Older Cutthroat Canyon

Season	1
Episode	15
Air Date	March 28, 2016
Written by	Brendan Gall
Directed by	Marcos Siega
Rating	1.6
Previous	Rules in Defiance
Next	Any Wounded Thief

Older Cutthroat Canyon is the fifteenth episode of the first season and the 15th overall episode of Blindspot.

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• Anagram: To Contact Your Handler

Short Summary

After a painting featuring one of Jane's tattoos is heisted from a gallery, the team discovers Jane is the real target. In order to protect her team, Jane goes AWOL.

Full Summary

“Older Cutthroat Canyon” opens with Jane meeting Oscar the night after the end of last episode. She’s still furious about the fact that the ‘people Oscar works with’ threatened Weller’s life and she doesn’t trust Oscar – but she reluctantly agrees to install a GPS tracker in her FBI team’s vehicle.

Meanwhile, Reade wakes up in his car with a gun held to his head. A man in a black mask warns him to stop looking into Thomas Carter’s disappearance unless he wants people he loves to die and then shows him a picture of Sarah and Sawyer. But Reade had already texted Mayfair that he found something – so when they meet he lies and tells her he no longer believes Jane is guilty of Carter’s disappearance. Mayfair is less than pleased.

A man in a black pig mask stole a painting from Zomo's, an elusive graffiti artist, exhibit. This matters to the FBI because the painting in question depicts a burning rose, which is one of the most prominent tattoos on Jane’s body.

At the gallery, Zomo’s assistant Kristy explains that despite working with Zomo for 7 years, she’s never met him. He communicates only via postcards with no return address. The burning rose painting, which interestingly enough is called “Ultimatum,” was added to the exhibition last-minute.

Jane returns to the car ostensibly to get her radio, but her real intention was to install the GPS tracker. Reade almost follows her but is interrupted by Zapata. As the team examines the gallery, Weller notes that one sculpture has been moved and learns there’s a security camera in the building that Kristy doesn’t recognize. So he dives out of the way – right before the bomb, hidden in the statue, explodes. Unfortunately, Weller is severely injured and sent to the hospital for surgery.

Mayfair reminds the worried team that the best way to help Weller is to catch the person who hurt him, so they get to work. Cue Jane taking charge, it’s easy to see how she got a whole team to follow her plan since she has such natural leadership ability. Jane learns that Zomo’s self-portrait is the only one which includes a photograph, and thinks that photograph might be the view from his studio. Patterson learns that it’s the view from a commercial loft building in DUMBO whose tenant pays cash and never shows his face.

But Zomo is clearly targeting the FBI since the bomb that hurt Weller was detonated remotely. So Reade and Jane go in disguise to the apartment with a bomb-sniffing dog. Zapata and other agents keep watch outside. When Jane looks through the eyehole, she sees a man bleeding and tied to a chair. Reade’s worried it might be a trap; but Jane says if they don’t get there quickly, the man will die.

So Jane and Reade rush into the studio, and it turns out Reade was right. Jane is immediately shot by a sniper. But he hits her in the plates, so Reade rushes to catch the man. On the building where the shot came from, the sniper kills an agent and steals his uniform, successfully fooling Reade into thinking Zapata has him. When the sniper gets to the street, Jane sees him and recognizes him from her previous life. He immediately begins shooting at her and Zapata realizes he’s targeting Jane instead of the FBI. Jane realizes it too…so she runs.

Later, Weller wakes up in the hospital with Sarah and Mayfair watching over him. He lost a lot of blood but no major organs were hit, so he must avoid strenuous activity. But Mayfair mistakenly tells him about Jane’s disappearance and demonstrating her suspicion towards Jane's possible escape. Weller insists she’s protecting them and gets out of bed to go save her life despite Mayfair and Sarah’s protests.

Back at the FBI, Patterson IDs Zomo as Eric Buchman, a fine arts student who flunked out of Columbia 5 years ago. But now they have no leads on the sniper. Patterson decides to analyze the shrapnel fragments from the bomb, but it’s a long shot. The FBI also picks up Kristy at JFK, where she’s suspiciously trying to board a plane to Bhutan – a country without US extradition.

Meanwhile, Jane sends a coded message to Oscar via a grandfatherly man. When they meet, Oscar says the sniper must be Cade. Jane kicked Cade out of their group after he became volatile and insisted they were no better than the people they were trying to stop. Jane insists she and Oscar must work together to stop Cade. Oscar says to do that, they’ll have to kill him.

