This week on Blindspot, the team heads off the grid and into woods populated by violent anti-government separatists. Who’s ready for a roadtrip?
Spoilers for Blindspot episode 7, “Sent On Tour,” a.k.a. the anagram is “Trust no one,” a.k.a did I not call it weeks ago that the show creators love The X-Files
Alas, my Blindspotting loves, this week’s recap will be somewhat shorter as I, like the FBI team, am away from New York City at the moment. I know you all will help fill in any blank spaces with your excellent commentary on last night’s caper. So what’ve we got?
“We’d like to talk to Sheriff Harry S. Truman, please.”
- Patterson decrypts one of Jane’s newly revealed tattoos, which sends the agents to a mysterious address deep in Michigan.
- Michigan is apparently home to woods where militia-types patrol with impunity and don’t take kindly to outsiders. This place is called “Draclan” and sounds like it can be found on a D&D campaign.
- Discovered at the cabin house in the woods is Lou Diamond Phillips, gardening. Michigan is weird, what can you do. Actually Lou is guest-starring as Sal Guerrero, a powerful bad guy (??) whose case we’ve heard about for weeks, because Command Lady Mayfair doesn’t want to talk about it.
“I better have an ongoing storyline, because I am Lou freakin’ Diamond Phillips and I deserve better than gardening and lines goading Jane about her non-boyfriend.”
- Aforementioned scary militia dudes come to save Guerrero from arrest, taking the agent’s mode of transport and big weapons and making any skills acquired in the cub scouts vitally important.
- The agents and Guerrero high-tail it through the woods while pursued. Eventually through another tattoo of Jane’s, they find an oil derrick and a hidden trunk. We know from the opening scene that the trunk was left behind months ago by Jane’s mysterious tree-tatted Sex Dream Dude, who is no Mystery Beard but may be O.K.
- Inside the locked box (which opens to the vastly complex code of ‘KURT’) are bulletproof vests and big guns so that the agents can make their escape.
- Why? Why not.
- Also the B-plot is pretty funky since it involves our favorite Patterson sleuthing it up with adorkable boyfriend David, who is so winningly nice/smart/understanding that I am now 99% convinced that he is a huge sleeper villain.
- I mean let’s talk about it: David spends most of the episode trying to convince Patterson to let him move in (WHERE HE CAN KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON HER) and then, for such a clever guy, insists on personally cracking a top-secret FBI clue in broad daylight and dragging Patterson into it with him and getting her in trouble with Mayfair. She could have lost her job! But what if that was his design?
- The agent team splits up in the woods for a dumb side-side-plot about getting rid of Guerrero’s tracker, but I actually really like Reade and Jane, crimefighters. They had good energy and it was chill to see him trust her and them work stuff out together.
- I continue to be a little disturbed at how this show treats human life like a shoot-em-up video game. Like, do the agents ever pause to consider at night that they’ve killed several people that day? Every day?
“Sigh. This again.” “Oh, does someone have a case of the Mondays?”
- This episode made the members of the team feel more like human beings, even though all of their as-yet-revealed subplots were left behind in New York. Maybe they should go into the field more often.
- Only maybe not, because Jane is afraid of flying. Turns out she can fly a hidden helicopter no problemo, though.
- Mayfair lied to Weller about being Guerrero’s handler—once he’s back in custody, Sal doesn’t recognize our Command Lady. But she does tell Weller the truth about whatever Project Daylight is (maybe). We don’t know for sure, since the episode fades to black, but we are promised Daylight answers next week.
- Knowing Blindspot, these answers will probably lead to double-encoded new questions. But. Some form of answers nonetheless!
I thought this episode was pretty fun, or at least a nice change of pace—perhaps because it liberated the team/the viewing audience from a lot of the Blindspot trappings that have started to wear thin as they repeat week after week. This time around we didn’t have NYC threatened with apocalypse, not much time was spent hand-wringing over Taylor Shaw or vague flashbacks, Weller and Jane were mostly split up and not angsting at each other, and we got a whole lot of Patterson and David-the-possible-betrayer.
Endless shootouts aside, which are getting tiresome, this was more of an intriguing, team-building side of Blindspot. What did you think?