Blindspot – Upside Down Craft Recap/Review
Eeek, sorry for the delay, things have been a bit crazy in real life but I’m slowly catching up. As an apology, please accept this Upside Down Craft recap/review and some silly roundtable shenanigans. We hope to be back on schedule ASAP!
Party Time
Kurt (Sullivan Stapleton) and Jane (Jaimie Alexander) are all dressed up, sipping champagne at a fancy party and Kurt is flirting HARD. Seriously, there’s mention of handcuffs and I may have stopped breathing for a moment. Only problem is, he and Jane are on an open channel and Tasha (Audrey Esparza) and Reade (Rob Brown) can hear everything. EVERYTHING! Tasha and Reade are in an office somewhere else in the building copying files from a computer. While they work they discuss Patterson’s app which apparently 75 million people play. At $3 a pop. Damn Patterson (Ashley Johnson) must be LOADED! They get the info they need from the computers and Kurt moves in to arrest the guy they were after at the party.
Lab Time
Tasha asks Patterson how she is holding up after Stuart’s murder. Patterson says she’s shaken but still going. they discuss the tattoo that lead to the guy they just arrested, Kevin Loewe. It was a code number from an anonymous tip made to the FBI – a train derailment that killed people made Loewe a bunch of money after he sold stock in the rail operator. Hirst says they better all be sure about this because Loewe’s lawyer is on the way and people up the food chain are rattled by the arrest.
Patterson is investigating Stuart’s murder on the side. She is suspicious as Stuart had a device called Kinga (one of those voice command deelies, like a souped up Siri) which she believes recorded the murder. She wants Reade to use all his power as an Assistant Director of the FBI to strongarm the company into handing over the recording.
Three Blind Mice
The lawyer is waiting in the conference room and playing Wizardville. Patterson gives her a hint on how to play before Kurt and Jane arrive. The lawyer says that the emails they have linking Loewe to the train crash were planted by a group of elite hackers called the Three Blind Mice. Patterson looks shifty and… wait… has anyone seen Rich Dot Com (Ennis Esmer) lately?
Patterson heads straight to Rich’s “office” with a scrambler and asks if he did the hack. Turns out the Three Blind Mice were her, Rich and someone else WAIT THIS IS THE RICH AND PATTERSON SECRET?… THEY DIDN’T HOOK UP… THEY WERE JUST ILLEGALLY HACKING! Weller summons the pair of them to ask if they know of the Three Blind Mice. After some nursery rhyme shenanigans from Rich he says he knows of them but not who they are. He is a good guy now after all.
Hirst, Jane and Weller have a picture of one of the Three…in a mouse mask (yes, really) and they want Patterson to track her. Patterson wants to come clean about their past, Rich persuades her not to and they argue over how to proceed.
Things are getting awkward for Reade
He and Tasha are at Kinga’s head office trying to get the recordings. Well, Reade is. Tasha is texting Reade’s girlfriend Meg. They’d also been doing brunch and yoga together. Wait, which one of these two is dating her again? Tasha tells Reade to put a ring on Megan or she’ll do it. They get a call from Patterson who has managed to find the hacker from the photo. Her name is Kathy Gustafson (Guest Star Heather Burns) and she works for Nerd Herd. As in…Chuck Bartowski Nerd Herd. Same uniform, logo…the works. Wonder if she’s really CIA… They bring her in and Hirst wants Patterson and Rich Dot Com in on her questioning. This is going to go HORRIBLY wrong isn’t it?
Horribly Wrong or Weirdly Right?
Kathy admits it was her that hacked Loewe, and all the other Three Blind Mice stuff. Says they were doing good things, not bad, like stopping politicians selling military secrets or preventing stock exchange crashes. Rich says that doesn’t sound so bad. Patterson says it’s “opposite opposite” – very bad. Something in the way she speaks seems to spark recognition in Kathy. Rich then proceeds to out himself by going full tech nerd, something about blade pass frequencies. Oh boy… Kathy says she’s only talking because more lives are in danger, Loewe shorted stocks in another company and she thinks he is going to engineer another “accident”.
More Secrets?
Patterson catches up to Rich after the interrogation and tells him she knows that the attack is really going to happen. It turns out that something in the coding of her app gives her a back door into EVERY USER’S PHONE… oh boy… The lawyer plays Wizardville, as we know, and Patterson hacked into her phone and got confirmation. They need to tell the team but they obviously can’t tell them the very illegal way Patterson came by the information. They present an anonymous tip to the team (that sounds a lot like Rich Dot Com) and Kurt makes the call to move on the information. That there will be an attack on a battery plant in Green Point that belongs to an electric car manufacturer, just about to announce their latest model.
Kurt and Jane arrive at the plant just in time, kick the bad guys’ asses and stop the bomb that’s about to ignite the severed gas line and blow the plant. Mostly by Jane screwing with the timer, speeding it up so one of the thugs has to disarm it to save himself. Smart thinking that woman! She then saves Kurt by shooting the guy beating him up using a bottle of oil as a suppressor so that there is no muzzle flash to ignite the gas!
Rich Dot Com and Patterson celebrate the investigation being over while at Kinga headquarters Reade goes full Assistant Director of the FBI to get the recordings!!
But wait… the episode is only half done!
