Persecute Envoys and Authentic Flirt were both solid episodes of Blindspot, but there were aspects of both that prevented either from being really good instalments. In both cases, the romantic element that’s developing was very much a factor, but there were other issues with the pair too.
Most notably frustrating in Persecute Envoys was the mix of the ways we learned about Daylight. The show had backed itself into a corner whereby Mayfair had to tell Weller, and that was fine. Equally, the show deciding that it would use flashbacks to show us the impact it had on Mayfair, Carter and (Deputy White House Political Director) Sophia was again, totally fine. The issue I had was that they did both, and as a result, neither felt like they had much of an impact.
Having watched Person of Interest and knowing that in the real world, the kind of lack of privacy that Daylight caused is real, means that the reveal as to what Daylight was perhaps less shocking to me than it would have been for Weller, but it was a pretty cool reveal, and seeing the effect that it had and why Carter’s so gung-ho about trying to find out what Jane knows was useful knowledge. That said, it just didn’t seem to quite resonate with me. I think things would have worked better had they found a way whereby they could show us what Daylight was through the flashbacks and then show us the impact it had. Granted, it saved them some screentime and they had obviously built it up this way given Weller’s inquiries, but it felt somewhat like a wasted opportunity.
The case-of- the-week was interesting enough to watch. I liked the fact that they used something that hit close to home for Zapata, and we got some good character development for her. Aside from the fact that she was in debt from gambling and that she agreed to feed Carter intel on Jane in exchange for the money she needed to pay off the debt, we’ve got very little about her. So learning more about her past as a cop was a nice way to accompany a solid procedural plot.
What frustrated me most about these two episodes - and it was more prominent in the latter of the two - was the romance plot between Jane and Weller that is clearly building. Generally, I’m not a big fan of romance plots anyway, but this just seems dull. It’s just far too obvious for them to do something here, and I just don’t feel the connection. I get that Weller and Jane do have some sort of connection if she is in fact Taylor Shaw - a plot which the show hasn’t revisited for a while - but I’m not seeing it.
It’s particularly vexing because Authentic Flirt took an interesting approach to the case-of-the-week by taking Jane and Weller undercover, and it was pretty fun to see. Episodes that follow your standard “crime/tattoo, a couple of twists concerning it, criminal is caught” formula aren’t very fun to watch at all. There’s enough variation that I’m not entirely bored by them, but without some good character development to go with it, I just don’t care that much.
So episodes like Authentic Flirt, like Sent on Tour before it, are fun to see. I like when the characters are thrown into really unknown situations like having to go undercover as a pair of married assassins at a party held by a man named Rich Dotcom who just happens to be dangerous. It keeps things varied and exciting, and this case was. Blindspot likes doing these high profile, high intensity cases like the idea that the names of everyone on the WITSEC list had been compromised. They’re as outlandish as the idea that a woman would have no memory and thousands of tattoos that lead to different crimes, and so they work.
But when the show tries to introduce a romance between the two leads, it takes away from that quite substantially. We were treated to two different awkward scenes between Weller and his ex-girlfriend Allison, who happened to be one of the U.S. Marshals at FBI HQ as the team learned of the hack, before a series of somewhat awkward scenes between him and Jane at the party. It was an unnecessary part of the episode and really made me enjoy the undercover scenes less.
The other big thing that irked me about Authentic Flirt was the montage at the end. It felt far too much like they were trying to rush through plot in four minutes because they couldn’t fit it in elsewhere, which is fine, but the fact that it was pretty important plot left me somewhat bemused. In four minutes they killed off Guerrero, who really didn’t end up doing much in the show, and Patterson’s ex-boyfriend David, who had earlier spotted someone at the library looking at the book that he and Patterson attempted to decode.
There was no real impact from the deaths - I’m assuming that we’ll get a lot of fallout in this week’s midseason finale - and that really bothered me, especially considering there was no real drama about it. Set to a bizarre tempo version of Pixies’ Where Is My Mind (seriously, that song is everywhere: thrice used in this season of The Leftovers and once earlier in the year in Mr. Robot), everything felt very calm, when really, things were going to hell before our eyes, and it just didn’t fit. Hopefully they can really build on these developments in Monday’s episode.
There’s a lot that’s been building over the nine episodes we’ve had so far, and though I wasn’t especially fond of these past two episodes, things definitely look like they’re coming to some sort of a head. With the midseason finale this week, I’m intrigued to find out what chaos is going to ensue.
What did you think of these episodes? What do you think is going to happen next? Let me know in the comments below!
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