Welcome to the Legion!

Legion contributor Andrea Levine is recapping and reviewing Blindspot for us this season. Follow her on Twitter @wysefyre!

Name Not One Man begins with a flashback. A young man is being chased outside of a building. A security guard catches up to him. They fight, and the young man is overpowered. It’s revealed to be a young Kurt Weller, and this is the military academy.

Weller is brought before Colonel Nicks, the man in charge. This is the third time Weller has tried to escape. He wants to check on his sister; he’s worried about her. No. Weller has to stay at school and get his act together. He’s sent outside the office to wait to be escorted back to his room. While he waits, a woman approaches him. It’s Shepherd. She likes his anger, but believes he needs to focus it in the right ways. He’s no good to his sister if he help himself. As she puts it, “To really protect people, you need power.” This is his first step. She’s called into a meeting with Colonel Nicks. She wishes Weller well and leaves.

We head into the present to find Weller, Jane, and Nas are at the academy, looking for answers. The secretary tells Jane and Nas about how impressed she is with the road Weller has traveled. Weller asks Colonel Nicks about Shepherd. Her real name is Ellen Briggs. She’s Army, and she used to visit once a semester to talk about her work abroad in Africa and the Middle East. She also took a strong liking to Weller. How so? It turns out Weller’s dad had problems paying tuition. Between that and Weller’s behavior,Nicks wanted to expel Weller, but Ellen Briggs convinced him otherwise and is behind the scholarship Weller received. Ellen decided to anonymously sponsor Weller’s education. Weller is spooked by this news. He says goodbye, and they leave. After they’re gone, the secretary places a phone call to Shepherd to let her know Weller knows everything.

Patterson searches for Ellen Briggs’ name. It’s next to impossible to find anything about her, but it’s Patterson, so of course she finds something. Ellen Briggs was a Major General in the Army. This is how she gained access to so much intel. Almost everything else about her is either missing or redacted. However, one name popped up – Sean Clarke. He worked with Shepherd. Unfortunately, he suffered a massive stroke and was now in an assisted living facility.

Weller, Jane, and Nas go to meet him. He doesn’t really tell them anything. He just wants to talk about baseball. Nas and Jane suggest Weller talk baseball with him to see if it’ll help Sean be a little more lucid. Weller tries. All he is able to get out of Sean is he believes Weller is a Met, but he should’ve been a National. Weller leaves disappointed.

While they’ve been tracking down Sandstorm leads, Patterson has gotten a hit on another tattoo. It’s a biblical quote that doesn’t exist. Genesis 3:25. But the system got a hit on it, and it led to the home of a farmer named Jared. Reade and Zapata go to check it out.

They arrive at the farmhouse, but no one is around. They go around back, because it’s a large farm, and they find a gun range and a garage filled with materials to make explosives. They call in a warrant and head back to the office.

Nas, Jane, and Weller have returned to the office. Zapata and Reade arrive. Patterson gets a hit on facial recognition. Jared has been found in their office, heading to the counter-terrorism department. The building is put on alert and they go to apprehend Jared. But there’s a catch. Jared claims he’s working as an informant for the FBI.

Jared is taken to an interrogation room. He swears he’s working for them, even though there’s no record of him in the system. An Agent Boyd arrives and vouches for Jared. Weller is furious. He brings Boyd to his office and asks what’s going on.

The people in Jared’s community are angry at the government, because of a pipeline, which is taking away their land, is being built. Boyd felt this discontentment could lead to domestic terrorist cells, so he enlisted the help of Jared to feel out who in the community seemed like they might try to take some action. Once they were identified, Boyd helped Jared get the bomb materials, so they could see just how far his neighbors were willing to go. They managed to ID three ringleaders.

Weller is furious at Boyd. This is an off-the-books op, which is basically entrapping people. He demands to see all the intel on the op and will determine whether or not it continues. After looking it over, Weller concludes the op will go on, but now he’s in charge. He would like to keep Jared out of everything, but Jared insists he needs to keep going, because he’s one of the leaders and if he disappears, the others might spring into action earlier than scheduled. He calls one of his partners, Tess. She wants to know what’s going on. He blames a nosy neighbor. He wants to arrange a meeting. Tess agrees, but changes the location. They’re now going to meet in an orchard.

Jared, with the FBI close behind, meets with Tess, Kevin, and Tom. Tess wants to change the plan and strike now, but Jared wants to stay on schedule. Tess becomes suspicious of Jared and pulls a gun on him. The jig is up. Tess shoots Jared. The FBI tries to close in. Tess takes off on her motorcycle and escapes. Tom is killed and Kevin surrenders.

Weller is livid Jared is dead and fires Agent Boyd. Then he goes to talk to Kevin. Kevin never wanted to kill anyone. He just wanted to keep what was his. He gives up the location Tess planned on hitting. It’s the Bureau of Land Management, located in the Federal Building in Manhattan.

Patterson discovers Tess, with the help of others, has gotten ahold of more explosives. Weller contacts the Federal Building to evacuate, then they head to help. The evacuation is taking longer than Weller would like, but there’s only so much they can do. On the traffic cameras, Patterson spots a truck going through traffic lights and heading towards them.

Weller goes out to meet the truck. He plays chicken with them. He has a gun trained on Tess and she speeds up. As she gets closer, Weller shoots out her tires. The truck swerves. Tess and one of the men she’s with are temporarily knocked out. Another guy exits the truck and fires on them, but he’s taken care of quickly. Tess comes to and gets out of the truck. She’s now surrounded, but she has her hand on the detonator. She’s willing to kill all of them. Weller persuades her to give him the detonator, by appealing to her solider mentality. The bomb is the easy way out. Soldiers always do the right thing. She gives up and is arrested.

