So, the band’s pretty much back together. Everyone is back from the hospital, Reade is trying to get back to normalcy after trying to kiss Zapata, Patterson is back in front of her computers trying to solve more tattoo puzzles, and Weller is back to being late for his personal life.
As for Weller’s personal life, baby momma has a new boyfriend, and having Weller at the doctor’s appointments is getting a bit awkward. Also, she wants to move with boyfriend someplace out of state. Ouch.
An older tattoo hit comes up on the radar–a shipping container ID finally hits port, and they find out a terrorist has brought his son to the US in that shipping container. They think there’s a plan for a bomb, until they find out a trace of nitroglycerin in the container wasn’t for a bomb–it was the son’s heart medication. The CIA (or more specifically, the man who tortured Jane from the CIA) has brought the dude in as a deal: they get the son a needed heart transplant, and the father reveals some terrorist plot to kill a lot of people.
Of course, all of that goes immediately sideways.
Aside from the static between CIA Goon and Jane, the son dies on the operating table. The father then wants revenge, and refuses to tell anyone anything about the big plans.
Conveniently, the big plans were actually a contingency–if something happened to his son, he wanted the agent who arranged it all to pay with his daughter.
The team uncovers a weird plot to plant a bomb made from racks of basketballs filled with explosive gases at CIA Jerk’s daughter’s basketball game. Now there’s an idea straight from a cartoon. Exploding basketballs?
At any rate, the team gets there, and once the bomb is found and time is running out, Patterson comes to the virtual rescue. The bomb is cell triggered, and she shuts down the neighboring cell towers so no one explodes.
When they find the terrorist henchman who’s tracked down the CIA man’s daughter, Jane ends an armed standoff by shooting the guy.
Throughout the episode, we’re shown a bit of a dichotomy–cold killer instinct vs. overcoming programming. Nas brings in a psychiatrist earlier in the episode to talk to Roman. He’s freaking out from the captivity, and as a result, the only thing he can remember is the assassin making kiddie camp holding him in isolation because he wouldn’t kill his rabbit.
The psychiatrist pretty much says that due to Roman’s training as a kid, he’s lost any natural empathy, and should be committed for life. Jane isn’t buying it–she had the same training, and her ZIP reboot made her into a completely different person. She wants the same for Roman. So, throughout the episode, we see Jane’s conscience and Roman’s awful memories. Jane thinks he needs to get out of the plexiglass box, or he’ll never remember anything. Nas thinks he needs more therapy, and he’ll remember things without anyone having to do the difficult thing and trust him.
What are they going to do with Roman? As psycho as he’s been until now, you can’t help but feel sorry for the guy.
Meanwhile, Patterson’s been wracking her brain to solve the missing leopard tattoo riddle from last episode when she notices something Roman has been doing with the sugar cubes Jane gave him for his coffee–it looks like he’s playing a game called Mancala. Of course, it cracks the missing leopard puzzle, and they find it connects to a woman in a biker gang. The picture they find of the woman is of her doing some sort of hand off…to Roman.
A lot is coming back to Roman. Now he just needs to remember it, so long as he doesn’t remember who actually ZIPPed him…
Previous Episode: Nor I, Nigel, AKA Leg in Iron
JL Jamieson is a strange book nerd who writes technical documents by day, and book news, reviews, and other assorted opinions for you by night. She is working on her own fiction, and spends time making jewelry to sell at local conventions, as well as stalking the social media accounts of all your favorite writers.