A friend suggested I check out new action show on television called Blindspot.
“You’ll love it!” she gushed. “It has the most gunfights of any show I’ve ever seen!”
Oh, okay. But I thought Westerns weren’t popular anymore?
“It isn’t a Western. It takes place in modern times.”
Alright, I decided to give it a go.
The premise is that a naked woman is discovered in Times Square, suffering from amnesia and covered in tattoos.
The tattoos hold clues to serious crimes and conspiracies, so the FBI race to decipher the tats in order to prevent such things as terrorist attacks and the like.
Okay, fine. Interesting premise. Shows promise, I’d say.
The problem I had right out of the gate is how an extremely small team of three FBI agents are dispatched to investigate clues that are gleaned from the ink, and they let the amnesiac woman tag long!
Hell’s bells, people! Her skin is covered in clues about crimes and conspiracies! Doesn’t it occur to anyone that she most likely is complicit? And, when they discover that she has had extensive weapon and military training, no one seems to think that is a bad thing!
Okay okay. Let me just take a look at Episode One an see what they do with it.
The FBI guys find a line of Chinese script in the tattoos. It is an address of an apartment in New York’s Chinatown, and the FBI team leave the tattooed girl in the hall while they illegally search the private residence for clues. While waiting for the so-called “professionals”, little Miss I-Don’t-Remember wanders off and gets in a nasty hand-to-hand brawl with the wife beating building super and his brother.
She saw the beaten wife, and so jumps on the husband and engages in a claustrophobic fight in the narrow confines of a New York apartment building!
So the FBI guy screwed up. They left their prize source of information alone in public. They won’t make that mistake again, right?
Episode Two saw the FBI mooks go to yet another apartment, this time to interview a suspect. They leave the amnesiac woman at the end of the hall while they pound on a door. The suspect spots the tattooed woman and tries to make a run for it, so she jumps on him and engages in a claustrophobic fight in the narrow confines of a New York apartment building!
Hey, wait minute! I just saw that in the previous episode!
There were other problems with the story. The bad guy is confronted by the FBI hero at a distance of about 50 feet. The FBI guy has a handgun, while the villain is armed with a full auto variant of the M16.
Lots of spray-and-pray from the bad guy, but he never manages to hit Mr. FBI even once. Maybe he should have spent more time practicing at the range.
It is painfully obvious that trouble erupts every time the three FBI agents leave the tattooed girl alone during an investigation. So they should park her at headquarters, or get a few other agents to tag along and keep her company. If they don’t have the manpower, they could ask the local police to provide a few plainclothes cops for babysitting duty. I bet they would jump at the chance for bragging rights alone. (“Hey, guys! I am working with the FBI and hanging out with a hot chick covered in tattoos! Nyah, nyah, nyah!“)
I start Episode Three, and it takes about 15 minutes for the FBI team to leave the tattooed girl alone again! This time it is a strip mall instead of the inside of an apartment building, which probably had the writers patting themselves on the back about how much they were thinking outside the box. The girl waits until all the FBI agents are out of sight, and then walks into the nearest store to find (gasp!) the suspect they are searching for! She chases him out the back door to a narrow alley filled with dumpsters, and then ….
Ah, screw it. I’ve had enough of this shit. Time to turn off the TV and see if there is anything interesting on the blogs.
Dude.
The show is about “relationships” and “fashion”. Think Nikita.
Just seem episode one of ‘Blindspot.’
Hmmm . . . not sure, but I am intrigued. Do have some reservations and they started from the opening sequence.
The Bomb Tech, wouldn’t it have been better to have used a robot (like the old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelbarrow_(robot) ) to check out the suspect bag?
Do Bomb Tech’s carry sidearms?
And his response to Jane Doe seemed, well, okay we’ve all seem movies where character approaches a seeming innocent in need of rescue only to end up with their head turned through 180 degrees, but his response still seemed unnecessarily harsh.
Oh and pause for prurient thought:
“What’s your job?”
“Oh I’m the guy who paints on all those tattoos on Jaimie Alexander.”
“Oh, what’s the pay like?”
“Fifty bucks a week.”
“That’s not much.”
“It’s all I can afford!”
Okay, it’s an old one but I couldn’t resist.
Anyway I enjoyed the episode and am prepared to stay with it for awhile. See if the mystery stays intriguing or becomes annoying. See if those niggles, and I can see where James is coming from over this, start to out weigh the fun.
Hmmm . . . James mentioned Westerns at the start of his post. Now there are a lot of Westerns I like, but sometimes a fun Western isn’t necessarily a realistic one. ‘Blindspot’ might still workout though, for me anyway, but it might be like one of those enjoyable Westerns where everyone wears Buscadero holsters.
For someone who knows as much about guns and their usage as James, I would imagine that a show from Hollywood with “lots of gunfights” would be one big face-palm as he’s constantly spotting idiocy and unreality.
“Hey, you stupid bastard, get your finger off the trigger when you’re just standing around! And stop pointing the gun at your friends! Why did that revolver just fire 8 rounds without reloading? You can’t make me believe that one shot from a peanut gun firing .22 shorts just dropped a 250 pound man!” and so on.
Caught episode two of ‘Blindspot.’
Reference the baddie with the M4(?): the character was military, but he wasn’t infantry or any sort close combat type. So less than stellar accuracy might be expected, especially since he seemed to think that actually using the holotech(?) sight was for wimps. He was also, at one point, shooting at the hero while running away and looking over his shoulder . . .
Anyway I’m still happy to stick with it for awhile longer. See how it develops.