A Jane Doe, wearing only a treasure map of tattoos, crawls out of a duffle bag in Times Square and hopes to regain her memories while joining the FBI on the quest for a terrorist. This seemingly outlandish concept sends the viewer on an entertaining thrill ride that ends up being one of the best pilots I’ve ever seen. Here is a recap and review of the Blindspot pilot.
Recap:
Tourists bustle through Times Square like every evening until an NYPD Officer spots an unattended bag. After questioning approximately 0.1% of the tourists about who owns the bag, he reads the tag: “Call the FBI.” No one but a Bomb Squad Tech moves through an eerily vacant Times Square. Before he inspects the bag, a tattooed Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) finds her way out, shivering, squinting, and confused. Cut to the complete opposite of NYC: rural Kentucky. Agent Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) and Co. capture a crazy dude with multiple hostages. Weller’s celebration is cut short when a helicopter whisks him away to explain why his name is on Jane’s back.
Quick rundown of what they know about Jane: nothing. No fingerprint hits. No facial match. No connection to Weller. No memories remaining from before she was dosed with a drug causing permanent amnesia, but external stimuli might trigger something. And all her tattoos are new. Frustrated by a fruitless polygraph, Jane demands to speak to someone in charge. Hi, Weller. Nothing about him feels familiar, including his beard. Now alone in her safe house, Jane takes a moment to examine her ink. She breaks down crying on the floor, and all our hearts broke with hers.
Examining a wall of Jane’s tattoos, Director Mayfair (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Agent Patterson (Ashley Johnson) notice one is not like the others. A plain black square on her upper arm contrasts with the others’ detail. Could be that the perp covered a pre-existing tattoo. They’ll look into it. Jane meets Dr. Borden (Ukweli Roach), resident scientist, psychiatrist, and Mr. Brightside, and discovers she prefers coffee over the grass trimmings labeled as tea. Baby steps. She joins the rest of the team and, without hesitating, reads a tattoo written in a complex Chinese dialect. An apartment owned by Chao Zheng and a date – today’s!
Jane lays down the law so Weller takes her along, but it only get her so far; she’s confined to the car. Not long after the FBI storms the apartment, they need Jane to translate. The resident she speaks with isn’t much help, so Jane’s sent into the hallway. She’s not there long either, as she overhears domestic abuse and darts to the rescue. Meanwhile, analysis on the oddball tattoo comes back … a covered up Navy Seal symbol, and Jane’s fight with the abuser seems to prove that she was special ops.
Weller, with Agents Zapata (Audrey Esparza) and Reade (Rob Brown), discover that Chao built a bomb. They follow Chao onto the subway, but Chao escapes and leaves a bomb to keep them busy. Channeling some football moves, Weller darts down the subway tunnel, bomb in hand, tosses it, and walks away from the explosion like a series of swear words I can’t say here. Reading Chao’s emails, Jane discovered his mom was killed in a Chinese prison camp after the U.S. ignored his pleas to free her. He’s going to blow up the Statue of Liberty.
On Ellis Island, Chao decommissions Jane with a few shots to her bulletproof vest and arm, but you can’t keep her down for long. She comes to Weller’s aid, just as Chao has a knife to his throat. Despite doubting herself, she takes the shot, and Chao goes down, which triggers a memory. Our first glimpse of flashback Jane, lacking tattoos and sporting lengthy hair. She runs an outdoor shooting course under the guidance of a Ruggedly Handsome Man.
Once all is said and done, Director Mayfair pours over a heavily redacted file with a case number found on Jane’s body. It implicates her in a case involving murder and embezzlement. Hugging it out, Weller notices a scar on Jane’s neck that disturbs him. Ruggedly Handsome Man visits Chao in the hospital. Everything went as planned. Well, almost everything. Chao was supposed to die for his sister’s life, and now he does. Cue another flashback, though this time not a memory. Ruggedly Handsome Man prepares to inject Jane with the amnesia drug, explaining the consequences. She responds, “I know. But it’s my only choice.”
Review:
Watching a pilot is kind of like going on a first date. Everyone’s nervous. There’s an awkward deluge of exposition. Sometimes you feel like leaving before the evening is over, and sometimes you hope that spark turns into a commitment. I typically don’t like pilots. Blindspot is an exception.
Half of creating a pilot is being able to fashion a story that can last a few seasons, minimum. The plethora of tattoos and questions surrounding Jane Doe’s past certainly make that possible. The other, and more difficult, half is creating magic. There needs to be that spark that excites the audience. There needs to be a desire to tune in next week for more of the story. The pacing, production value, and lead actress (backed by a solid cast) all work together to ensure that the “naked amnesiac” premise is not just a gimmick. As I recall, the only other two pilots that truly excited me for week two were Sleepy Hollow and Castle (which inconveniently has the same timeslot), so Blindspot earned its way into an exclusive club. Seriously, is it Monday yet?!
