Blindspot recap: 'Everlasting'

Blindspot is certainly a show that loves its complex plots, largely because that complexity masks the reality that almost none of it makes any sense from week to week. It’s a show that delights in the ridiculous and the fantastic—remember when, earlier this season, Weller jumped out of a plane to dismantle a bomb in mid-air?—but doesn’t stray too far from its crime procedural formula. Then, there’s this week’s episode. “Everlasting” might be the most inventive hour the show’s ever done. Somehow it’s Groundhog Day, The Breakfast Club, Edge of Tomorrow, and failed Bradley Cooper vehicle Limitless all in one. It’s trippy, emotionally effective, and packed with action, which is exactly what the show needed after last week’s rather laborious episode.

“Everlasting” begins traditionally enough. Patterson wakes up in her apartment to the sound of a trumpet—what kind of horrible human and neighbor plays the trumpet at 6am?— then heads into work, riding the elevator with a good-looking professor named Jack. As their conversation tips into the area of awkward flirtation, as Jack calls her “magnetic” because she has a dryer sheet stuck to her pants, Zapata get on the elevator and witnesses Patterson’s panic and denial of Jack’s proposed date for coffee.

Once off the elevator, Zapata lays into Patterson for not “getting back on the horse” after her admittedly terrible past relationships with a man who died and a man who tried to kill her. Of course, Zapata has her own issues with romance, and when Reade tells her and Patterson that he proposed to Meg, you can see the devastation on her face. Still, when Reade asks her to be his best man, she agrees.

This is a lot of explanation to start this recap, but stick with me because it’s necessary; you watched the episode, you know what I’m talking about. After all the romantic trials and tribulations are swept aside, “Everlasting” can get down to this week’s tattoo case. One of Patterson’s protégés has solved a new tattoo. It involves multiplying number by pi and then matching up those numbers with autopsy reports for three different marines. They all died on the same day, and all from an apparent drug overdose.

That sounds sketchy, so the team decides to run a controversial and dangerous test on the cremains of the marines. The Colonel in charge of those marines is defensive and feels the tests are unnecessary, but their General wants to understand what happened. They lend the FBI some centrifuges to do the tests, and Zapata sneakily invites Jack, who has a super crush on Patterson, to join in. Then, everything goes to hell. The centrifuge explodes in the lab, just as Patterson is trying to fix it, and the episode cuts to commercial. Not cool, Blindspot.

Coming back from commercial, it’s as if the episode starts over. There’s Patterson waking up, the trumpet, the alarm clock, and the awkward elevator ride. This time though, Patterson is convinced this is all déjà vu. The problem? Everybody else seems to be going through the exact same motions. Nothing really changes except for Patterson’s reactions. She screams at Weller for not knowing the details of the tattoo case, and she spends a lot of time in the bathroom repeating “I’m not in The Matrix. I’m not in The Matrix.”

The destination is the same. The centrifuge explodes and Patterson ends up back at the start of her loop, with “Everlasting” going full Edge of Tomorrow. This time around though, Patterson noticed that the dial on the centrifuge was turned all the way up. Somebody in the lab had to have done it on purpose. But who? And how can she possibly change the outcome?

The other big question is this: What’s truly happening here? The back half of the episode finally starts to provide some answers. After the first explosion, Patterson was rushed to the hospital and put in a medically induced coma before surgery. Things aren’t going well for her, so much so that the doctor tells Weller and Jane to call Patterson’s next of kin. With this context provided, we come to understand Patterson’s struggle. She’s not only trying to solve the case, she’s trying to stay alive. In true Patterson form, she’s always working, even on her death bed. (Recap continues on next page)

While she continues to break the case open one small piece at a time, things get harder when she has visions from her past. The most heartbreaking is David, her true love. She stills blames herself for his death, and no words from Ghost David can change that. Stuart is there too, as is Director Pellington. These are the people that Patterson, in one way or another, believes she’s responsible for killing. If she can’t let that guilt go, she won’t live, and she’ll be stuck in this never-ending loop, which also includes Borden questioning her relationships.

What’s great about “Everlasting” is that while it’s an emotional hour, it’s also a lot of fun. The episode never takes itself too seriously. One of the loops sees Patterson get in the elevator with a naked Roman. “Wait, I have a crush on you?” she says before continuously touching his bare chest. “I’m the bad boy you’ve always wanted,” he says, the whole interaction delightfully cringeworthy. Another one of the loops has Patterson sitting in on a lecture from Jack, taking place in a classroom where the rest of the FBI team is dressed like the members of The Breakfast Club. Another sees Jane and Weller swapping roles, and it should be said that Sullivan Stapleton’s impression of Jane/Jaimie Alexander is spot-on.

Of course, “Everlasting” can’t be all fun and games because there’s a case to solve and a coma to come out of. (Sidenote: I just realized that Blindspot is a cop soap opera. A soap copera?). In the classroom where Jack is teaching, Patterson gets her break. She realizes that arsine gas, a cousin of arsenic, was found in the cremains of the marines. That means they were poisoned. But why? And how did they end up in different locations?

David jumps in to help her connect the dots. “Use what you know to help solve what you don’t know,” he says, employing her favorite activity, crosswords, as motivation. So, Patterson determines that the men must have been on a top-secret mission, which explains the cover-up and the separate locations listed on the autopsies. A little more tattoo digging gives Patterson the coordinates to a location in China, meaning that the General was leading a rogue mission not approved by his superiors. When the men died, the General hid his rogue mission from the U.S. government.

Patterson has to fight the General in order to get out of her coma, but luckily the coma version of Patterson has some serious ninja skills. She takes him out, makes peace with David, Pellington, and Stuart, and wakes up in the hospital, giving the team the good news that she’s solved the case.

In true Blindspot fashion, the episode doesn’t end there. Instead, after Patterson gives Jane and Weller some sage advice about Avery, and tells Zapata that she still needs to tell Reade how she feels about him, she also mentions that in her hallucinogenic state something felt off about Borden, like he was separate from David and the others.

Sure enough, Borden is alive, patching up a man who insists that “the attack” is coming soon. I have no idea how Borden is alive, but then again, I just watched Patterson come out of a coma by living the same day over and over again until she solved a crime. Blindspot is nothing if not consistently ludicrous.