Blindspot boss dissects that shocking Remi reveal

Warning: This story contains major spoilers from the season 3 finale of Blindspot. Read at your own risk!

Blindspot closed out its third season with several giant twists, but none more shocking than Jane Doe reverting to her Remi persona!

During the season finale, Roman (Luke Mitchell) led Crawford to South Africa, where he revealed his true nature: Roman had been systematically tearing Crawford’s life apart because Hank was the man who founded the orphanage that turned Remi and Roman into child soldiers.

When the FBI crashes the party, Crawford sacrifices himself to give Roman a chance to run, with Jane ultimately killing Hank. Roman then meets up with Blake, who reveals she knows the truth about Roman’s plans and shoots him — she found out from Zapata (Audrey Esparza), who seemingly wants to follow-through on Hank’s plans to build a worldwide army loyal to no country. Yikes.

As Roman dies, he hands over a drive to Jane, which the team discovers holds partial data to unlock the rest of the tattoos. It also holds the key to curing Jane. That’s right, she���s not pregnant, as she had assumed, but is suffering from ZIP poisoning — Roman had been seeking a cure and hopes the information might help her. But the team will have to find the other drives first, which will prove even more difficult since Jane’s mind is deteriorating.

In fact, Jane wakes up in the hospital shortly thereafter with nary a memory of being Jane Doe. Instead, she’s reverted back to her Remi persona and truly believes she’s been able to infiltrate the FBI. She even manages a sneaky smirk as the team offers comfort at a comatose Weller’s hospital bedside. Whaaaat? EW turned to executive producer Martin Gero to get the scoop.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Jane has reverted back to her Remi self. When did that idea first come up in the writers room?
MARTIN GERO: Well, we’ve been talking about it for a couple of seasons just in the abstract. It was an idea that we really liked. We just didn’t know where it went for a long time. As we started to have longer and longer conversations about the beginning of season 4, we were very conscious of creating conflict between Jane and Weller, because they been through so much already, what could we do that could break these two or put them through strain, because they’re so solid? And then we realized, “Oh, maybe we use our Remi idea as a way!” To be honest, it kind of gets back to the old storytelling of season 1 that we really liked where Remi now has two huge goals. She’s undercover with the FBI. She’s gonna be running side missions in the meantime. We just think it’s a really exciting way to start the season to expand. Jaimie’s just chomping at the bit to show what she can do. I think it’s so amazing what she does. It just feels like a completely different character when she makes that transition. We’re just excited for the stories it’s going to bring next season.

How different is Remi, particularly because she doesn’t know that she can be honest with these people?
That’s right. Again, not to get into too much in season 4, but the thing is she can’t be honest with them, because her original intentions are still her intentions. She has none of the goodwill and good feelings towards Weller and the team that Jane was able to grow very organically as she gained consciousness again and developed the new self. This is the old Remi. This is the ruthless Remi, who now is suddenly behind enemy lines surrounded by her enemies, who thinks they’re friends.

Wouldn’t Remi realize something is amiss if the team mentions Sandstorm? How would she feel if she found out Sandstorm is basically no more?
Well, you just have to wait and see.

The team has their hands on only one of the drives. What’s their next move? Where do they even start to look for the others?
They just opened it up and so it’s got an insane amount of information in there. So they’ll start to put together the clue trail pretty quickly at the beginning of next season. We plan on starting next season between a month and three months after this moment, and so they’ll have done a lot of the groundwork to figure out how they go about getting some of these drives.

So there will be a time jump?
Yeah. It won’t be a big one. It’ll be about a month or two, maybe three, but there will be a soft reset just to give us some time to lay some groundwork, so that we’re not coming back to just a mountain of exposition.

Kurt obviously suffers from complications from his gunshot wound. Do we really have something to worry about or was Kurt’s complications just to serve the reveal with Remi at the end?
He’s certainly not gonna be back to 100 percent right away at the beginning of next season. But I think it’s pretty safe to assume that he’s gonna survive at this point.

Jane calls Hobbes, who was part of Sandstorm. Is that who Roman has been talking to on the phone this year?
No.

Roman left someone a message saying he was leaving the person all his money as long as they continued working toward a specific goal. Is there anything you can say of who that person might be?
No.

Have we met said person on the show before?
I’m not gonna say. I mean, that’s a huge season 4 reveal that we’ve been planting since midway through this season. So no, I can’t even skirt close to talking about that right now.

Talk about Roman’s death. Did you feel that you had to kill him? And can you confirm whether this means Luke Mitchell is leaving the show?
Roman is 100 percent dead, yeah. That’s really all I can say right now, Roman is dead. And for us, it was heartbreaking because we loved that character so much, but the reality is like on either side he just knows way too much. If he came clean to Blake and said, “This is everything I know and here’s how we stop the tattoos,” then the tattoos don’t work anymore. If he came over to our side and said, “Okay, I’m game, let’s bring down Crawford,” you get all the information. So the tattoos, which are the main engine of the show, stopped working no matter what decision Roman makes. We knew basically from the beginning of last year that Roman would have to die at the end of this season. We tried to come up with a bunch of ways to make it work, because we love Luke so much and we love that character so much, but Roman is for sure dead at the end of the season.

That doesn’t answer whether Luke it coming back, though. But I’m guessing you don’t want to answer that?
You’re right.

Can you confirm that the clue from the episode titles, “One of us will give our life,” was referring to Roman?
Yeah, that was Roman.

There was also a big shocker with Zapata and Blake. Is the idea that Zapata is going to fulfill Crawford’s destiny?
I think right now Zapata isn’t driving, I mean, Zapata is working for Blake right now. She is not at the head of that company. Blake very much needs a consilliary. Clever viewers have caught, if they are keeping notes at home — in episode 317, when they were at the Gala and Zapata and Blake were in the bathroom together, suddenly Zapata’s comms stopped working. So I would take note of that. Since then, really, Zapata has been… It’s hard to talk about without giving away too much of the fourth season, but she’s definitely been collaborating with Blake.

So will the show dive back into that to show viewers how that came to be?
Yes.

So we shouldn’t assume that Zapata is acting on behalf of the CIA? This is Zapata on her own?
The real question is did Zapata actually steal that phone for Blake or did she steal it for the CIA? Is she working for Keaton? Is he working for Blake? Is she working on her own? What’s her end game? Certainly Zapata has been feeling increasingly frustrated with how the world works, I think, over the last two seasons, and has wanted to make a big move that I think even the CIA felt was a little much. It makes sense to me that she would gravitate towards someone like Blake, and the power that she can wield, especially at this moment now when Crawford is dead. There’s gonna be a power vacuum that she can manipulate pretty easily I think.

It almost seemed like Blake was a little bit hesitant to continue moving forward.
Yeah, I think Blake is a little out of her depth a little bit. I think she always planned on taking over her father’s company, and she understood that was gonna require a certain amount of ruthlessness that she was prepared to do. But I think she thought that was years away and now it’s all come to a head, and suddenly she’s at the head of the table, and that’s an intimidating position to be in no matter how ready you think you are.

So would she be the villain of next season? Or are you looking at Jane as the villain?
Well Jane is not the villain. Remi is definitely one of the bad guys next year. But there’s a lot of villains next year.

Considering that Blake was the one to shoot Roman, would Remi want revenge on Blake next season?
Absolutely, I think that is possible.

Blindspot will return Fridays this fall on NBC.