Blindspot recap: Remi attempts to break Shepherd out of a CIA black site
The first few episodes this season of Blindspot changed things for better and worse. With Remi making a comeback in Jane’s body, the show found a way to shift the narrative in an interesting way. With Sandstorm all but taken care of, and Hank Crawford dead, Blindspot needed to create a new villain…or in the case of Remi, bring back an old one. But the narrative trick grew tiresome quickly; on paper it’s a good way to create tension between the team and Jane/Remi, but in execution it resulted in a lot of repetitious scenes of Jane concealing her terrorist side. Last week’s episode finally exposed Remi to Weller, and that reveal pays off in spades this week, as “Screech, Thwack, Pow” finally sees things heating up.
The episode lets you know it means business right off the bat, as we pick up with Weller speeding down the road, aiming his car right at Remi (I’ve been calling her Jane all season, but the switch seems appropriate now). She pulls out her gun, puts the car in her sights, and fires off a few shots. The car rolls, the windshield shatters, and Weller’s fate is unknown as “Screech, Thwack, Pow” flashes back to earlier that day.
When they show up, they learn the truth about Jane and her reversion to Remi. “Full personality reversion” is what Patterson calls it. Weller asks about the latest data cache and any potential information about a cure, but there’s not much. From what they can tell, there was one doctor that ran an experimental memory treatment, but he was shut down after his test patient died. Weller wants to find the doctor, but that’s a problem too; his name’s been redacted from all the medical records.
As they discuss the zip poisoning some more back at FBI headquarters, they’re rudely interrupted by an alert from NORAD that says a nuclear missile, fired by a submarine in the Atlantic, is heading for New York City. They set about evacuating the city while coming up with a plan to stop the nuke. Rich takes the impending attack particularly hard, convinced he’s going to die. He calls Boston, who won’t pick up, and leaves him a message telling him that he loves him. Weller does the same thing for Jane, saying that he fought for her right until the end.
After Weller does some calling around and discovers that all the subs in that area are not only American subs but also have all of their nuclear missiles, Rich determines that NORAD was hacked. That means someone wanted the city and the FBI to think that an attack was about to happen. They wanted chaos, people fleeing into the streets. But why? Rich and Patterson think that tracking the location of the hack will be tough because it’s probably masked and rerouted a number of times, but that’s not the case. In fact, they easily find where the hack is coming from: inside the FBI. (Recap continues on next page)
Remember that ethernet cable Remi rushed to attach to an FBI server a few episodes ago? That’s the source of the hack, which means Boston has been unknowingly doing Remi’s bidding this whole time. When she shuts down his computer and tells him he’s done, he’s ecstatic, thinking he’s finally passed the test to become one of the FBI’s good guys, just like Rich. When Remi pulls a gun on him, he’s not so ecstatic. “We’re not the good guys, are we?” He can’t believe he hacked NORAD and instigated a nuclear crisis, but he has bigger problems in front of him. Roman, once again making a hallucinatory appearance, tells Remi to kill Boston. Violet says they need him to escape the city. Then, Remi talks to Roman out loud, which puzzles both Boston and Violet, and sets up a neat little way to tie this whole thing together later in the episode.
Remi spares Boston because Violet is right, they need him to get out of the city. With the traffic jammed, they order Boston to hack into the traffic lights and make sure their way is nothing but green. He hacks as they go, with Remi refusing to tell him their final location. She doesn’t want to risk him somehow tipping off the FBI. Little does she know that he’s doing just that, in his own unique way: once they’ve passed through a green light, Boston changes it to yellow. The FBI notices that when they’re looking at a map of the traffic in New York while trying to figure out where Remi could be headed. “Follow the yellow brick road!” shouts Rich. “He loves The Wizard of Oz.”
While Zapata and Burke secure a deal for the famous hacker Del Toro, offering up a presidential assassination and $2 million in exchange for a few days work, the FBI discovers the real reason for the nuclear diversion. When there’s a nuclear crisis like this, the CIA moves its black site prisoners out of the country. So, Remi must know where Shepherd is being moved. Weller follows the path laid out by Boston, and that’s where we get back to the scene from the very beginning of the episode. As Remi pulls Shepherd out of the CIA’s transport van and kills all the agents — Violet is shot and killed in the shootout, while Boston plays dead — Weller shows up just a bit too late. He tries to run Remi down, but she shoots out his tires, sending him careening into the woods. Remi escapes with Shepherd, while Weller and Boston make their way back to the FBI.
The mother-daughter reunion between Remi and Shepherd isn’t a happy one though. Shepherd sees that Sandstorm is destroyed, so she wants to run away with Remi. She sees no point continuing their mission. Remi’s a no-nonsense terrorist now, though, so she yells at Shepherd until she’s got her terrorist groove back. Who knows what they have planned, but whatever it is, there’s a big problem standing in the way, and that’s the zip poisoning. Remi is really starting to lose it, talking out loud to Roman constantly, which worries Shepherd.
