Blindspot boss on those twisty finale reveals

Jeff Neumann/Warner Bros/NBC

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

Blindspot provided some closure during its season 2 finale — the show was on the bubble, so this could've been the end. But thank goodness it was renewed because the final moments revealed some shocking twists.

As teased in the penultimate episode, Shepherd (Michelle Hurd) planned to dismantle the government so that it would be replaced by the COGS — Continuity of Government Sub-Committee. Many of the people connected to tattoo cases over the last season are COGS and locked in a bunker in the wake of the attacks on the FBI and slated to take over should the government fall.

Shepherd's plan to destroy the government involves wiping out the entire eastern seaboard by sending a glider via satellite in space to bomb nuclear material in D.C. Fortunately, the combined efforts of Jane (Jaimie Alexander), Weller (Sullivan Stapleton), and Patterson (Ashley Johnson) prevent catastrophe and everyone, villains and heroes alike, survives.

While Jane decided to stay with the FBI in the wake of Weller confessing his love for her, a flash-forward in the closing moments of the finale found Jane far from home, plagued with regret — that is, until Weller shows up enlisting her help to rescue Patterson, Reade (Rob Brown), and Tasha (Audrey Esparza), who were kidnapped. Oh, and it looks like Jane and Weller used to be married. And a mysterious key unlocked a new layer of Jane's tattoos! Whaaaaaat? EW turned to executive producer Martin Gero to get the scoop:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's talk about this flash-forward. First off, Jane apologizes for everything that's happened. Is there anything you can tease about what you will be exploring next season?

MARTIN GERO: She obviously has gone on the run or left. Weller has obviously been searching for her and didn't know exactly what had happened. We're going to get into that right away in the very first episode of season 3, probably the opening moments of season 3, so I don't want to give too much away, but we'll get to there.

Will you be doing flashbacks to show what has transpired in these ensuing years?

Yeah, it's been two years. For us, this is a show that runs on secrets, and so as we were talking about season 3 about a year and a half ago in a real serious way, we felt like by the end of season 2, you just know so much about all of our characters and wouldn't it be fun to be away from them for a couple of years and recharge that secret bank that they all have so that when we come back to season 3, there's some mystery in them again? They're the same old characters that we know and love, but now they have some stuff we don't know about them.

Jane notes how Weller was still wearing his ring, does that mean they were married?

That's a very good assumption, yes.

Patterson, Reade, and Tasha were kidnapped. What can you tease about the driving force of next season and who might be behind this?

Well, they guess that Roman is behind it, and I think that would be a very good guess. He's a phenomenal character, played by Luke Mitchell, who is just a goddamn TV star, so we're lucky to have him, and want to give him plenty of stuff to do next year, so Roman certainly is the main big bad of season 3 — or so we would want you to think.

The key in the box unlocked a new set of tattoos. Was that always the plan? Did you always know there was this second layer there?

Well, the second layer hasn't been there since the beginning; that's all I'll say for now. I always felt like the tattoos probably couldn't extend past season 2 just because there is so much prescient information on them, it starts to stretch credibility — regardless of how much program time has happened — that people would start to feel like three years later, for there to be an emergency on Jane's body starts to feel stretched and fake. We talked about numerous ways of how to reset the tattoos. This is the one that got everyone really excited once we realized that this is actually even physically possible, these bio-luminescent tattoos. What's cool about them — and we'll get to this season 3 — is they're new, but the way that they're oriented on her body, sometimes they reference what's beneath them, so it becomes this 3D chess game of puzzle solving that's really, really exciting for us.

Jane couldn't kill Roman. Can you talk about what was going through her head? Do you think there is regret as a result of that?

I don't think she regrets not killing him. She just has too much history with him. For Jane, regardless of who he ended up being, I think she feels responsible for him, which is what those flashes of her holding his hand back when they were kids and always trying to look out for him showed. She's not been a great sister to him, really, in their adult life. She blames herself a great deal for where Roman has ended up. She just couldn't do it. Their relationship was one of my favorite things in season 2. It made all the sense in the world to us that she couldn't take him down.

Because of the time jump, should we infer the seeds you planted point to what's going on with the team — Reade with Quantico, Zapata with the CIA, Patterson not really wanting to stay with the FBI?

I have the privilege of working with an extraordinary team of writers that are all big forward-thinkers like I am, so we really sat down — as we do every year — and tried to figure out what we wanted to do. At the beginning of season 2, we really spent a couple weeks on what season 3 will be, and then tried to tee everything up. So definitely all those things that you're feeling, where they are emotionally at the end of the season, and how that leads into season 3, yeah absolutely I think some of those things will come true. Not all of them.

Shepherd ended up surviving. Why? And will she still be a threat?

She will not be that much of a threat. I don't want to talk too much about Shepherd in season 3, except to say she's not going to play a pivotal role. For us, she's a great actress and we thought that's a character that would be great to have in the world. Also, we had fallen in love very early on with this mirror image scene of Nas (Archie Panjabi), who had worked so hard to bring Sandstorm down and was forced off the team, to have that final moment with Shepherd is very satisfying — it not only echoes her first moment with Jane, and her first moments on the show, really, but it's her final grand victory. That's what that was.

Have we seen the last of Nas?

I hope not. That will really come down to Archie's schedule. I think she's so great and has been such a beautiful presence on our show. She is a soothing balm with our cast, really has just one of the greatest on-set presences I've ever seen. She's a huge TV star, so she won't be a regular on the show again, but she's always welcome if she wants to come back.

Will Mary Stuart Masterson play a role next season?

Up in the air. I'm not sure yet.

Is next season essentially a reset?

It's a reset, but in many ways, it's also a return to season 1. Season 1 was highly focused on the tattoo cases of the week, and in season 2, we had developed the mythology so heavily that we veered away from the tattoo cases of the week and the puzzles. So for me, it's our old characters in the new dynamic, which I think will be really, really exciting, and it's a return for us to the type of storytelling we were doing in season 1, which is tattoo-driven cases, a little more close-ended. Unfortunately, we can't assume that people are watching every episode of Blindspot; how dare they. [Laughs] So I think for our more casual viewers this year, the show got maybe a little too confusing, so we want to strike a better balance of rewarding the fans. Obviously, our diehard fans are our first concern, but we also think the show can be a little more like it was in season 1.

Blindspot will return to NBC this fall.