Blindspot recap: 'Deductions' 

“Deduction” begins with a flashback. It’s one year earlier and we see Cade, the former Sandstorm operative who hasn’t made appearance on the show since being granted freedom after helping out the FBI, shopping for diapers in an unspecified country. He’s stressing out about finding the right organic diapers that his partner likes, his lack of luck only exacerbated by the language barrier. His luck only gets worse though. When he asks a store clerk for help, two men approach him from behind, sedate him with a needle in the neck, put a hood over his head, and kidnap him. His FBI-granted freedom, it seems, was short-lived.

Back in the present day, Keaton and Zapata are doing what any good CIA agents do: burning a bag of case evidence. Their ritual is interrupted by a call. A CIA plane that was transporting prisoners has crashed in a river in New York. When they get to the crash site, where divers are looking for survivors and the plane’s black box, Zapata notices the name of the flight company is Valkyrie. She connects that to a mysterious tattoo on Jane’s back that references “Ride of the Valkyries,” and despite Keaton’s objections, decides to loop the FBI in on the case of the mysteriously downed plane.

After Jane and Weller have their dinner, things with Avery turn sour when they try to broach the subject of Avery’s adopted father being a potential murderer. Meanwhile, Reade gets blasted by the U.S. Attorney for not having anything but circumstantial evidence on Crawford, and the team meets up to discuss the downed CIA plane, which is where Cade finally factors in. In the middle of the night he finds his way into Jane and Weller’s apartment and says that he was on the plane that crashed, and that he has valuable information that the FBI could use.

Once they’re at the FBI headquarters, Cade details how he was kidnapped by the CIA and transported to a black site, a betrayal of the deal he’d worked out. Now, he wants a new deal in exchange for giving the team everything he knows about the plane crash. He says there were three prisoners on board, and that they’re planning an attack on a building in New York, though he doesn’t know where.

The mystery goes deeper than just a few random terrorists though. It turns out that the planes the CIA uses for prisoner transport are made by HCI Global, a company that Crawford has a hand in. Still, that doesn’t mean he’s connected to the crime, but it does once again underscore the scope of his influence. Once the team gets the flight manifest and the black box, they confirm what Cade said: that he was on the flight, and that the plane was crashed on purpose. When Cade signs his new deal, he offers up the only other bit of information that he has: a woman approached him in the black site and offered him freedom in exchange for a job. He was never going to go through with the attack on an unspecified CIA building, so he fled into the woods and then to Jane and Weller’s apartment.

Cade also gives them the location of a flophouse where everyone was supposed meet, but by the time the team gets there it’s too late. The fact that there are four parachute packs gives them a clue though, suggesting that the pilot was in on it. There can only be so many CIA agents with that kind of clearance, and the team eventually pulls a photo for Quinn Bonita, who Cade identifies as the woman that approached him about the job. It turns out that her husband, also a CIA agent, was beheaded by terrorists in a video that went viral, and the CIA completely abandoned him, failing to acknowledge his mission. That’s par for the course for the agency, but Quinn’s been plotting her revenge ever since. Now she’s going to hit them where it hurts, attacking their outpost for undercover agents, secretly located at the Bellmore University library, and taking out the man she deems responsible for her husband’s death.