'Blindspot' Season 5 Episode 5 Review: Kurt Weller reaches his breaking point, is another drone attack coming?
Spoilers for Season 5 Episode 5 - 'Head Games'
As the tension picks up and more and more of our beloved rogue agents fall prey to the notorious Madeline Burke and her torturous schemes, the latest to crack in that department is our good man Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton). The esteemed and seasoned agent was kidnapped at the end of the previous Episode 4 of Season 5 and as we saw his wife Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) bleeding her guts outside the warehouse where she had been shot and he was kidnapped. While the concerns for Jane's life and safety were met with ample clarification that she is fine after all, the same cannot be said for Kurt. Under the influence of the drugs induced by the Dabur Zan terror group orchestrating the chemical weapon attack on Madeline (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio)'s orders, Kurt eventually slips some information that might lead the mercenaries back to where our agents are hiding. And no amount of Jane pacifying the blunder made can convince us otherwise.
The episode begins with yet another torture scene, and though not as laden with physical battery and abuse, Kurt's situation was far from sunshine and rainbows. Per its protocol, the final season has been picking one character each week to spin a twisted web of crisis around, and what had started with Rich Dotcom (Ennis Esmer)'s torture at the CIA black site, soon turned into Patterson (Ashley Johnson)'s plight about her father, and Tasha Zapata (Audrey Esparza)'s grief and pregnancy. Now at the brink of Kurt's breaking point, it becomes obvious soon the ordeal is to fixate on our prime protagonist Jane, and if not that, at least a second drone attack is definitely coming.
Sullivan is good at the job he has been doing for five years now: playing the gruff, angry agent who's doing all he can to reunite with his little daughter, clear his name, and live a peaceful life. It is, however, the torture scene that once again establishes just how good he is at playing this layered agent. The Dabur Zan group seek intel on the rogue agents' whereabouts, and Kurt accidentally spills about the European bunker they are living at under the influence of heavy drugs as part of their interrogation technique. It, however, didn't happen before he hallucinated some pretty unnerving stuff, and that's where the remarkable work of the writers come in.
Heavily under the influence of drugs forcefully injected into his body as the Dabur Zan keep torturing him, Kurt hallucinates two people, but those two are enough to screw with his head. The first one is Season 1 adversary Oscar (Francois Arnaud) who keeps making Kurt question the credibility of his relationship with Jane, insisting that they were never soulmates. The other hallucination gets even moe harrowing as Kurt sees his father Bill trying to get him to feel accountable for the death of his childhood friend Taylor Shaw, who was killed by Bill himself. Constantly reminding him that he's killed dozens of people are part of the job, Bill manages to get inside Kurt's head, and later, only Jane can help Kurt.
Jane tries her best to ease Kurt's pain after learning of the psychological torture the Dabur Zan put him through and keeps assuring him he's a good man, but his hallucinations just fear besting him. But no matter how hard Jane tries to pacify, there is no ignoring that the terror group knows they are staying at a bunker. True, Jane says there are hundreds of bunkers in the continent, but we can't help look back at the major drone attack that sparked their mission at the beginning of the season. If Madeline could dig them out of the padded snow of Iceland, a bunker in Europe shouldn't be a problem, right? The only question is, who will sacrifice this time?
'Blindspot' Season 5 airs on Thursdays at 9 pm only on NBC.