Blindspot recap: A serial bomber accuses the FBI of framing an innocent woman
The FBI team has been through a lot this season on Blindspot. On a personal level, they’ve never struggled more, with Weller having to deal with the return of Remi and Jane’s potential death by poisoning, and Reade having to acknowledge that Zapata was in some murky moral waters working for the CIA. Zapata’s proven that she’s still one of the good guys, but that doesn’t mean the FBI director is welcoming her back into the fold with open arms. When she returns to the office after her failed rogue trip to steal Madeline’s files, Reade chews her out for going out there alone. He doesn’t fully trust her, and he feels betrayed, so he’s using his authority to chastise her.
The team currently has no lead on Madeline, and the puzzle Shepherd left for Jane is no closer to being solved. Jane notices a strange pattern in part of the puzzle Patterson’s working to decode, but that’s about it. There’s no time for that anyway, as the team gets news that New York has been hit with a trio of bombings. Gathering the data, they notice that the three locations hit are the same as in a bombing case from two years prior. Those bombings were enacted by Lilly Terrace, who’s still in prison, so this must be a copycat. But why? What’s the motivation for bombing the exact same places?
They don’t have to wonder about motivations for too long. The bomber calls the FBI tip line and leaves a message saying he knows someone in the FBI framed Lilly two years ago, and he’s going to keep setting off bombs until that person comes clean. The episode then flashes back two years. It’s a narrative trick the show has used from time to time, but here it feels a little wonky. It makes the whole case feel convoluted and overstuffed, all for the sake of getting a bit of insight into what the team was doing in the time Jane was missing.
Two years ago, Weller is on the hunt for Jane, thinking he’s found her in Russia, and Zapata is itching to get into the field at the FBI, where Reade has her sitting in a lab. Digging into the bombing case, they can’t find any connection between the three victims. It all seems so random. That is, until Rich Dot Com is brought in from prison. He tells Weller and Reade that he knows the connection: They had all recently signed up for a grocery delivery service called Swift Shop. Weller thinks Rich is playing them, but Rich lays it all out. Not allowed near any of the computers, he tells Stuart (RIP) to go check out Swift Shop’s reviews. There are a ton of negative ones, and Rich has noticed that they share similar syntactic qualities. Using a computer in the prison library, which he isn’t supposed to do, he determined that the reviews all came from Lilly Terrace, a woman with a family-run grocery store that’s going under because of the new service.
The team brings Lilly in, and things start to go off the rails. Her mother is dying in a hospital bed, and Zapata uses that against her, saying that if she skips the whole lawyer business, she can just sign a confession and still be there to see her mother die, rather than being behind bars when she goes. It’s real close to a coerced confession, but the team seems mostly okay with it. Still, they need some sort of evidence to back it all up. That’s when some evidence drops right on their doorstep. (Recap continues on next page)
