Blindspot - 'Woe Has Joined'

Ensemble cast shot! I like you already, Blindspot.
From left to right: Dr Pharmababble, Agent Technobabble, Special Agent Manly Intuition, Mystery Woman, Agent Cyberbabble, Agent Badinage and Assistant Director Boss-Lady.*

An unattended bag addressed to the FBI leads to the evacuation of Time Square for fear it contains a bomb. In fact, it contains a drugged, amnesiac woman, covered in tattoos, most prominently the name of big damn hero FBI Special Agent Kurt Weller. When the woman turns out to read Chinese** one of the tattoos is identified as an address and the day's date, leading to a hunt for a domestic terrorist and a quest to decrypt the remaining tattoos before their warnings expire.

With its oblique clues, mysterious mastermind and central female lead, Blindspot is a bit like The Blacklist, only without anyone as interesting as Raymond Reddington or as bland as Elizabeth Keen. Kurt Weller is a gruff, surly man of action, his enemy a Unibomber type with an unknown agenda. Jane is both the mechanism by which the game is to be played out and a wild card, because whatever her involvement in the plot before her memory was erased, whether she now sides with the Beard of Fear of Agent Manly Intuition is likely to prove critical.

Let's be honest; a series could go either way from this opening.

The pilot episode establishes the basics well and the action is decent. Weller is okay, if a bit generic, but Alexander does excellent fragile strength, and if she looks a little too slender to have been a SEAL, the former Asgardian is no slouch around a fight scene. I do have a slight problem with the set up in that for the plot to work the Beard needs to have plotted out and organised a series of criminal enterprises so monumental in their scale and precise in their timing that it boggles the mind. It smacks of the thing which killed Bones for me, which was that they eventually had to go up against an adversary so insanely skilled and lucky that he was obviously a freaking wizard. It's not like this is Person of Interest and the tattoos are a secret government surveillance system; they're all in place. What if someone gets the flu? What if one team gets food poisoning? What if some consultant slaps an extra door on a vault one day?

Whether and how these questions are approached will likely determine whether this remains one to watch.

* Dr Borden (Ukweli Roach), Patterson (Ashley Johnson), SA Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton), 'Jane' (Jaime Alexander), Agent Zapata (Audrey Esparza)), Agent Reade (Rob Brown), and AD Bethany Mayfair (Marianne Jean-Baptiste)
** Points off for just calling it 'Chinese'