Under interrogation, Kristy reveals that Zomo received an anonymous message threatening to expose his identity unless he painted the burning rose sketch for the show. Weller realizes that Kristy is actually Zomo and Kristy explains Zomo was an experiment she and her boyfriend Eric began. She was at the gallery when Eric was killed, so the FBI puts her in protective custody. Patterson doesn’t say anything – but as she watches the interrogation, it’s clearly all hitting a little too close to home for her. After all, Patterson’s boyfriend died because of her too.

Oscar and Jane meet Danny at a garage. Jane recognizes him from her memory of drinking around a fire too, but backs away when he tries to hug her. But Danny is funny and Jane seems to like him as Danny gives the duo burner phones, guns and a car. Unfortunately, the friendship doesn’t last long. When the garage door opens, Cade opens fire and kills Danny. Before he dies, Danny apologizes for messing up and letting Cade follow him there – and tells Jane, “I owe you one. Now we’re even.” Oscar is shocked but Jane knows they have to go when they hear sirens. She makes Danny’s death look like a robbery and they head out to steal a different car.

Back at the FBI, Patterson determines that the bomb was made from a material used in old power plants. Only four plants in New York use that material – and one’s been decommissioned, so the team head there, where they find a massive ship where Cade is patching up his wounds. Unfortunately, the ship has a solid alarm system. After a gunfight, Cade locks Weller, Zapata and Reade into a room in the ship.

Oscar gets a call informing him that Cade tortured and killed one of his men. He says the only way to beat Cade is to stop playing his game. He wants to pull Jane out of the FBI because their mission will fail if Jane dies and he can’t lose her. Jane absolutely refuses, but Oscar says her presence will hurt the team more than her absence.

After Jane calls the hospital pretending to be Sarah and learns Weller left the hospital, Oscar gets a 911 on his pager. He doesn’t want to check it but Jane forces him and makes him take the call in front of her since she’s sick of being in the dark. Hobbes says Cade called and said he had the FBI agents trapped on the boat. Oscar tries to tell Jane it’s not her fight, but she is not having it at all. Jane pulls a gun on Oscar and steals his car.

On the ship, Weller realizes the door is hollow so he shoots a hole in it and begins to fill it with gas. That’s when he sees Jane through the porthole in the door. Unfortunately, Cade shows up before Jane can open it. He demands to know where Oscar is, saying, “I want him to watch you die for what he did to Marcos.”

Jane releases herself from Cade’s grip and the two fight on the ship’s deck while Weller successfully gets out of the locked room. That’s when Oscar shows up and shoots Cade in the stomach. But when he hears Weller’s team coming up, he dives into the river – taking Cade with him. Jane lies and claims she shot Cade in the stomach.

Back at the FBI, it's stated that the Coast Guard didn’t find Cade’s body while Weller and Mayfair yell at Jane for putting herself in danger. Jane pretends she found the team by tracking the assassin, and Mayfair says, “Do something like that again and you’re done.” Weller recognizes that too because after Mayfair leaves, he tells Jane he would have done exactly the same thing. Weller is mostly upset at the thought of losing Jane/Taylor again.

Mayfair doesn’t buy Jane’s story and asks Reade if he really doesn’t think Jane had anything to do with Carter’s disappearance. Reade lies again. Later that night, he goes to Sarah’s home and breaks up with her because he doesn’t love her. Of course, the real reason is exactly the opposite.

And finally, Jane is surprisingly thrilled to find that Oscar is actually alive. She asks why Cade has it out for Oscar, and Oscar admits he was responsible for the death of someone Cade was once close to. Jane also says that Oscar always pretends that everything is going to plan, but Cade proved that’s not the case – so she wants to know how worried she should be. Oscar says Cade is dead so Jane just needs to go home now, however, the final scene of the episode is Cade stealing a car. He’s very much alive. (Source)

Tattoos

Cast

Starring

• Jaimie Alexander as Jane Doe
• Sullivan Stapleton as Special Agent Kurt Weller
• Rob Brown as Special Agent Edgar Reade
• Audrey Esparza as Special Agent Tasha Zapata
• Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Director Bethany Mayfair
• Ashley Johnson as Patterson

 Also Starring 

• Tom Lipinski as Cade
• Ukweli Roach as Dr. Borden

Guest Starring

• François Arnaud as Oscar

Featured Music

• Somebody's Gonna Cry Tonight by Trevor McSpadden - (Jane and Oscar visit old friend Danny to gear up and fight against Cade)

Images

 Trivia

• The episode's title is an anagram of the phrase "To Contact Your Handler".
• Zomo is likely a reference to Banksy.