Blindspot recap: 'Two Legendary Chums' 

There’s a very good reason that “Two Legendary Chums” is the best episode of

in a few weeks: it mostly sidelines the drama of the Avery storyline and instead returns the focus to the overarching story of Roman’s plan to take down Crawford, and how that might involve messing with the FBI team. There’s still a lot of Avery in this episode—it turns out she has her mother’s flair for stubbornness and impatience—and that’s okay because she’s integral to Jane’s character arc, but for the most part it feels like the show is getting back to basics here.

But let’s start with Avery, because despite being saved from Roman by the FBI, she’s not exactly ready to cozy up with them. Roman has filled her head with a lot of different ideas, and that means she doesn’t really trust anyone. Weller and Jane do their best to get some information out of her about her interactions with Roman, but she’s hesitant to say too much. She defiantly asks them if they’ll wipe her memory and lock her in a cell the way they did Roman.

Despite her anger, she does give them something. She says that while she’s been searching for Jane, it was never really part of her plan. Rather, she’s been looking for the man that ruined her father’s life and pushed him towards killing himself. When Avery’s adoptive mother died of cancer, all her adoptive father had was his work. Before long though he was pushed out of that job and then he threw himself off a bridge. Since that day Avery has been looking for the man responsible, and it’s none other than Hank Crawford.

This is the episode where everything starts to come together. The connections between Roman, Crawford, Avery, Hirst, and the FBI team become a little clearer. The knowledge about Crawford’s connection to Avery’s dad is one thing, but another tattoo case really starts to clarify what’s been going on. Roman sends a video to Patterson that once again nudges the team in the right direction. Once Patterson puts together the pieces of a tattoo on Jane’s body, revealing the picture of a ship and two words, “Donald Ley,” Weller discovers a connection. Donald Shipley was his old partner before the guy took a job with a private weapons contractor.

A little digging reveals that Shipley had a ton of debt that was recently paid off, meaning that someone is using him to gain access to weapons. Weller insists that he go visit Shipley on his own, despite the fact that their relationship didn’t end on good terms. Weller finds Shipley, but his timing isn’t the best. Shipley claims that he’s working undercover for Homeland Security, meeting with a dealer looking for an EMP device. So when the terrorists show up, Weller has no choice but to play into the act and pretend to be an EMP expert.

While Weller brushes up on putting together an EMP device under pressure back at the FBI headquarters, Roman is hanging out in Morocco with Victor, awaiting the arrival of Crawford. Some sort of deal is about to go down in the middle of the desert, but Roman’s being kept in the dark. More importantly though, things are tense between the two men. This is about more than who gets to be Crawford’s right-hand man, though. Victor finally tells Roman what he knows: that he’s not Tom Jakeman. He might not know much else, but he knows Roman is a rat trying to get close to Crawford for some reason. It’s the first time this season that Roman’s truly been threatened, and it sets up a wonderfully tense scene later in the episode.

“Two Legendary Chums” isn’t necessarily a confusing episode, but it is one that has a lot going on. There are a lot of threads to follow, including the reappearance of Director Hirst. She’s being held in a CIA black site—”theoretically,” says Zapata, to cover the illegality of the operation—and Zapata is sent in to try and get some more information about Crawford out of her. She injects her with a drug cocktail that the CIA has been working on, a truth serum of sorts. Hirst reveals that Crawford had ties to an anti-government group called The Regimen, which is the same group Shipley says Homeland Security is tracking. Namely, they’ve been looking for their leader, a former Green Beret named Nils Bresden (with a name like that, he

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