Because the topics of violence against women and female exploitation keep popping up from grumbling viewers, here’s my quick soap box response as a female viewer, but everyone’s entitled to their own opinions. No, the Kentucky scumbag was not necessary to the plot (as far as we’re aware), and he’s not portrayed in a positive light, so there shouldn’t be a problem. Sure, he could have been a meth cooker, a bank robber, or a mob boss instead, but how much more satisfying is it to watch the FBI take down someone like him? The Super abusing his wife was the most shrewd and revealing situation that creator Martin Gero could have used. Jane, a woman with absolutely no understanding of the laws or of socially acceptable behavior, knows in her gut that this man is doing something wrong, and if that’s not a profound comment about morality, then I don’t know what is. Moving on. Yes, her body is exploited, and Jane, like many, makes it clear how disturbed she is by this, but she is never sexually objectified, and that is what matters. All of her scenes were more modest than a vast majority of Emmy dresses this past weekend.
What’s most impressive about the series is that even though Jane Doe has been stripped of her clothes, her memory, and her identity, she is still one of the most multifaceted women on television in just one episode. She is vulnerable because of her loss. She is strong mentally as she pushes through the pain and confusion and physically because she’s a skilled fighter and expert marksman. She is courageous, fearful, demanding, resigned. She is human. Alexander gracefully moves between the different facets of Jane as smoothly as Jane flips from concerned bystander to resident protector. She grounds the series in a reality that makes the story all the more intriguing.
As soon as Jane Doe arrives at the FBI, Blindspot is non-stop progression. The nature of the series creates a lot of important information that the audience needs to hear without getting bored. The show handled it exceptionally. The sneaky, simple, and quick intercutting during the FBI’s initial search for answers about Jane’s identity makes the sequence feel less expositional than it actually is. As the Chao Zheng case developed, even the moments of “downtime” were on the go, namely Weller checking in on Jane’s wellbeing while en route to stop Chao. The people were moving. The camera was moving. Nothing was stable. And nothing felt safe. This tactic, as effective as it was for exposition, also helped to mask one of the pilot’s very few flaws.
With good reason, so much time and energy was spent on scenes setting up the premise and Jane’s predicament, but as a natural consequence, the case suffered. Visually, the scenes spent investigating Chao Zheng were on par with the others, but story wise, they were lacking. That’s not to say they weren’t good, because they were, they were just less engaging. Less unique. The FBI barely questioned someone, did a smidgen of computer digging, tailed the suspect for all of 30 seconds, and voila, they took him down. Okay, they did save subway riders from a bomb along the way, which was pretty cool. The path to solving the case lacked an equal weight to Chao’s plan and motivation. With nothing more to go on, this case looks pretty arbitrary. I guess we’ll see.
One of the most poignant moments of the pilot was Dr. Borden giving Jane hope of finding herself by moving forward and making new choices to define who she is. As much as this series is about identity, it’s also about hope – about the hope of a future not defined by your past. Whether or not Jane was a willing participant in the amnesia plan, it doesn’t matter what her intensions were before now because she’s proven that her intensions now are honorable … until the writers turn her present self against the FBI, which seems inevitable for at least an episode or two. A beautiful message, nonetheless. It looks like Mayfair could use a second chance in light of her redacted file, along with Kurt Weller and whatever he’s hiding from his past. He’s a TV character; he’s hiding something.
On the one hand, a conspiracy-based show invites the audience to formulate their own theories and engage on a level beyond mindless viewing. On the other hand, it means that a small detail this episode could be important in a later episode. On a third alien hand, it likely leads to viewers (re: me) obsessing over things that carry no significance. The teaser scene in Kentucky, for example. Simply a cool way to introduce Agent Weller? Was he working a case that will return later in the season? Or was it a clue about his past? His accent sounded slightly southern, but that might have been a consequence of Stapleton trying to cover up his Australian roots.
Only once, about two-thirds of the way through the episode, did Jane’s “what happened to me?” plea brink on irritating, but more so, repetitiveness. Understandably, she wants answers, but they’ve already established that no one else has a clue what’s going on, so that moment turned into a missed opportunity for Jane to reflect upon her future attachment to the FBI or to learn more about Weller.
My only other criticism of the Blindspot pilot is the lack of character development for the FBI team. Although Agent Zapata had two brief lines delivered with style, it’s difficult to describe her, Reade, Patterson, Director Mayfair, even Weller beyond the fact that they’re FBI. But there’s a whole first season ahead of us to lessen this problem.
Odds and Ends:
– Someone please help me understand why Jaimie Alexander is not listed first in the opening credits. I’ve tried – there is no way to spin this premise to make Kurt Weller the main character, and you do not list your main character second.
– Has anyone thought to ask Jane Doe for a signature to see if that part of her muscle memory is still in tact? Or perhaps the agents should refer to her by a different name every time they encounter her to see if she instinctively responds to one.
– Pepper grinders are the new frying pans.
– Jane’s combat-ready facial expressions alone would send me running away.
– Am I the only one who sees the hexagons on Jane’s wrist and thinks of Aquaman?
– Dr. Borden: Are you familiar with the PKM Zeta inhibitor commonly known as ZIP?
Mayfair: Doctor, you and I have very different ideas of what “commonly” means.
– Dr. Borden: We’re defined by our choices.
– Weller: You guys smell that. Rotten egg.
Reade: Yeah, along with mold, rot, and a couple mystery smells I’m trying hard not to identify.
