Blindspot recap: 'Deductions'

“Deduction” begins with a flashback. It’s one year earlier and we see Cade, the former Sandstorm operative who hasn’t made appearance on the show since being granted freedom after helping out the FBI, shopping for diapers in an unspecified country. He’s stressing out about finding the right organic diapers that his partner likes, his lack of luck only exacerbated by the language barrier. His luck only gets worse though. When he asks a store clerk for help, two men approach him from behind, sedate him with a needle in the neck, put a hood over his head, and kidnap him. His FBI-granted freedom, it seems, was short-lived.

Back in the present day, Keaton and Zapata are doing what any good CIA agents do: burning a bag of case evidence. Their ritual is interrupted by a call. A CIA plane that was transporting prisoners has crashed in a river in New York. When they get to the crash site, where divers are looking for survivors and the plane’s black box, Zapata notices the name of the flight company is Valkyrie. She connects that to a mysterious tattoo on Jane’s back that references “Ride of the Valkyries,” and despite Keaton’s objections, decides to loop the FBI in on the case of the mysteriously downed plane.

After Jane and Weller have their dinner, things with Avery turn sour when they try to broach the subject of Avery’s adopted father being a potential murderer. Meanwhile, Reade gets blasted by the U.S. Attorney for not having anything but circumstantial evidence on Crawford, and the team meets up to discuss the downed CIA plane, which is where Cade finally factors in. In the middle of the night he finds his way into Jane and Weller’s apartment and says that he was on the plane that crashed, and that he has valuable information that the FBI could use.

Once they’re at the FBI headquarters, Cade details how he was kidnapped by the CIA and transported to a black site, a betrayal of the deal he’d worked out. Now, he wants a new deal in exchange for giving the team everything he knows about the plane crash. He says there were three prisoners on board, and that they’re planning an attack on a building in New York, though he doesn’t know where.

The mystery goes deeper than just a few random terrorists though. It turns out that the planes the CIA uses for prisoner transport are made by HCI Global, a company that Crawford has a hand in. Still, that doesn’t mean he’s connected to the crime, but it does once again underscore the scope of his influence. Once the team gets the flight manifest and the black box, they confirm what Cade said: that he was on the flight, and that the plane was crashed on purpose. When Cade signs his new deal, he offers up the only other bit of information that he has: a woman approached him in the black site and offered him freedom in exchange for a job. He was never going to go through with the attack on an unspecified CIA building, so he fled into the woods and then to Jane and Weller’s apartment.

Cade also gives them the location of a flophouse where everyone was supposed meet, but by the time the team gets there it’s too late. The fact that there are four parachute packs gives them a clue though, suggesting that the pilot was in on it. There can only be so many CIA agents with that kind of clearance, and the team eventually pulls a photo for Quinn Bonita, who Cade identifies as the woman that approached him about the job. It turns out that her husband, also a CIA agent, was beheaded by terrorists in a video that went viral, and the CIA completely abandoned him, failing to acknowledge his mission. That’s par for the course for the agency, but Quinn’s been plotting her revenge ever since. Now she’s going to hit them where it hurts, attacking their outpost for undercover agents, secretly located at the Bellmore University library, and taking out the man she deems responsible for her husband’s death. (Recap continues on next page)

While the team tries to come up with a plan to storm Bellmore University and stop whatever Quinn has planned, Roman is making his own plans to save Blake from her kidnappers. I’m happy to report that this sluggish story is finally paying off, mostly because the dynamic between Roman and Crawford is changing in interesting ways. The whole rescue mission, agreed upon by Crawford and another powerful, rich man named Jan Paul, whose son, Christophe, was taken along with Blake, seems like a sloppy affair until Roman works his way in there.

Once Blake is located — Jean Paul believes her and Christophe are being held in a club that’s known for being a hot spot for gangs — Roman and Jean Paul’s team of three former Mossad soldiers storm the place. What’s strange is that they don’t find anyone except Blake and Christophe. The kidnappers have seemingly disappeared, so Roman calls an audible. He kills Jean Paul’s men and rescues Blake and Christophe, fabricating a story of heroism once he’s back at Crawford’s mansion.

The reason he lies? Because he figured out that Crawford orchestrated the kidnapping himself in order to get closer to Jean Paul, and he didn’t want to blow his bosses cover. Like everything Crawford does, this was all business. So, Roman not only gets to save Blake, he proves his loyalty to his boss in the process. Now, Roman is integral to whatever Crawford is planning, and yet we know that Roman also has plans of his own. These two will collide at some point, and Blindspot is finally moving in that necessary direction.

Meanwhile, the conclusion to the story of a rogue CIA agent going after her own people ends up fizzling out. There’s simply nothing at stake here, no real story to latch on to. The team shows up at the library just in time to take Quinn down before she can behead the man she hates. It’s a perfectly fine procedural story, but all the talk about the connections to Crawford never really pays off.

With that said, the aftermath is certainly compelling. Keaton tells Zapata that despite the deal, Cade will once again end up at a CIA black site. She’s furious after hearing this, but as Keaton notes, this is what the CIA does. Cade is/was a terrorist, and that means he’s never going to be free. Zapata tries to play it cool when she goes to move him from the interrogation room, but Cade doesn’t buy it. He takes Zapata hostage with the sharp edge of his handcuffs to her throat. The standoff ends when Jane fires a shot through the window from outside the room that takes down Cade, a tragic ending to a tragic story.

As Blindspot continues to pile up bodies this season, there’s one more on the way that could have a significant impact on the season. Avery comes back to Jane and Weller, wanting to understand the truth about her adoptive father, no matter how difficult it is. When they tell her the truth, she breaks down. Reckoning with her family’s history is only just beginning though, as two men dump the body of Avery’s adoptive father into a river in the hopes of it washing up somewhere. Somebody wants that body to be found, which can’t bode well for the FBI’s investigation into Crawford.