‘Blindspot’ Review: One Revelation After Another
This week on Blindspot, we explored the real estate around Jane Doe’s right elbow, which yielded a tattoo that led to an FBI file-case number of some significance. Three episodes in, Blindspot is staying true to creator Martin Gero’s promise that the show would not hold back on revelations about Jane’s identity, and Monday night’s edition handled the revelation-to-action-scene ratio better than last week’s hour, which had entirely too many explosions and drone attacks for my liking.
This week’s edition began right where last week’s left off, with the handsome bearded guy she remembered from a black-and-white flashback of a training memory. He was advancing on her menacingly in her apartment, but ended up telling Jane she can’t trust “them” before dying awfully quickly, which doesn’t seem like a motive to have been menacing.
The notion Weller had last week that Jane was a childhood friend of his, the long-missing Taylor, has really thrown him for a loop. For a cool government agent guy, he seems easily rattled, a quality that manifested by barking orders at Jane in weirdly halting speech patterns I hadn’t noticed before. I mean ostentatious, Christopher Walken-level speech rhythms, bawling her out for intruding on the interplay he has with his partners but really, we knew, because he was freaked out that this tattooed lady might be his long-lost buddy. You knew he was freaked out because at one point he opened his eyes very wide and stared at her, saying, “I’ve been looking for you my whole life.”
The main action this week revolved around the aftermath of a jewelry store robbery at the start of the hour, with the robbery crew trying to get a wounded member of its gang out of a hospital guarded by Weller and his team as well as the usual retinue of guards and police. It all would have been ludicrously overwrought had these scenes not been so imaginatively choreographed. Any time you get not merely a good scene of Jane fighting fast and brutally in a crowded space but also Weller fighting fast and brutally in a crowded space plus Jane dispatching someone with a very big knife — well, Blindspot is fast becoming TV’s best fight-scene show this side of Cinemax’s Banshee.
This week’s Blindspot tossed out another cryptic clue — a muttered “Orion” from the lips of a dying robbery crew member who recognized Jane from her past. (Information-givers on this show die awfully fast.) And it featured Marianne Jean-Baptiste saying, “Just once I would like to know something for certain about this case!” with very Jean-Baptiste-y exasperation. Also, it looks as though her character Mayfair is involved in some highly classified, back-channel skullduggery code-named “Daylight” that may position her as a villain going forward. Most important, the DNA test results were back from last week: Jane Doe’s matches the long-disappeared Taylor Shaw’s. I guess we have to start calling her Taylor; I hope the FBI hadn’t gotten her name tag and business cards printed up yet.
Blindspot airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on NBC.
