'Blindspot' Season 5 Episode 10 Review: With Jane trapped with a ZIP bomb, have things come full circle?
Spoilers for 'Blindspot' Season 5 Episode 10 'Love You to Bits and Bytes'
For all the intensity our beloved team of rogue agents has presented this season, they do get played pretty well by the 'allies' they choose to make. Be it the now deceased Matthew Weitz's (Aaron Abrams) constantly shifting loyalty or even Jake Keaton (Chad Donella) and Boston (Josh Dean) being pawned off into trapping the team with promises of help. It's not all that difficult to trick the group of five who are somehow FBI agents. But perhaps trusting in as many allies as they can make is their only remaining resort right now.
After pulling at our heartstrings with Weitz sacrificing himself for the agents and Madeline Burke (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) triumphing over them once again even in death (she drank poison before the team could get to her), this episode shows the team reunite with a former nemesis and follow the same old patterns resulting in one of their own getting trapped with the very same thing they are trying to diffuse - the memory-wiping ZIP bomb. And considering that member is Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) herself, the possibility of her losing her memory all over again makes a very fitting close circle arc for the final season of the show.
With Madeline's death one would think the team has an upper hand, but not quite. Ivy Sands (Julee Cerda) is still carrying on the shrewd director's vision and is about to unleash the ZIP bombs on unsuspecting masses. Rich Dotcom (Ennis Esmer) and Boston both believe the team should make a run for it, but they also needed to get their defense straight and this is where their former frenemy Kathy Gustofson came in. She was the hacker Madeline had used to pin all her wrongdoings on Weitz. Kathy changed her mind when she realized what Madeline's bombs were actually going to do and promising she wasn't evil, she offered the team their help. Gullible, right?
Joining hands, the team ventured out to hunt down Ivy as she needed a hacker to get into Madeline's server and trigger all the bombs. Unfortunately, Ivy had already managed a hacker for herself and put him on top of a weight pressure bomb to stop him from acting out. Getting a little predictable here, the plot sees Boston as Ivy's new hacker. After Keaton and Boston, Kathy decided it was her time to sacrifice her life for the team of rogue agents because why not. Every ally is a spare pawn in getting them to restore their names in the FBI's good books. Only that Kathy is too smart and conniving for this trap. Getting everyone out of the ZIP-room, Kathy easily diffused the bomb and made her escape. Even she is smart enough to see how clearing the team's name is next to impossible - thus giving Rich and by extension, the viewers, ample reason to gloat with 'I told you so!'s.
Meanwhile, there's a new director for the FBI, Arla Grigoryan, who worries they are being used by external forces. She orders the team to return, but they refuse, they want to track Ivy down by hook or by crook even if that means sacrificing the protagonist Jane for the cause. Well, they of course didn't intend to turn things that way, but on their quest, the team has to separate and as fate would have it, Jane gets trapped inside a room where a ZIP bomb goes off. There's ample reason to worry about her status, but knowing what this bomb is capable of, one would worry more about her memory.
It takes us back to Season 1, where this mysterious unidentified woman woke up in Times Square with a body full of coded tattooed and no memory whatsoever. Thus was coined the name Jane Doe and thus started Alexander's journey as the character, who at the end of the five-year saga, finds herself at the same crossroads. Perhaps the ZIP bomb will wipe all of Jane's memories off, or perhaps it will wipe everything Jane has seen since she woke up at Time Square and actually restore her memories from the past. With only two more episodes to go, tension builds up as Jane's arc comes full circle.
'Blindspot' airs on Thursdays at 9 pm only on NBC.
