BLINDSPOT “Ohana” Recap

BLINDSPOT — “‘Ohana” Episode 418 — Pictured: (l-r) Ashley Johnson as Patterson, Ennis Esmer as Rich Dotcom — (Photo by: NBC/Warner Brothers)

BLINDSPOT “OHANA” RECAP

BY PAULINE PERENACK

Attack of the Killer Bees

Last week on Blindspot, it was a race against the clock as the team worked to find Jane, who was buried alive underground by Dominic, in an attempt to free Madeline. The team found Jane just in time and put Madeline away for good, while finally coming together as a full team with Zapata now back in the game. However, Dominic is still out there, and now has the attack on the eastern seaboard, Helios, to push through.

Bill, Ginny, Patterson

Tonight’s episode, “Ohana” begins with two lab techs questioning each other as to why they’re in the lab so late. The woman, Ginny, is nervous around her male counterpart, and quickly leaves.

At headquarters, Reade wakes up Zapata, who has worked through the night on trying to find Dominic. She’s determined to find him and isn’t impressed when the rest of the team shows up and treats the whole situation as more of a joke than anything else. Jane tells Zapata she needs some rest, and Reade gives her the keys to his apartment, since Zapata’s current home is a crappy motel.

Jane and Weller are still looking through the contents of the Sandstorm bunker – with Weller teasing Jane about the poetry of hers he found, when Patterson calls for them. Turns out, a tattoo that had been solved was becoming active. A recent outbreak of TTX poisoning was occurring, and it was curious because the poison is a bacteria usually found in puffer fish, yet there was no seafood connection between the victims.

With a bit more digging, Patterson and Rich find that everyone who died had eaten cantaloupe that came from a research facility near Quaker Hill. The team storms the facility, and inside, find Patterson’s father, Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Turns out, Bill has been working for the facility as a consultant, and even though all the evidence points to Bill as the villain, no one on the team can believe he’s the one capable of poisoning all those people. Patterson goes to talk to him, as Weller and Jane return to digging through the bunker materials. There, Jane focuses on a business card, since it’s the only thing she doesn’t have a personal connection to.

Patterson thinks the card belongs to the person on the bunker security footage since some dye she found on it matched the jacket the person seemed to be wearing. The card leads to a women’s shelter, and when Jane is shown members of the shelter, she recognizes one of them, so Weller knows she needs to be brought in. When they question her, she says she thinks the picture of Shepherd looks familiar and that Shepherd had come in looking for a woman named Jessica. Ironically, Jessica had come to the shelter recently, and was wearing the same jacket as the person from the bunker security footage. As such, Jane wants an FBI sketch artist to get a drawing done.

Meanwhile, Patterson and Rich have determined that someone has been using the technology in the research center to change the genes of bees so that they can carry TTX. Thus, there is a swarm of killer bees out there, and more and more, it seems as though Ginny is the culprit, as the team finds a research paper she wrote about the potential of weaponized bees through gene modification.

The team brings Ginny in for questioning, and Patterson goes at her particularly strongly, but mostly to prove that no one can replace her in the eyes of her father. Patterson’s insecurities grow even deeper when the team shows Ginny a request she made for bees, but Ginny points out that the signature date is actually her birthday, and she was having dinner with Bill and his wife that day, meaning she didn’t send the request.

With Ginny being a dead end, Bill tells the team to focus on Nick Pomeroy. Nick recently was denied a raise, and he’s in tons of debt. Reade figures that Nick co-opted Ginny’s research to turn the bees into a weapon, so they need to find him. When they see a wire transfer to Nick’s account go through from an account that’s a front for the defense contractor, Alverson Aerospace, they assume Nick will be meeting with Alverson soon to trade the bees for more money. With help from Bill and Ginny as to what kinds of buildings Nick would need for the bees, the team is able to narrow down where he’ll be. The raid is a success, and Nick is taken out by his own bees after getting locked in a truck with them.

Because they can’t bear to have the rest of Nick’s bees die, Bill and Ginny head back to the lab to try to cure them, and Jane convinces Patterson she should go as well. Soon after Patterson arrives, a team of mercenaries sent by Alverson Aerospace arrive, and take Bill hostage as they force Patterson and Ginny to package up the remaining bees. Working together, Patterson and Ginny are able to release the bees to kill two of the mercenaries, while Weller and Jane who have since arrived take out the other mercenary and save Bill.

As the rest of her team deals with killer bees, Zapata gets a call from Claudia who wants to help in tracking down Dominic. Claudia doesn’t want to work with either of their respective teams, and wants to handle finding Dominic with only Zapata. However, it turns out she doesn’t even want Zapata’s help, and goes off on her own to follow a lead, and ends up dead.

The episode ends with the usual wrap up of our characters. Patterson has dinner with her dad who points out the incredible chemistry she has with Rich, Reade tells Zapata she can stay at his place as long as she wants, but she says she’ll look for apartments in the morning, and Jane and Weller’s evening together is interrupted by Rich, who is dropping off the finished sketch of Jessica. As Weller and Jane look at it, they instantly recognize the woman as Weller’s mom.

Weller’s Mom?

I was honestly disappointed by this episode. Bill Nye the Science Guy as Patterson’s father is a genius casting move and was done so well the first episode he was in, but this one was just not as good. Having Patterson jealous of Ginny seemed super forced, and I just can’t buy into a storyline that involves killer bees, nor all the bee puns that were shoved into every scene. I do appreciate however, Bill thinking that Rich and Patterson were dating. While those two don’t have sexual chemistry, they definitely do have solid chemistry, and it was funny to hear Bill mention it.

Zapata’s storyline was once again relegated to the B storyline, and Claudia was killed off so quickly, it almost makes you wonder why she was there in the first place. At least she and Reade seem to finally be getting back to their original solid friendship, which is great to see.

Then finally, the big shock that the hooded person caught going into the bunker was Weller’s mom, just didn’t seem to be that big of a shock. Shepherd has been following Weller since he was young, so of course she would have some sort of relationship with Weller’s mother. How else could she continue to keep getting so close to him?

Guess we’ll find out more next week. Until then!