Blindspot Review: Check Your Ed (Season 4 Episode 9)
The midseason premiere of Blindspot finally answers one of my burning questions and pulls from the show’s foundation to create an intriguing internal storyline. Blindspot Season 4 Episode 10 “Check Your Ed,” might be the best of the season so far as we finally get Jane back.
First, a huge thanks for finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of how ZIP works, mainly creating a wall between Jane and Remi. I’ve been saying for a long time that an entirely different person was created the second Jane was dosed with ZIP, and that is exactly what was confirmed at the top of this episode.
“Check Your Ed” is remarkably well done outside of that too. Episodes that take place primarily inside of a character’s mind can be tricky. How do you make it feel fresh and exciting? Putting Jane against Remi does that and the solution feels a bit like the best of both worlds.
Bookending the episode with brief appearances by “real world” Zapata and Reade is a good choice. The war raging between Remi and Jane is big enough to carry the entire episode, and there are four seasons of mythology and half-remembered memories about Remi and Roman and the team.
As much as I want to know what Zapata is up to, it can wait.
The internal scenes as Jane comes out of the bag and slowly remembers the team are heartfelt and touching and harken back to the original moments and episodes where they occurred. The coffee, one of the first choices that Jane had to make, was a nice homage to how far she’s come.
As Jane remembers each of them some of the most memorable scenes from early in the series run, she gets stronger and builds a support that helps her get the strength to fight Remi. It’s moving and shows what a family Team Weller has become as they gently guide her to the next step.
But while the team is comfortable for her, she has other memories to face. The fact that Reade, Patterson, Zapata, and Rich can’t follow her feels indicative of exactly how ZIP works. She can’t mix her memories of being Jane while confronting people from Remi’s past.
The fact that Jane has to confront these fears alone feels so intimate and isolating compared to when the team is introduced back in the ephemera-covered lab.
The scene between Roman and Jane is particularly interesting. The game of mancala in one of the interrogation rooms is a great idiosyncratic choice that starts to lead us to the ultimate resolution: Jane and Remi’s memories coexisting.
It’s fitting that this would start to come about with Roman, with a game where the objective is to gather all the marbles on one side of the board. Jane winning means she gets all the memories, or all the marbles. At the same time, it turns Shepherd’s echo of “another win for Remi” into a win for Jane.
If Jane makes peace with Remi she’ll be able to access and pull from her memories as well. Breaking the wall that divides them.
This scene is also about the third time we’ve said goodbye to Roman. Luke Mitchell is a force every time he comes on screen as Roman. This goodbye feels final, but with Jane and Remi’s memories coexisting it also feels like this opens the door to flashbacks. flashbacks into their childhood.
The scenes with Shepherd in Jane’s head are equally terrifying. Jane and Shepherd’s relationship is not the same as Remi and Shepherd’s relationship and this scene does a good job of illustrating that.
The final confrontation between Remi, Jane, and Shepherd further serves to drive the point home, especially when Alice Krueger is involved. Realizing that both Remi and Jane originated from the same person and that Shepherd was really nothing more than the impetus for who Jane is today is the kind of progress the show seemed to be building towards.
The thing is, that Jane never really made peace with her past, because how can you make peace with a past you can’t remember.
This time, it’s not just confronting a woman who raised her turned her into a weapon, she’s owning her choices and acknowledging where she came from. It’s not about forgetting Remi, it’s about realizing that who she was then doesn’t need to be who she is now.
When Jane stands in front of Shepherd and proudly says that she likes herself, it’s a moment of strength that this character has earned.
The final scene between Jane and Shepherd after she wakes up also feels like the end of the era. I’ve said before that I Shepherd is a formidable adversary and I really hate to say goodbye to her. One of Shepherd’s final lines after Jane shoots her perfectly sums up Jane’s strange behavior and encapsulates that moment:
SHEPHERD: I’m get a lot of mixed signals from you lately.
While this episode is so fulfilling to watch, it also feels like “Check Your Ed” could be a finale. It’s clear that Martin Gero and the Blindspot Writers have more story to tell and this is just the next step to Jane’s story. There are lots of memories to unpack there, and just because Remi is gone doesn’t mean that Jane won’t have trouble confronting them.
Looking back though, the show was about Jane’s loss of identity, and now that she feels like a whole person, it feels like we might be losing the main thread. Yet, just because Jane feels like a whole person now, doesn’t mean she’s not going to still struggle with who she is.
Stray Thoughts:
- I think the best entrance in this episode came from Zapata when she shot Jane like she did in Blindspot Season 2 Episode 1. It was a great way to call out the character and a very fitting introduction to how she’s probably viewed by the team right now.
- This episode really reminded me of Blindspot Season 3 Episode 14, “Everlasting,” in which Patterson was caught in a bomb explosion.
- So, the Book of Secrets is coming back right? Because when I sit and think about what needs to be resolved and the preview for next week’s episode: I most want to know what’s in the book.
- Bathing the FBI in blue and red light created some very freaky, Matrix-y type vibes to the entire space. It’s kind of cool and at the same time so unnerving.
What did you think of this episode of Blindspot? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Blindspot airs Fridays at 8/7c on NBC.
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Lauren Busser
Lauren Busser is an Associate Editor at Tell-Tale TV. She is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in Bitch Media, Popshot Quarterly, Brain Mill Press Voices, and The Hartford Courant.