Blindspot recap: season 4, episode 18

Zapata is working herself to the point of exhaustion. At the top of “Ohana,” she’s barely awake in the FBI conference room, having worked all night in an attempt to track down Dominic, driven at least in part by guilt. She feels responsible for catching him, but she’s forgetting she has a team to help her this time around. So, Reade gives her the keys to his place and tells her to go get some rest, a gesture of goodwill both personally and professionally. She’s going to need the rest, too, as “Ohana” sees the team trying to stop an attack from…killer bees.

That case gets underway when Rich and Patterson learn about 26 unconnected cases of TTX poisoning, which is a bacteria that comes from fish and is largely fatal. A bunch of people have died already, but the curious thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any seafood connection. So how are all these people contracting TTX? Well, Patterson discovers that they all ate cantaloupe that seems to have come from the Quaker Hill research facility, which means someone is purposely poisoning the food supply. The team immediately rolls out, storms the facility with guns drawn, and finds, of all people, Patterson’s dad, also known as Bill Nye the Science Guy. As you’ll recall, Blindspot is bonkers and Bill Nye is Patterson’s real in-universe father.

Bill’s been working as a consultant at the facility. He has a research assistant named Ginny who Patterson is immediately jealous of, and things aren’t looking good for either Ginny or Bill. Weller knows that there’s no way Bill Nye is secretly a scientific madman that’d kill numerous people, but the evidence shows that someone in that lab was using the gene-changing technology to allow bees to carry TTX. The killer bees are on the swarm, and the team finds a research paper that Ginny wrote where she talks about the potential weaponization of bees through gene modification.

They question Ginny, and Patterson is particularly pointed with her, trying to prove that no one can replace her. Of course, it’s all just Patterson’s insecurity, which is only heightened when they show Ginny a paper she signed that ties her to the killer bees, only for her to reveal that she couldn’t have signed the paper because it’s dated with her birthday, and on that day she was having a nice lasagna dinner with Bill and his wife. So much for that line of questioning.

The team digs deeper, and they find another employee with ties to the lab and the bees. Nick Pomeroy was denied a raise in recent months, and his records show an incredible amount of debt. If there’s one thing that kills the buzz — yeah, I had to — about this episode, it’s that the bad guys are so ill-defined. I get that Nick is kind of in over his head at some point, but the motivations here don’t feel very clear, even as it’s revealed that Nick is going to sell the weaponized bees to a defense contractor. An episode about killer bees doesn’t need a lot to be fun, but “Ohana” could use a little more insight into the villains in order to heighten the stakes.

Anyways, while Zapata suddenly gets a call from Claudia, who’s interested in tracking down Dominic without the help of any agencies (in other words, she’s really speaking Zapata’s language), a mission that ends up getting her killed, the team tries to figure out where Nick is going with the stolen killer bees. They find a wire transfer into Nick’s bank account from a company that’s a front for defense contractor Alverson Aerospace. They figure the deal is going down in the same place where the bees will be stored, and after some digging into construction and ventilation patterns, they find the presumed location.

The raid is a success. Well, Nick ends up locked in the truck with the killer bees, which means he dies a truly gruesome death, but otherwise everything goes well! In fact, with the bees safely stored away, Bill Nye and Ginny set about trying to cure them rather than kill them all. There’s a whole stash of genetically modified bees in the lab, and they can’t bring themselves to just exterminate them. Unfortunately, that bit of information also brings more Alverson Aerospace mercenaries to the lab, who take Bill, Ginny, and Patterson hostage and force them to extract the bees for their client.

But, Patterson and Ginny prove to be a great team — the “overcoming jealousy” plot here is too much text instead of subtext, but again, killer bee episode — and manage to kill these mercenaries with the bees as well. Jane and Weller eventually show up to help, but the bad guys are already taken care of. Bee crisis averted.

All that’s left then this week is one massive twist that’s very much Blindspot. Remember the hooded figure that got into the Sandstorm bunker and was caught on camera, but nobody could make out the face? Well, Jane and Weller use a business card found in the bunker to track the figure down, which leads them to a women’s shelter. Turns out Shepherd came around there once asking for “Jessica,” and the person working at the shelter believes the figure in the video is “Jessica” because of the distinctive jacket they’re wearing.

So, the FBI brings in a sketch artist to draw Jessica. Late at night, Rich delivers the sketch to Jane and Weller, knowing they’ll want to see it right away and start figuring out who’d been working with Shepherd and Sandstorm. Well, they get a bit of a surprise. Jane and Weller immediately recognize the face. “Who is that?” asks Rich. “That’s my mother,” says Weller, and suddenly Blindspot is back to exploring the whole evil maternal theme. So many bad moms on this show.

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Blindspot recap: The team tries to stop a swarm of killer bees

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