'Blindspot': A Fast-Paced Premiere, But Let's Back Up a Little
Spoiler Alert: This post contains storyline and character spoilers for the premiere of Blindspot.
The cat is out of the bag. Or the kick-ass lady is, at least. No doubt about it, the premiere of NBC’s Blindspot certainly lived up to the hype. The action-packed thriller produced by Martin Gero and Greg Berlanti didn’t waste any time diving right into the story of an amnesiac who is tied to an FBI agent by the hundreds of tattoos covering her body. When Jaimie Alexander made her debut as Jane Doe, a shivering, naked woman climbing out of a duffel bag, Times Square literally stood still.
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What We Liked:
The Cast: In addition to Alexander (who has the perfect look, body, and athleticism for the role of Jane), hunky Aussie actor Sullivan Stapleton plays FBI agent Kurt Weller. But the impressive supporting cast also includes Academy Award nominee Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies, Without a Trace) as FBI director Bethany Mayfair, Rob Brown (Finding Forrester, Treme) as Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) team member Ramirez, Audrey Esparza (Black Box) as CIRG agent Tasha Zapata, Ashley Johnson (Chrissy Seaver from Growing Pains is all grown up!) as tech expert Patterson, and British actor Ukweli Roach (The Royals) as Dr. Borden. It doesn’t get any better than this.
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The Fast Pace: The show’s plot flies by at a dizzying speed. Gero promised us the story would be “extraordinarily dense,” telling Yahoo TV in an interview last month: “Especially in these early episodes, we’re giving you huge pieces of the story.” And he wasn’t kidding. If you blinked, you missed something. We find out early on that Jane’s system is loaded with a drug that causes permanent amnesia, and for some reason she has the name of FBI agent Kurt Weller (Stapleton) tattooed on her back. By the middle of the episode, we know she can speak fluent Chinese and is an expert martial artist and gunslinger. And one more thing: In her past, now-erased life she was a Navy SEAL. By the end of the premiere, two of her tattoos have already been deciphered, prompting Jane and several special agents to stop the Statue of Liberty from being blown up by Chao (Yung-I Chang), a Chinese dissident who believes the U.S. government hasn’t done enough to protect the repressed citizens of China.
What Didn’t Work: We know Jane and Weller can kick ass, but a couple of scenes were a little far-fetched. Weller and Ramirez tail Chao as he unhooks a subway car with passengers in it after putting a bomb on it, and while Weller single-handedly diffuses the bomb and saves the day, no one is waiting to nab the bad guy when the moving part of the subway lands at the next stop. And when Weller and two teammates are about to hop aboard a boat to save the Statue of Liberty, Jane begs her way on because they only have “three FBI agents to cover 14 acres.” She convinces Weller that they need her, but really, couldn’t he helicopter in more agents?
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In addition, while the show’s fast pace didn’t leave room for any boring moments, it also left no room to get to know these characters. We have no idea about Weller’s life outside the FBI. Is he married? Does he have kids? We sure hope not, because his chemistry with Jane is already off the hook. But with this fast pace, it’s definitely all business and no pleasure, something we hope changes as the season goes on.
Our Burning Questions: Obviously there’s a lot of story left to unravel — and about 198 more tattoos to go through. But the premiere episode already left us hanging, in a season-finale kind of way. It appears that Jane knew she was going to have her memory permanently erased and took one for the team. But who is the team? And who is the bearded mystery man who seems to be the mastermind behind this human treasure map? These are questions we hope will be answered by the end of the first season, and Gero has already promised we’ll know Jane and Weller’s link by the end of the second episode.
Blindspot airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on NBC.
