Blindspot recap: 'Balance of Might' 

“Balance of Might” kicks off with a flashback, the first of many peppered throughout this week’s episode. It’s six months ago, and the show places us inside a refugee camp. A man named Saya (

‘s Jim True-Frost) is giving a family good news: their application has been fast-tracked, and they’re on their way to New York City. There’s no mistaking the joy in their voices as they find out they’ll be escaping the camp and the danger that they’ve been living through.

Then, out of nowhere, Roman shows up (he has a way of doing that). He begins causing a lot of confusion, saying that Saya can’t be trusted. He tells the family they’re in danger. Could it be true? What part are they unwittingly playing in Roman’s game? It’s all so mysterious. Roman gives them a card with the name of a journalist on the front and tells them to call her.

Flashforward to the present day and Reade’s girlfriend Meg receives a call. When Reade asks about it, she says she’s been getting call after call from a Sudanese refugee who’s eager for her to tell “their story.” Meg doesn’t seem too interested in the story—she’s wrapped up in a scathing piece about $18 coffee, apparently—but when Reade starts to ask questions he sees a connection to a tattoo case. Specifically, the family was held in Camp Iko in Kenya, and one of Jane’s new tattoos is a reference to that camp.

So, Reade convinces Meg that they both need to go meet the refugees, but when they do they’re put in immediate danger. Despite meeting in a public veranda for coffee, three shooters show up to execute the refugees. Reade sends everyone inside a building and then puts in a call to the team. Patterson does her superhuman research thing and determines that the refugees somehow came to the United States after only six months in the camp, where the vetting process usually takes years. An NGO by the name of One World Alliance approved the move. The problem? All the names listed at the NGO are fake, except for one: John Saya, a private military contractor who’s clearly using the NGO as a front for something nefarious.

With all that information the team heads out to give Reade a hand, though he’s already picked off one of the shooters by the time they get there. They quickly take down another shooter but the third gets away. When Jane shoots the second, yet another flashback kicks in. This time we’re transported to 10 months ago, and we see Jane working an assignment with Clem, the man she called to help her find Avery, back before she believed Avery was killed by Weller. It’s the first in a series of flashbacks that show us how Jane and Clem grew romantically close during her time away, only for her to eventually pull back because of her love for Weller. It’s an insightful enough episodic arc, but it also contributes to the episode’s incredibly jumbled feel. There are way too many flashbacks and location jumps, and it halts much of the episode’s otherwise earned momentum.

The location jumping is a necessity because Roman is halfway across the world. Still, what started out as an intriguing story line—Roman using the FBI as his pawns for some unknown endgame—has quickly grown tiresome. Every time Roman’s on-screen it feels like

is killing time until it can reveal the man’s true intentions. It’s a slow-moving story, and while some people might connect with it, I largely find it to be tedious. This week Roman fakes PTSD, gets chastised by Blake for lying, and then eventually makes up with her by using those puppy dog eyes of his. We don’t learn anything new about Crawford, but at least we get a slight progression in the simmering feud between Roman and Crawford’s right hand man Victor. They have a tense conversation at a hotel bar, joking/not joking about how they’re still considering killing each other, all before Victor hands a shot glass to a colleague and asks him to run Roman’s fingerprints to find out who this “Tom” guy really is.

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