Rich Dot Com and Patterson meet out at some shady dockyard and realise too late that it’s a trap…as crazy Kathy shoots them both with beanbag rounds while saying that she’s saving them!
The pair wake up in some grungy dump wearing shock collars. “She’s going to make us play the Hunger Games” Rich wails. Turns out Kathy is a Rich Dot Com fangirl (who knew that was a thing). She is convinced that Patterson and Rich have been brainwashed into working for the FBI. She’s going to save them and they are all going to work together again. Kathy has gone to the dark side of hacking and is also totally off the reservation! Patterson’s phone pings, it’s a text from Wellers asking if she has forgotten dinner. Kathy walks off with the phone.
Team Bonding
The gang are all at Kurt and Jane’s apartment for dinner. Tasha and Jane are discussing Wizardville, which they both play. Tasha asks Jane what a particular noise means and Jane says it means there’s another high level player on the same wifi. It’s not Jane. And Kurt doesn’t play… It’s READE! Kurt thinks it’s hilarious…or possibly that his entire team are crazy. Tasha is seriously unimpressed and determined to take Reade down.
Rich tries to convince Patterson to go along with crazy Kathy for a bit, earn her trust and get free, but Patterson isn’t convinced.
Kurt gets an email from Patterson saying she’s ditching the team for dinner with Rich. Tasha grabs his phone to reply and sees something odd. Patterson has signed with her first name. Which she NEVER uses. Kurt then wonders why Patterson would respond to his text with an email. The team realise something is wrong and go on the alert.
Black Hat Time
The first hack Kathy wants her amigos to perform is to discredit a congressman by exposing his rather deviant background during a live press conference. That done, Kathy moves on to the real deal – she wants them to crash Loewe’s plane, killing him and his wife. Turns out Kathy’s vendetta against Loewe is because her brother was on the train that was derailed and he was killed. Doesn’t quite explain the crazy though. Rich Dot Com sides with Kathy while Patterson protests and gets zapped unconscious for her troubles.
The team back at the NYO find the abandoned cars and start trying to track their abducted team-mates but it might be too late. Rich crashes the plane as requested and Patterson is devastated. Kathy is enraged when her proximity alerts go off and then even more when she realises that Loewe’s plane landed safely after all. Rich was playing her the entire time! She knocks Rich out and then hacks the team’s SUV to try and crash it but they manage to escape. She torches the computers and it looks like she’s going to kill Rich and Patterson. Patterson apologises to Kathy in an attempt to stall her and it works. The team arrive, although not before Kathy shocks Patterson again. There’s a super sweet moment where Kurt checks Patterson over to see if she’s okay, there’s a total big brother-little sister vibe and it’s ADORABLE!
Tying up loose ends
Reade suspects that Patterson and Rich were the other two members of the Three Blind Mice but they keep very quiet. He says that the tattoo wasn’t just about exposing Loewe, it was about exposing people on the team too. Like the previous one brought Jane’s K&R work to light and caused a rift between her and Kurt. Roman is using the new tattoos to try and break the team apart.
Kurt arrives home and finds Jane cooking – vegan lasagna. He’s utterly horrified until Jane says she’s made him a steak, medium rare. Now THAT is love. He runs off to take a shower and tries to drag her with him but her phone rings. Okay – I can suspend disbelief so far but when that man wants you to take a shower with him YOU IGNORE THE PHONE JANE! She answers and it’s Roman taunting her about the new tattoos.
Patterson has got the recordings from Kinga of the day of Stuart’s murder. She plays it for Tasha and Reade. It’s just a dog barking and a siren. But it’s been copied and pasted from earlier in the day. The exact same noises. She has also managed to crack the tattoo that Stuart had been fixated on. It’s a code that provides the names of a dozen people who were all previous owners of Van Gogh’s famous self portrait.
Elsewhere we see the Kinga exec that Reade dealt with earlier. They are approached by a man who wants to know if they did as he instructed. It appears that instruction was swapping the audio. After finding out that it was done he turns to leave and we see… HE ONLY HAS ONE EAR!
Roundtable Questions
As always we had some questions for our Blindspot fans Clare and Mo after the episode. Check out their responses below.
Patterson’s app allows her to access the phones of those who have downloaded it. We know that Tasha, Reade and Jane all play the game. Do you think Patterson will at some point be forced to use that to spy on her colleagues?
M – I think Patterson may be forced to use the app but wouldn’t want to.
C – I think she’s going to give in to temptation as secrets start to unfold and she’s not going to like what she finds.
Were you surprised at the revelation of Patterson and Rich’s secret being their hacking activities? Were you expecting something else?
M – I thought something more romantic with Rich’s reaction but should have guessed hacking.
C – Well the way Patterson talked to Rich at the end of the premiere sure made it SEEM like they’d done a little interfacing if you catch my drift. I think I was surprised that it was hacking, but I probably shouldn’t have been.
During this episode we see Kathy hack a car, Rich hack a plane, and find out that the Kinga device Stuart had was basically recording everything in his house. On a scale from one to screw this… how afraid of technology did this make you?
M – Screw this!
C – SCREW THIS! Honestly I have never been happier to drive a junker of a car. I was already dubious as hell of those home assistant thingies, I will not be getting one of those ANY time soon!
Join us on Monday nights at 10pm UK time when we live tweet new episodes on Sky Living. Blindspot airs on NBC in the US on Fridays at 9!
