Blindspot recap: 'City Folks Under Wraps' 

understands, it’s that you go into the holiday break on a high note and leave your viewers wanting more. “City Folks Under Wraps” does just that. It’s a thrilling, fast-paced, tense hour of television that expertly plays with our understanding of the events from the season, constructing a prison break, cat-and-mouse style episode that concludes the dominant arc of the season’s first half. Last week the team was running out of time to find evidence that Hirst killed Stuart. This week, they’re on the run from the Director herself.

“City Folks Under Wraps” takes us back to the final moments of last week’s episode, but rather than witnessing “van Gogh” get killed from the perspective of Weller, and the subsequent devastation on the faces of the team, we see it from Hirst’s perspective. She sits in her office, in the dark, like some sort of Bond villain. Hr phone rings. “It’s done,” says the voice.

With that complete, Hirst makes a call to a secret contact on her phone. Suddenly, she’s not the composed, menacing Hirst we’ve seen, but rather someone desperate and uncertain. She’s clearly talking to the man highest up on the food chain, the one she’s taking orders from. She says the heat is on and that she might need protection if things go south. The man on the other end of the call (David Morse, bringing his usual gruff gravitas to the guest spot) makes it clear that no such thing will happen. If Hirst loses control of the situation, she better run because he’ll be hunting her down. This is a man who doesn’t like loose ends.

The murder of “van Gogh” leaves everyone in a tricky position. The team now has nothing substantial on Hirst, and their panic is only compounded by the fact that Hirst knows they’re on to her. The Director herself needs to find a way to clean up the mess and pin Stuart’s murder on someone else. Then there’s Reade, the one caught in the middle. Hirst still trusts him, so he has to play a long game, telling her that he believes his team is compromised, a lie that will keep him close to her.

Things really start to pick up when Hirst puts her plan in motion. She tells Rich to break into a laptop that the FBI just confiscated from “a hitman,” and when he does he finds evidence pointing to Patterson as Stuart’s killer. Knowing that isn’t true, he takes it straight to the team. With Hirst tracking the system, the planted evidence will be out there in no time. Rich does everything he can to give the team a head start on getting Patterson out of the building, sending a virus out to the surveillance system. Patterson uses that time to get to a safe spot, a Faraday Cage within the building, but with the entire FBI now looking for her the team doesn’t have much time to prove her innocence.

While the rest of the team tries to figure out a way to link Hirst to Stuart’s murder, Rich attempts to help Patterson escape. It turns out that he has his own escape routes planned out just in case the FBI ever decides to turn their back on him and toss him back in jail. So, he sends Patterson into the vents for a quick escape. Rich is forever the lovable criminal hacker, and it’s been good to see him getting substantial screen time this season.

Rich’s plan, which involves dressing Patterson in a life-like old man mask that he says he uses when he needs to make a quick getaway, initially works, and Zapata gets Patterson back to Weller and Jane’s apartment. It’s not long though before Hirst and some agents search the Faraday Cage and find Rich’s fingerprints on the entrance to the vents. Hirst arrests him, and questions him along with Reade, who’s still playing his part. Rich buys as much time as possible by being ridiculous, concocting stories about how he and Patterson have been sleeping together for months now, doing it in the vents and every other room in the FBI headquarters.

Rich has to reconsider where his loyalties lie though when Hirst offers him a deal: In exchange for Patterson, he not only gets complete freedom, but also the location of his true love, Boston. Hirst hands him the deal. Reade watches him, completely unsure if Rich will betray the team. Rich signs the deal with two words: “Suck it.” Hey, the lovable criminal hacker hasn’t always been the classiest guy.

With Rich arrested and no way to hack into Hirst’s phone, which is the team’s last hope for obtaining concrete evidence, Weller and Jane have to go the old-fashioned route and simply steal it from her office. Patterson calls in a bomb threat, essentially giving herself up, in order to cause a lockdown, which allows Weller and Jane to break into Hirst’s office. They learn that she’s installed an electromagnetic doorframe, which means if they walk out with the phone all potential evidence will be erased. So, Weller throws the phone through the vents—the inner-workings of the FBI’s ventilation system gets a lot of play in this episode—and gives himself up as a distraction so that Jane can snag the phone. Getting into it won’t be so easy though.