'Blindspot' Season 5 Episode 4 Review: Is Tasha's predictable comeback enough to save Jane's life?
Spoilers for Season 5 Episode 4: 'And My Axe!'
With Madeline Burke's (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) maddening agenda to help the mercenaries expose several capital cities to a fatal chemical, our team of rogue agents jumps heavily and wholeheartedly to stop the shrewd FBI director from having her way. But their journey towards busting whatever Madeline is planning for the future sees Tasha Zapata (Audrey Esparza) take a deep dive into memory lane, and it's not a pleasant one at all. A lead in the case behind the manufacturing and storage of these chemicals lands the team on a suspect that Sasha had interrogated with Edgar Reade (Rob Brown) on the very first day they had met. But revisiting the past is rivaled by what the future holds for her and her now-deceased fellow agent. And even with new life budding along the way, it is the prospect of more loss of life and bloodshed within the team that has our attention in Season 5's Episode 4 of 'Blindspot'.
Predictable as the lowest hanging fruit, the episode titled 'And My Axe!' sees Tasha confide in Rich Dotcom (Ennis Esmer) that she is in fact, just as fans called it last week, pregnant with Reade's baby. Their one time hook up while exiting in Iceland shortly before Madeline brutally bombed their hideout which cost Reade his life, has led to a new life, possibly explaining all the mood and anxiety Tasha has been bubbling with in the recent past. The information surfaces as Tasha reminisces sometimes fondly, and most of the time painfully about the day she met Reade and how they just fit together in a difficult case they cracked. The exact same way their minds worked and their gut instincts while hounding suspects and backing up each other on the field speak volumes about the bond they shared.
The few minutes of the Tasha and Reade team-up we get to see only remind us of what we might go on to miss the most about the show. And honestly, them being the couple in prime focus would have been a way better call than Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) and Jane Doe's (Jaimie Alexander) romance. But that's wishful thinking, as answering most of our doubts from the teaser for this episode, Reade returns only in flashbacks and hallucinations. He is most certainly dead, living only in the life growing inside Tasha -- a secret she is yet to reveal to the rest of the team. It's funny she would choose Rich to confide in, as the resident joker is seemingly becoming more and more of a confidant for pretty much everyone. Or maybe Tasha is just compensating for all the time she spent unable to open up to people as this episode sees her blossom in ways more than one. She overcomes her personal walls and submits herself all the way in to help out however she can: be it brainstorming in the bunker or out there backing up in the field.
But this little progress from Tasha's end trying to honor Reade's memory doesn't end all positively for the team. While they do manage to dig out the storage where the weaponized chemical was being stored and call the authorities on them, things go very wrong, again predictable, when they split up to head back home. All this while, we thought Kurt being offended by Jane keeping his daughter Bethany's health scare a secret from him was the biggest thorn in their garden of Eden, but at the end of the episode, right when they are about to head back, the mercenaries come and kidnap Kurt, while leaving Jane shot in the stomach. She stands there, horrified, bleeding out of her guts, and there's no one to help her as Tasha has already made her way out before any of this happened. While Jane getting shot doesn't necessarily come as a surprise because she is the protagonist who has to suffer the most after all, but with her shot, Kurt kidnapped, and Tasha pregnant, will Rich and Patterson (Ashley Johnson) jump to the field now? That's the question we'll be stewing in for a whole week or so.
'Blindspot' Season 5 airs on Thursdays at 9 pm only on NBC.