What’s this? Another doomsday device?
Warning: Full spoilers from the episode follow.
As Blindspot has progressed, my interest in the central mystery has started to wane. Even when the show is directly addressing Jane’s backstory, we never seem to learn anything concrete or significant. This week’s “Split the Law” gave us a few more glimpses of young Jane (or possibly Taylor Shaw) being taken away by a mysterious man and put into a warehouse full of other children. But these flashbacks were not as intriguing as the tattoo mystery at hand, and even that is beginning to lose its novelty.
Take tonight’s procedural case, which was mostly centered around a dirty bomb threat and started out with one of the most boring hostage negotiations I’ve ever seen — run by a bunch of alleged ex-MWA employees robbed of their pensions (but not really). Things picked up a little bit when the team realized the bad guys weren’t who they said they are and took them down. That said, the formal introduction of Carter was surprisingly anticlimactic, and exposition-heavy to boot.
The eventual discovery that Dodi and his men were selling cesium-137 on the black market was also pretty dull, as the group shot back and forth trying to figure out their enemies’ next move — all while staying put at HQ and doing little actual investigating.
Really, the only good part about this episode was the big cemetery shootout, which at least offered a unique location. However, I did think this week’s climax felt a lot like last week’s in that they both involved exposure/air-born hazards. Nevertheless, the gun fights and combat were cool, and the return of Carter and his men made for a fun, tense standoff between the CIA and the FBI. I also thought it was interesting how Mayfair did the right thing by not turning Jane in to Carter. At least she seemed to have some loyalty to Jane, or at least she realized what a valuable asset she is to the FBI.
Again, though, the character development this week was lacking. For a second there, during the opening sequence, I thought we were actually going to see Jane and Weller behave like normal people — eat dinner, converse, enjoy each other’s company, etc. — but that was immediately cut short by another one of Jane’s episodes. She and Weller also shared some incredibly cheesy moments later in the episode, like them feeling each other’s heartbeats and Jane calling Weller his “starting point,” whatever that means.
“Split the Law” also brought Weller’s dad back into Weller’s life for all of 30 seconds before Weller stormed off. So… that’s something, I guess. And then there was Zapata’s secret meeting with Carter, which… you know, whatever.
This week’s Blindspot wasn’t bad, per se, but it did continue last week’s trend of letting the case-of-the-week story edge out any potential character development. While there were little nuggets of intrigue like Weller’s dad showing up at the end and Zapata double-dealing with Carter, they were too brief and too mystifying to make an impact on the episode as a whole. Right now, Blindspot’s greatest weakness is its two main characters, who have still yet to give us a reason to care about them.
