“What if he’s right? What if the tattoos are a trap? We don’t know anything about did this to me or why and people are losing their lives.”
- Jane
So this episode picks up the day after the end of the pilot (with a brief voice over by Jane and an in media res sequence). But we’ll get to that when we catch up time wise. The writers waste no time in throwing us into the plot for the week. While Kurt and the team test Jane with combat skills and firearms in the hopes of knocking loose another memory, Patterson (the blond scientist lady) has cataloged all of Jane’s tattoos and basically created the equivalent of a Google alert for Jane’s tattoos. Just as Jane recalls a new memory (shooting a nun in a church), Patterson cracks one of the tattoos. Using the decoded Chinese address, she deciphered (which is an accurate term since she used a particular type of cipher) another tattoo revealing the name Major Arthur Gibson. He’s a former Air Force pilot and things don’t go well when Weller and Jane and company pay him a visit. He refuses to talk to them and then his house blows up. But he’s not inside.
We also slowly get some backstory on Weller as the case unfolds. For one thing, we meet his sister and nephew and learn that there is a memorial for someone named Taylor that he’s not going to because he doesn’t feel comfortable being around people. We later learn that Taylor was a little girl he knew as a child who went missing. That revelation comes out after Weller gets stonewalled by Gibson’s former CO and she gets blown up. It seems Gibson didn’t suffer from PTSD or get washed out of the service. He was turned into a drone pilot and it seems the lives he’s taken are weighing heavily on him. He even kidnaps a little girl (hence Weller’s extra angst) and forces her father to swap out the drive for a UAV so he can kill the CO. The more important part though is that as Weller recounts the story of the last time he saw Taylor, he says he thinks he knows who Jane is and why his name is on her back. He thinks because she has an old scar on her neck that she is Taylor Shaw. I honestly didn’t see that coming. I like it!
Mayfair isn’t all that convinced but she doesn’t have time to debate it because Patterson has just cracked Gibson’s safe. They find a word document with dates and initials and coordinates that link up with the deaths of 5 Middle Eastern nationals on US soil. This goes against what they were told by a 3-star General that the program Gibson was working for was a last-resort drone strike on domestic soil and that it had never been used. Patterson has determined who the second set of initials belong to and so Jane and Weller head out to find him. Jane gets to be all action hero again and beat the crap out of him. Just as the guy admits that Gibson hates him, Jane spots the man from the woods and then they barely escape another drone strike. Plus side, Gibson only has one missile left? Yeah, not really a plus side in all of this. The man is just kind of nuts. But the other drone pilot explains that there were a lot of casualties and Gibson couldn’t handle it. He wanted to blow the whistle but the other guy turned him in. The government washed him out at that point, threatened his family and just generally were assholes about the whole thing. So pretty much exactly how the government operates. Fantastic.
Time is running out as the gang rushes to find Gibson’s last target. The general finally comes clean that he would likely attack the drone program itself which just so happens to be housed in the same building as the FBI. Oh and even better, there are two times each day when ever drone pilot is on premises for shift change. So while Patterson and some other agents work to quietly evacuate people from the building via the basement, Jane and Weller head off to find Gibson. On the way Jane admits she lied to Weller about the memory from that morning and wonders if she’s a terrible person for what she’s done. He points out that her first instinct is to help and protect people so even if she wasn’t a good person before, she’s one now. They find Gibson at a high rise construction site and he opens fire with an automatic rifle on Weller. I’m guessing we are almost caught up to the scene from the opening of the episode. Gibson makes a run for it and ends up shooting the SUV that Jane is in. But she’s not sitting back and taking it. She engages in a high speed chase that ends in both vehicles getting pretty banged up. Seriously each episode is like its own little action movie! She’s okay (and remembered taking a flash drive off the dead nun) and Weller manages to rescue the girl so they have thwarted another attack. Go team!
Even though the team managed to stop the last missile from being deployed, not everyone is on Team Tattoo or convinced they should be following it. But Weller is. And it seems Mayfair is biting at his theory on Jane’s identity. She’s ordered the old case files to the lab for comparison. Weller shares this with his sister and we learn why her going to the memorial is so awkward. Their father was accused of kidnapping and killing Taylor 25 years ago. His sister begs him to see their father before it’s too late (he’s dying) but I have a feeling he’s not going to do it. It seems both Weller and Jane will be keeping secrets from each other a little while longer because he hasn’t shared his theory even when she asks specifically why she was sent to him. And we end with a rather dangerous twist as Jane’s safe house is invaded (possibly by the man from the woods memory) and she’s told not to make a sound.
I definitely enjoyed this episode as much as the pilot. I think that they have an interesting formula to work with and as the story progresses and the characters get fleshed out a little more we can really dive into the mythology. The one complaint I have is that both of the people linked to that tattoos so far haven’t had any real connection to Jane and it seems a little repetitive that they wouldn’t have a link. Hopefully that is addressed and moved on from going forward.
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