Back at the FBI, Weller talks to Patterson about using Omaha, Nas’ secret Daylight database on steroids. He doesn’t want her to use it. It’s illegal and they need to do everything by the book. Patterson doesn’t want to, but she’ll disconnect Omaha, but after Weller listens to an audio file she uncovered. It’s a phone call between Mayfair and Sean Clarke. He’s calling to persuade Mayfair not to put Weller up for a promotion, which would relocate him to Washington DC. Mayfair agrees. Weller is floored by this, because that means Sean was trying to communicate with him when he said Weller was a Met, but should have been a National. He was talking about the promotion.

Weller goes back to see Sean. He’s a little more lucid. Weller asks Sean why did he want Weller’s career in NY? Sean calls Weller a star player and tells him to be a Met. Weller doesn’t understand. Sean mentions the Truman Protocol. What? The Truman Protocol. It’s everything. But Sean thinks there might be people listening, so Weller takes him back to his room. Once there, Weller is greeted by Shepherd, who promptly knocks him out.

Meanwhile, a whole bunch of other drama is unfolding. Jane shows Roman Sean’s and Shepherd’s pictures to see if they’ll jog any memories. They don’t, but Shepherd is familiar to him. Jane tells him about her. He wants to know everything. Jane is hesitant at first, but speaks to Nas, who gives Roman all the redacted files to read.

Later, he asks Jane why Shepherd is doing everything, and when Jane tells him Shepherd believes the people in power are serving only themselves, Roman wonders if maybe Shepherd is right. He’s in a cage. Jane’s working for the FBI, but they tell her what to do and where to go. Maybe she is brainwashed. Jane rebukes this. She’s at the FBI because she knows it’s the right thing to do, but Roman’s comments stick with her.

Reade seems to be having second thoughts about having slept with Nikki. However, he’s willing to see her again. They come back to his apartment, and he offers her a drink. She pulls out some coke and begins to set up lines. Reade points out he’s a Fed, and she just encourages him to whip out his cuffs. He thought she had left Freddy over drugs, but she left him because he was getting out of control. She just wants to have fun. She taunts Reade with being a stick in the mud and offers him the coke. Reade is walking a very dangerous path.

Zapata goes to check in on Patterson and finds her combing through the reference numbers of Shepherd’s redacted files. Zapata encourages her to take a break and unwind, but Patterson can’t. She needs to keep going, because she has to find Shepherd and Borden. As she rants to Zapata about how Weller has tied one of her hands behind her back, she passes out.

Jane decides to heed Roman’s words and do something for herself. She goes out with Oliver Kind again and plays skee-ball for the first time. Oliver wonders how she never played before, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether or not Jane has enough tickets to get something good. She doesn’t. She wants to win a giant shark, but Oliver says it’ll take thousands of tickets to get it, so they’ll have to spend a lot of time together, playing a lot of skee-ball. It’ll be a big commitment. Jane takes his hand and says she’s in.

Name Not One Man ends with Weller waking up in an abandoned building, tied to a chair. Sean is seating opposite of him. He looks spent. Shepherd reveals she had to use a lot of drugs to get Sean just lucid enough to lure Weller to his room. She’s sorry they had to meet again this way, but she’s happy to see him. Shepherd goes off about how she saw something in Weller all those years ago. She believes they are the same. They both want to help save the country.

She reveals she sponsored him, because she saw his potential. She believes he will help her cause. Weller denies all of this. Shepherd believes the big difference between them is he plays by the rules, while she wants to change the rules. Then she goes up to Sean, gives him a kiss, apologizes, and stabs him in the heart. She holds him as he dies.

Weller screams at her. She didn’t need to do that. Yes, she did. She needed to show Weller he was not the only one suffering. But it will all be worth it in the end. She promises they’ll meet again, and this time, he’ll have no choice but to join her. It’s a shame. She believes in another life, they could have been family. She gives him the knife so he can free himself and leaves.

Well, that was nice and dark. I don’t know how I feel about Reade taking a walk on the dark side as a way to cope with Coach Jones. It’s cliche, but given how Blindspot loves to play around with cliches and then make them different, I’m willing to hold judgement.

It’s interesting seeing how Roman experiences warm feelings towards Shepherd, but he’s also asking good questions. I can’t help but feel that at some point, he’s going to get free and break from Jane to figure things out himself, and that’ll bring him back to Shepherd in some capacity. He’s too good a character to waste in a cell

Hearing Mayfair’s voice again was nice. I like Weller being in charge, but Mayfair was such a murky character. She was more fun than Weller, because Weller is all about the rules, while Mayfair made her own. The show needs more characters like her.

I’m sure some of it is unintentional, but anyone else feel as though the ideas behind Sandstorm are somewhat relevant to what is happening in the news these days? I wonder just how much is accidental and how much is deliberate. Personally, I like it, because while I don’t think Sandstorm’s tactics are acceptable, they do raise questions we should be trying to discuss. But that’s just me.

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Andrea Levine

Andrea Levine is an East Coast based geek, who has more fandoms than she cares to admit. When she isn't talking about the latest geeky news, she's obsessing over musical theater. Her dream is to successfully bring geekdom and musical theater together (I'm looking at you, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark). You can read more of her exploits as Wysefyre over at [insertgeekhere].