Blindspot: Eight Slim Grins

As a blatantly jaded TV viewer (and reviewer), I can sometimes force myself into existential knots when I watch something. I’m working on that. Case in point: I really like Blindspot so far, but I’m not sure where they’re going with the main relationship, and I have to question why my first instinct was to call bullshit on what feels like a very early reveal. Let’s break it down, shall we?

R.I.P. Ruggedly Handsome Man. I kind of hoped we’d have Whitworth around for a while, but that’s a negative. After he and a clad-only-in-her-underwear (WHY, SHOW?) Jane throw down and she tells him she knows him — and he says that’s impossible, and P.S. don’t trust the Feebs — someone shoots and kills him from outside the apartment. That unleashes holy hell at the office as Mayfair is livid that her security detail screwed up, and Weller is, shall we say, more upset about that than he should be.

Across town, a jewelry heist that ends with a store manager dead and one of the gunmen hospitalized takes an interesting turn when the gunman has the exact same SEAL tattoo as Jane. That would be a neat and tidy arc except that the guy’s squad comes after him in the hospital, which leads to another dead end for Jane because he dies after they move him around the hospital trying to prevent him from being taken out of it at gunpoint.

Related to one of the Qs I had last week, Reade gets his panties in a supreme bunch about how inclusive Weller is of Jane when she’s technically a witness and a case. When she proves useful, again, they take a vote and decide by episode’s end to deputize (?) her and give her a gun.

Weller jumps a gun of a different kind when he decides to tell her who he thinks she is before they get confirmation at the very end of the hour from Patterson’s DNA test that, yes, she is Taylor.  It’s all lovely and heartfelt, and a weight off Weller, who has mourned a girl he knew when he was ten. And Jane is relieved to know who she might have been, even though that identity was likely surrendered against her will years ago.

And here’s where my problem comes up — I immediately thought the reveal of her identity was 1) way too early and 2) probably not true and 3) I just need to watch the damn show and not overthink it and 4) I really do rationally know this but still and 5) See 3).

I also kind of have a problem with the way it’s playing out on screen because Weller’s behaving like he had lost and grieved the love of his life for 25 years and has found her again, which I’d buy if he (and she) had been older when she disappeared, but given that he was ten, that feels off. At ten, she’d have been more like a sibling, right? I don’t know if that disconnect is in scripting or performance or direction or all in my head because I like Stapleton and Alexander’s chemistry.

But … then we have Weller losing his shit about the break-in and later on, he hands her her ass for leaving her watch post in the SUV to go after a suspect, where she gets her ass handed to her by the suspect. Fun fact: these Feebs run around Manhattan in a Lexus. Bye-bye Suburbans.  It all feels like more than a reunion of childhood friends/neighbors.

I was glad to see Jane address out loud all the way she’s been violated, when they were so hyper-concerned about the break-in and she rightly pointed out that it really wasn’t as bad as having her memory erased and her entire body forcibly tattooed.  Point to Jane.

Mayfair has a hush-hush meeting about Jane that susses out that one of her tattoos points to something very few people in the world know about,  and it’s suggested to her that maybe Jane should be killed, but she puts the kibosh on that. Patterson uncovers the case file related to Mayfair, not realizing what she’s found, but Mayfair brushes it off as something she’ll get to later.

Tomorrow night they end up at the CDC, where we’ve all seen threat-of-death-by-something-in-a-lab heartfelt conversations so I full expect that to happen here. Here’s a sneak peek of “Bone May Rot.” Blindspot airs Monday night at 10/9c on NBC in the U.S. and 9 pm e/p on CTV in Canada.

 

Photo courtesy of JoJo Whilden/NBC and Video courtesy of NBC.

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