BLINDSPOT “If Beth” Recap

Girls Who Code

Tonight’s episode starts off with a guard being injected in the neck with something to take him down, but quickly shifts to a quiet scene of Roman and Jane at a lake. Jane questions why he took her there, and it turns out that Lake Aurora is a lake in which a company had been knowingly dumping chemicals for years, causing the people who lived around it to get sick. Roman explains that the lake was a symbol of the people they’re fighting, but it wasn’t enough to convince Jane that Sandstorm were the good guys.

The tattoo case of the week continues with Patterson briefing the team on the latest tattoo she had solved. The honeycomb pattern on Jane’s hand translated into the 1s and 0s of basic code, and ultimately pointed to Homeland Security employee Bo Kaier, and to SHDWCAT, which is the handle for a well-known hacker.

The team drives out to Kaier’s house, where they catch him in the process of destroying all of his hard drives. As Zapata and Jane try to save as many of the hard drives as they can, Reade chases after Kaier, and with an anger we haven’t seen before, beats Kaier senseless. Weller has to pull Reade off, and arrests Kaier.

Back at headquarters, Patterson is able to get some information from the saved hard drives, and determines Kaier was building video games which detailed actual buildings and their security measures, so thieves could plan their robberies. She manages to determine the next building to be hit will be the AEBLY Museum of Art during a fundraiser in a couple of days. Concerned about Reade’s sudden temper, Nas wants him to sit on the sidelines, but Weller refuses, and the team goes to the fundraiser undercover.

As the fundraiser goes on around them, the team fans out to try to find the thieves who were in the building. While searching the basement of the building, Patterson is surprised by the thief, and is saved by Weller, who immediately takes chase. Weller loses the thief, but Jane is able to find her, and a fight ensues. Normally, this is where Jane comes out on top, but she’s surprised by a flashbang, and the thief is able to escape.

After combing the museum for evidence, Patterson was able to find a partial print, and the team is able to identify the thief as Elizabeth Gubara, who has ties to a terrorist cell. Patterson also confirms that the two victims from the museum had similar itineraries to each other, which also coincided with those of another man from the fundraiser, Charles Kessler. The team heads to Kessler’s house, and end up ambushing Elizabeth, who is there to finish her kill. As they arrest her, she drops the bomb that she’s actually CIA.

While talking to her, the team learns that the two victims at the fundraiser were go-betweens for the CIA and the terrorist unit Elizabeth was working with, but were using her intel to turn a profit. Kessler was her handler, and when she went to him for help, he told her to stay quiet. Elizabeth was eventually outed as CIA, who wiped her from all of their records, her family was killed, and she was held captive by the terrorist group.

Digging deeper into the two victims of the fundraiser by looking into their financial records, Patterson discovers they both had all the markings of being spies, which meant Kessler had to be as well. And since he had suddenly gone dark, the assumption seemed likely. As the team discussed Elizabeth’s family, Zapata shows a photo from Kessler’s computer she had found, which had him standing with a young woman, even though his records clearly showed he didn’t have a daughter. Elizabeth confirms the girl is her daughter Meridia, and confesses that Meridia is also Kessler’s – the result of an affair with Kessler during her first op.

Now knowing Kessler was traveling with Meridia, Patterson has someone else to track, and traces the duo to a local airport. The team races to intercept them from getting on a private plane, and the weekly shootout begins. Weller makes a kill shot on Kessler, but the fight isn’t over as Meridia starts shooting back in self-defense. Jane is able to talk her down however, and the team takes the girl back to headquarters so she can see her mother once more before Elizabeth is taken to jail.

The main character side story of the week continued to delve into Reade’s past with Coach Jones. Because he can’t get a handle on his repressed memories, he starts to act out with anger. Concerned for her partner, Zapata steps in, asking Freddy to stop crashing at Reade’s apartment, so Reade could deal with his problems on his own. She then took a step across the line when she visits SHDWCAT in the hospital, and asks him to do a job for her off the books.

Our Sandstorm cliffhanger of the week comes in the form of Nas showing Weller a video from his days at the military academy. She tells him the video was smuggled out of Sandstorm, which means that Sandstorm has been watching Weller for over 20 years.

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