'Blindspot' Postmortem: Creator on the Mole Reveal (and Who It Was Originally)
Warning: This recap for the “Why Let Cooler Pasture Deform” episode of Blindspot contains spoilers.
Reade’s in the hospital, Roman’s got the Jane Doe amnesia treatment, and who took the bullet? Patterson? Or Borden, who has been Sandstorm’s inside man from the beginning? The mid-season finale of Blindspot left us with plenty of questions, so we talked with the show’s creator, Martin Gero, about what it all means and if anyone will be safe after this.
For Patterson fans who just wish she could catch a break in love — her last boyfriend was murdered while trying to solve one of Jane’s tattoos and Borden has just been using her to get classified intel — Gero says not to worry. “She’s going to be okay! We needed some fodder for her to really react against. Patterson’s sometimes at her best when she’s at her worst, so there’s some great stuff ahead for her,” he says.
If you go back, you can see the clues about who the mole was from the very beginning, Gero insists. “Borden just made the most sense. He was the other new person on the team,” he says. And, he’s been using Jane and Weller’s natural suspicious natures against them. “If you look back, Borden’s the one who’s saying, ‘Hey, don’t quit the FBI.’ He’s been able to keep [Jane] on mission. He’s been pushing her toward having a relationship with Weller and trying to convince Weller to open up to Jane about Taylor Shaw so they could have valuable intel. He’s been pulling the strings in a pretty effective way since the first episode.”
Surprisingly though, Borden wasn’t the original mole. “We knew there was a mole in the pilot. Originally, it was Zapata, but we all decided almost immediately that that was a terrible idea — even during the course of the production of the pilot. That never made it to any cut of the pilot,” he says. So half-credit for anybody who suspected her of being the traitor; she almost was.
Jane “zipping” Roman, leaving him in the same amnesiac state she was in at the beginning of the series, is an amazing full circle moment for both her and the show. Gero says the writers wanted to focus on the importance of their relationship and how, “Jane is Roman’s blindspot and Roman is Jane’s blindspot.” Roman has known that she’s been a double agent the entire time, but he still fought to turn her, just as hard as she’s been trying to turn him. “They’ve both been trying to save each other,” Gero says, “and it’s been going poorly for both of them, obviously.”
Which is what pushes her to make the extraordinary decision to zip him — which is either the ultimate act of charity or the ultimate act of violation. “Over the course of this half of a season, she realized, in a f–ked up way, that getting zipped was maybe the best thing that ever happened to her and she wants that for him,” Gero says. The repercussions of that choice? “That’s what the back half of the season is about,” he adds.
Gero also says that, however it shakes out, Roman won’t go the way of Mayfair. Not yet, anyway: “Luke [Mitchell] fans will find a home on this show for a long time to come, I think.”
The patience of people rooting for the relationship between Jane and Weller will also be rewarded. They both betrayed each other and needed time to recover from that. “[The rest of the season] is a lot about them now fully over the past traumas that they’ve inflicted on each other and really realizing that they are the two people at the center of this who can understand each other like no one can. And that brings them a lot closer together,” Gero says.
So don’t worry, he wants to see them as a couple, too: “I ship Jeller, guys!”
Blindspot returns Jan. 4 at 8 p.m. on NBC.
