Blindspot - 'Bone May Rot'

"Do I have something on my face?"

When Patterson's boyfriend sneaks a look at the tattoos, he gives her a clue which allows her to crack another puzzle, sending the team to a CDC facility where decon procedures reveal UV tattoos with the vial numbers of several missing disease samples. One of the senior scientists triggers a lockdown and goes missing, even as Patterson links the stolen vials to plague outbreaks in areas that the scientist had visited. The team track and contain a weaponised virus bomb at the New York port, and Weller and Jane subdue the woman's colleague when he tries to turn himself into the new delivery device.

Mayfair's CIA colleague asks to be allowed to question Jane, but is rebuffed. Meanwhile, Jane tries to adjust to being Taylor Shaw, only for Patterson to discover based on tooth enamel analysis that Jane appears to have been born in sub-Saharan Africa. Both tests are conclusive, but one must be wrong.

This week's revelation once more shows the depth of the Tattooist's knowledge, but is at least less absolutely time critical, and the accelerated timeline is a more natural response than episode 2's laughable piece of prognostication. I currently suspect that the tattoos are linked to 'Daylight', and that this will turn out to be Blindspot's equivalent to the Machine in Person of Interest. Sadly, the people in Blindspot are less interesting, and in particular the revelation that Agent Zapata has bad gambling debts was a total non-event because of it.

Blindspot - 'Eight Slim Grins'

The FBI know how to show a girl a good time.

We open with Jane confronted by the bearded mastermind behind this whole thing, who is then shot to death by a mystery sniper, so I guess he's either not the mastermind at all, has a weird plan involving his own death, or is some sort of death cheating wizard. The latter option is supported by the fact that the mastermind appears to have kidnapped Kurt's childhood best friend, framed daddy Weller for murder, raised young Taylor as a ninja then erased her memory and sent her back to Kurt, now an FBI agent, in order to lead him through a complex pattern of crimes of which he has apparently precise, date specific information and/or has assessed the precise pattern in which they can be triggered by the agents themselves.

For the bulk of the episode, the team pursues a bank heist crew, one of whom has a SEAL tattoo matching Jane's. It's pretty by the numbers and yields just one word of a clue: Orion. The team spend much of the episode snarling over the way all their leads peter out, but that actually doesn't make it any less irritating to the viewer. The confirmation of Taylor Shaw's identity is a small thing given how many more questions it raises. There is some business about Jane's place in the team, but that's really just marking time.

The real twist of the week comes when Patterson uncovers a tattoo identifying a heavily redacted FBI case file related to AD Mayfair. Mayfair blanks the connection rather, but later hooks up with an old colleague and warns him that whoever sent Jane knows about 'Daylight', which is something secret enough that his immediate response is pretty much 'and you haven't killed everyone and set fire to the office because...'

Blindspot is definitely a flawed work, but not uninteresting. Jaime Alexander is a bright spot in a slightly underwhelming cast, and the sheer unlikeliness of the premise deserves a full on craziness that the show holds back from.

Blindspot - 'A Stray Howl'

"I shot a nun once. I was out hunting in upstate New York..."

The FBI continues to investigate the tattoos covering Jane's body, although many of them - and Jane herself - are beginning to wonder if they aren't some sort of elaborate trap. Patterson establishes that each tattoo may act as a key to unlock the next in a sequence. Kurt begins to suspect that he knows who Jane is, while Jane retrieves another memory: Of shooting a nun in a church*.

The second episode of Blindspot sees the series confront the second biggest problem with its own concept, that the FBI are prepared to chase after cryptic clues tattooed onto a hot commando chick by someone who is a) a nutter and b) a wizard. This week, the hint leads them to a would-be whistle-blower and tips him over the edge into kidnapping a little girl in order to use an illegal domestic drone programme to assassinate its own staff. Agent Badinage breaks cover as the entertaining sidekick to become the voice of skepticism in the face of a set of clues which seem so arranged as to not just lead to a particular sequence of crimes but to trigger them, although the fact that this requires a level of precise manipulation and prescience akin to sorcery is so far lost even on him.

We end the episode with the Beard of Fear paying a personal visit to Jane, which seems remarkably careless, and Kurt convinced that Jane is actually his former neighbour and friend Taylor, a girl that he believed his father to have kidnapped and murdered years before.

Blindspot is teetering on the edge of believability, and a lot is going to hang on the encounter with the Beard. given the intricacy of his plot, he'll need to convince as some sort of insane genius and/or soothsayer.

* Fortunately, she later realises it was just a dude dressed as a nun.

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'