‘Blindspot’ Boss Promises ‘Emotional Payoffs’ & Teases Finale Conversations

Blindspot Season 5 Episode 2 What's Next Recap
Spoiler Alert
Barbara Nitke/Warner Brothers/NBC

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 5, Episode 2 of Blindspot, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”]

Patterson (Ashley Johnson) has a first name!

Blindspot reveals that detail in the second episode of the final season: William, as revealed by her father. “You got your last name from your mother, and your first name from me,” he says. Patterson gets a brief family reunion while the team stays on the run but needs a way to contact Weitz (Aaron Abrams).

And speaking of Weitz, he and the rest of the mini-resistance at the FBI is in all sorts of trouble when it comes to Madeline (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and her mercenaries. They corner him in the elevator in the final scene.

The episode also reveals a death that only happened because it’s the final season. “Certainly it allowed us to be a little more reckless with our guest stars. For example, in Episode 2, we find out that Shohid Akhtar is dead,” creator Martin Gero told TV Insider. “That’s a character, if we were doing seven more seasons, we would never kill because that’s such a fun character. But now we know, listen, we use him once a year, we used him already, so it makes sense that we can be a little more bold in how these stories are resolving for these characters.”

Blindspot Season 5 Weitz

(Barbara Nitke/Warner Brothers/NBC)

“Because the show is ending,” he continued. “After 11 episodes, they’ll all be gone in a way, so what makes the best storytelling for us as we go towards these final 11 episodes.”

Here, Gero teases what’s next as the final season continues.

How worried should we be about Weitz in the elevator with Ivy and her men?

Martin Gero: I’d be worried. He’s in trouble. He’s going to be under Madeline’s thumb for a lot of this season, and she also shares your sentiment of not trusting him really and realizing that he could be useful until he’s not. When he’s not useful, he’ll be dead. And he understands that. So he’s gotta walk that fine line of not doing something he’s uncomfortable with or feels is too morally wrong but also needing to save his own skin.

How would you describe the status of the resistance inside the FBI at this point? There’s Weitz’s position, Brianna was caught, Afreen is on Madeline’s radar…

Yeah, it’s not looking great. [Laughs] There aren’t a lot of them, and the ones that they have are incredibly hamstrung. I don’t think the team can rely on the resistance to save the day. They’re going to have to do it themselves.

Patterson with her father — and that moment with her first name — was so sweet.

Yes!

Blindspot Season 5 Returning Guest Stars

(Barbara Nitke/Warner Brothers/NBC)

How much did she need that with the team on the run? Will the others get moments with loved ones like that?

Yeah, this year we’re trying to bring as many guest stars back as we possibly could. We really wanted this to be a fond farewell to the show and all the people that we love on the show — not only our main characters but the small universe of characters we created over the 100 episodes — so yeah, we’re trying to have a lot of those emotional payoffs and revisiting characters and having a final moment with them.

The team thought they were going to have a win, only for Madeline to seemingly rip that out from under them. Do they have to let the phone part of their plan go?

Yeah, the phone part is dead. They can’t trust that data.

So what’s their next goal?

Well, they’re pretty f**ked. [Laughs] That was their plan. So now they’ve gotta regroup and think again. The fun part for us this season was to dangle something then take it away, dangle something then take it away, and then have them fully realize how they can take Madeline down hopefully. It’s a lot of fun.

Jane brings up possibly never being FBI again. Are we going to see the team figuring out the future they want professionally even if this ends as well as it can?

Yes, that’s something they talk about a lot in the very final episode.

Blindspot Season 5 Tattoo Messages

(Barbara Nitke/Warner Brothers/NBC)

Will there continue to be more messages like the bird for the team?

Yes, there is some sort of secret group out there that is at least now we think trying to send beacons using the tattoos to try to communicate to the team secretly. It was a way for us to keep the tattoos alive in this final season. They’ve been so important to the storytelling, so it’s a really unique and fun way for us to do it. But also we don’t know who these people are and can we trust them is the other part of it. They helped with Rich, but what do they want out of this? Trying to figure out who this group of superfriends is — if it is a group or if it’s one person — is a lot of the fun coming up.

Blindspot, Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC