“So you wipe my memory, you tattoo my entire body and then you send me to the FBI so I can steal a pen?”
- Jane
This was a very meaty episode on several fronts. They are definitely continuing to make things interesting and doling out pieces of the puzzle a little at a time. We pick up right where we left Jane and Oscar on that rooftop. He promises more answers if she does a mission for him. He needs her to swap out Mayfair’s pen. She’s clearly skeptical about why this needs to happen but she takes the pen and considers doing what he asked. Weller approaches her the next day and tells her he didn’t show up for the meet because things are too complicated. I guess it’s nice that he’s letting her off the hook for being the one to not show but I did kind of like where their relationship was going. But I’ll stick with Oscar, too. He is quite handsome after all.
The case for this week involves a soldier named Charlie who has memory loss and kills some soldiers on an army base. The more interesting thing about Charlie is that he was listed as killed overseas in an IED explosion eighteen months ago. Something is clearly afoot here. The team heads to Charlie’s family home and Jane manages to subdue him a little by talking very calmly to him. Interestingly, we get a bunch of military flashback/memories for Jane this week involving her failing at boot camp on purpose. In the end she gets recruited into Orion (a little more on that in a bit).
Charlie’s body is a mess of drugs and things that shouldn’t be in a human being in such high doses. And most of it should make him a vegetable. But he’s walking around and shooting people. And he’s got the same memory wiping drug in his system that Jane did. Obviously his isn’t quite as severe as hers but it’s an interesting tidbit that leads the team to think he might be connected to Jane. She’s a little worried that might be the case, too, given what she knows now about her mind wipe and tattoos. Just after they get Charlie’s mom down there to try and job his memory, the army swoops and takes Charlie away. Jane is very pissed at Mayfair for letting this happen.
It turns out that Charlie isn’t the only one the team needs to be worried about. Patterson found four other names on Jane’s body that belong to presumed dead soldiers. And she finds the link between them all: a shady private military contractor. I just need to take a moment to say that I kind of despise these people (in general not just on the show). They are never depicted as good people and it’s just disgusting the things they do because they think they can get away with it. These particular contractors are no exception. They end up breaking Charlie out of army custody and drag him away. Luckily, the team does a little deducing from the information they have (including Charlie’s description of being kept in Hell) to determine where they might have taken him. Thanks to some knowledge from Zapata (I’m guessing she knew about the church because she probably goes to Gambler’s Anonymous. They find the right facility on the first go. But it’s empty save for the other four soldiers who are dead. Patterson manages to pull some partial video which shows that Charlie was the only one tolerating the drug cocktail. So they know that for the moment he’s still alive. So it’s now a race against time as the team’s doctor points out the scientist conducting the experiments probably wants to find out why Charlie is the exception and that doesn’t bode well. I liked that we got to see people in the field other than our core four.
After exchanging much gunfire with some mercenaries, the team gets Charlie free but he’s been drugged with the memory wipe drug and takes off. Jane gives chase and Weller follows her. She ends up getting into a fight with Charlie and Weller has to put him down to save her life. Jane is also not happy about this because she sees Charlie as an innocent in all of this. But Weller stands by his decision. So she’s got even more motivation to nab that pen from Mayfair and hand it over to Oscar. Whether she’s acting or genuinely pissed about the way things went down with the army, Jane manages to get Mayfair to put down her pen before leaving the office. While Weller has a heart to heart with his dad (newsflash: his dad attempted suicide on the night Taylor went missing) Reade and Weller’s sister are out on a date. I guess that little bombshell hasn’t reached our fine leading man yet. I don’t blame Reade for being anxious about imparting that news. Weller can be a bit intense and kind of scary when he feels overprotective of someone. The more interesting information comes from Jane’s next visit with Oscar. She learns that the bearded man who was shot was with them but Oscar can’t tell her yet who killed him. She wants to know what Orion is but he’s hesitant to tell her. Eventually he relents and says quite cryptically that Orion is where she died. That is one hell of a way to end an episode, let me tell you.
The writers of this show are very smart in how they structure their episodes. And I like that the writers have been giving us information along the way the entire season. Sure some of the answers don’t always make sense (like that baby tooth issue) but at least we have answers. It’s a lot more than some mythology and mystery-based shows do. I also am enjoying the fact that they have moved pretty quickly beyond the tattoo mystery to include other things and open the world up wider.
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