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Did ‘Blindspot’ really just kill off its arguably biggest star?
Whether it’s coincidence or an emerging move on the show’s part to lighten him up, teamleader Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) has been paired off with a less-than-obvious choice in partner again in Feb. 22’s “Draw O Caesar, Erase a Coward.”
While nothing can ever compare with a visit from Rich Dotcom (Ennis Esmer), particularly the latest, we’re entirely thrilled by this week’s matchup: Kurt Weller and Roman (Luke Mitchell).
RELATED: Hurrah! Mr. Rich Dotcom returns to ‘Blindspot’ — just when we needed him most
Perhaps these two aren’t the most successful pairing within the story’s parameters — seeing as how they get themselves caught and in need of rescue — but the matchup does bring Weller a lot closer to understanding, if not quite yet jumping on, the Team Roman bandwagon. It’s necessary for the story, of course, as Weller is the ultimate authority on the show: Eventually, without giving him some form of sympathy for it, Jane’s (Jaimie Alexander) ambivalent compassion for her brother would simply be overruled.
Of course, a fledgling bromance certainly ratchets up tension while waiting for the other shoe to drop — Weller’s still none the wiser about Roman’s involvement in the murder of Taylor Shaw’s mother. Their adventures in the field together also made nice use of the ongoing suspense over Roman’s loose cannon reputation: At one point, it appears that Roman is flipping out when he gets in the face of a cloying medi-spa doctor… But it merely proves to be a ploy to grab an all-access security pass from the fellow. Weller has to cut his planned “you nearly jeopardized this whole mission” lecture short to concede that it was a freakin’ awesome move. We never doubted it, but now even Weller seems to agree: Roman is a shoo-in for this season’s MVP.
At first, Weller seems reluctant to grant Roman another shore leave, after last time — but Patterson’s (Ashley Johnson) latest tattoo-decryption yields three separate clues, and with time running out, Weller realizes they’ll need to buddy system the hell out of this week’s case… And that possibly, there’s no time like the present to see if Roman’s memory might be triggered by spending time in different circumstances, and with someone new — in other words, not big sister Jane. Not much happens in our ongoing Roman-decryption project — although we do discover that, in addition to mad fieldwork skills, Roman can also habla espanol. Muy interesante!
RELATED: If Weller’s another Shepherd pawn, ‘Blindspot’s’ Roman/Jane debate just got a lot more interesting
The case itself doesn’t turn much up, by way of Sandstorm leads — instead, it takes a kitchen-sink approach to villainous tropes: There’s a Mexican cartel, a dark web courier, money laundering, human trafficking and involuntary organ harvesting. (Just one space shy of winning bad guy bingo.) But what it does accomplish is seeing various duos venturing outside of their BFF comfort zone: Beyond the glory of Weller and Roman taking the good cop/loose cannon cop thing to a fun place, we get two more off-the-beaten-path pairings: Jane (Jaimie Alexander) and Zapata (Audrey Esparza), and Patterson and Reade (Rob Brown).
Jane and the ever-vigilant Zapata manage to thaw relations by at least a few degrees, lamenting how difficult dating can be in their line of work — you thought Tinder was scary enough on its own! — and it’s admittedly endearing to see some simple girl talk between two of the biggest bad-asses around… Not to mention, as above, the fact that Zapata’s one-note automatic-pushback on everything Jane is also due a shift of some kind, to keep the season’s momentum.
Meanwhile, the Patterson-Reade pairing mainly gives Patterson the opportunity to notice and call out Edgar’s drug problem… Which itself is still an issue. Edgar being so out of it that he nearly gets himself killed after cornering a suspect feels rather unfair to this character. Certainly his backstory provides ample motivation for him to want to check out, but it could and should be handled with much more nuance than this ongoing, cursory afterschool-special treatment.
While the twists and turns of his previous child-abuse plot were fascinating, and knit well into the overall arc of the show at that time, Reade’s PTSD is scanty reasoning to spend so much time on what continues to feel like a less-interesting version of Zapata’s gambling addiction stuff. While that story, too, fed into the larger plot in heartbreaking ways, that’s all it was: A surface look at personal issues given just enough gravity to move the pieces around on the board, and no more. Esparza and Brown are good actors who deserve their due in this ensemble, and setting them up as moral fall-guys — in order to rig blindsides that affects more “important” characters and narrative real estate — is getting pretty old.
RELATED: We love Roman on ‘Blindspot’ — but seriously, when’s he going to snap?
The only character who sees any movement on the Sandstorm front is Nas (Archie Panjabi), who leaves us — possibly forever — with a ton of questions. It would be a decidedly foolish shame if she were to go out this way, especially considering we’ve already been through this with her once before — but are we really buying that Weller would be okay with putting the day’s most important and dangerous lead solely in Nas’ hands — especially if it meant sending her into the dead of night, completely alone, with no covert backup? Not even a wire?
Hard to believe the team, much less Weller who cares for her so much, could be this lax about something so significant — which suggests there’s a last-minute hail-mary coming. Unless the show’s planning on deciding midstream that Sandstorm really isn’t a huge deal — a la “Revenge’s” hilarious Season 3 reveal that its powerful (and largely fan-scorned) “Initiative” was invented by Conrad Greyson (Henry Czerny) as a goof — in which case… We’d be pretty impressed.
But something tells us these pieces will all fit together — in classic “Blindspot” style — when the season returns for its second half.
“Blindspot” airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on NBC. New episodes begin Mar. 22.