back at the FBI headquarters, Roman is hanging out in Morocco with Victor, awaiting the arrival of Crawford. Some sort of deal is about to go down in the middle of the desert, but Roman’s being kept in the dark. More importantly though, things are tense between the two men. This is about more than who gets to be Crawford’s right-hand man, though. Victor finally tells Roman what he knows: that he’s not Tom Jakeman. He might not know much else, but he knows Roman is a rat trying to get close to Crawford for some reason. It’s the first time this season that Roman’s truly been threatened, and it sets up a wonderfully tense scene later in the episode.

“Two Legendary Chums” isn’t necessarily a confusing episode, but it is one that has a lot going on. There are a lot of threads to follow, including the reappearance of Director Hirst. She’s being held in a CIA black site—”theoretically,” says Zapata, to cover the illegality of the operation—and Zapata is sent in to try and get some more information about Crawford out of her. She injects her with a drug cocktail that the CIA has been working on, a truth serum of sorts. Hirst reveals that Crawford had ties to an anti-government group called The Regimen, which is the same group Shipley says Homeland Security is tracking. Namely, they’ve been looking for their leader, a former Green Beret named Nils Bresden (with a name like that, he must be an evil militia leader). (Recap continues on next page)

Apparently Bresden is going to be at the Twin Rivers power plant, which is the target where Weller and Shipley have to bring the EMP device. That’ll be the one opportunity to snag Bresden, as he notoriously keeps himself away from a lot of the action. Everything seems to be in place until Weller and Shipley arrive at the meet. One of The Regimen’s members makes Weller test the EMP, which blows out their communication with Homeland and the FBI. Then, The Regimen changes their plan. The power plant was never the target. Instead, they drive to a remote location in the woods where the Treasury Department has a secret bunker that monitors all international financial transactions made by citizens of the United States.

With the Regimen pulling off that swerve, Weller and Shipley are on their own. Once they’re inside the bunker and the team opens up the door to the server room where they’ll use the EMP and knock out all monitoring of financial transactions, they make their move. They take down just enough guys to escape, but they’re chased into the woods and Shipley is hit with a bullet. Weller has to do the heavy lifting from there, picking off the Regimen’s men one by one—he rises like Rambo, in slow motion, out of the water at one point—before Reade, the FBI, and Homeland show up to rescue them.

The question is, why bother with this bunker in the middle of nowhere? Why is it so important? Well, it all ties in with Crawford. The deal in Morocco, for a vast stretch of land, involves so much money that the United States government will certainly flag it and investigate. So, Crawford has hired the Regimen to take that tracking offline so that he can make his deal. Of course, all of that goes to hell because of Weller and Shipley, and Crawford’s business partner walks away from the deal.

Crawford needs someone to blame for the FBI’s involvement, and that’s when Victor steps in. He begins to tell the truth about “Tom Jakeman.” But before he can get a full sentence out, Crawford stabs him in the stomach and kills him. “How did you know it was him?” says Roman. Crawford explains that he’s been tracking both of them in order to be careful about this deal, and found that Victor was placing a number of calls to the FBI. As it turns out, Roman was ahead of the game yet again. When Victor covertly took his fingerprints, Roman switched their phones. All of Roman’s contact with the FBI, including the recent video sent to Patterson, is made to look like Victor’s doing.

Crawford isn’t giving up on the deal though. In fact, he’s more driven than ever to get the FBI out of the way and get the deal done. While Jane shows Avery every bit of evidence they have on Crawford, finally getting her on the FBI’s side and showing her that they all need to work together to take him down, Crawford gives his new right-hand man, Roman, an assignment. “Kill every single one of them,” he says as he hands over a file. Roman opens it and flips through the pages: pictures of Reade, Zapata, Patterson, Weller, and Jane.

Did Roman know it would come to this? Has he always planned to go after the FBI, or is Crawford his target? Is there something in their mutual destruction that will benefit him? Roman’s endgame is still very unclear, but at least Blindspot is starting to clarify its season-long arc, giving the show the momentum it needs as we get closer to the end of the season.