Getting Blindsided by a Shark

So OK, this piece, being a Friday one of lighter scale, is neither about getting blindsided nor about a real shark, and it's not about any "The Blind Side" characters either, or Sandra Bullock or Michael Oher.

We recall the phrase "jump the shark" in regard to a television show that has gone on too long, and has pushed its plots and abused its premise to where it needs to go away.  It derives, of course, from a notorious episode of "Happy Days" when Fonzie somehow jumped over a shark for some reason (I have not seen it, nor do I care to), convincing the producers that it was time to end its run, a bit after the audience had already done that.

In some cases, a show jumps the proverbial shark in a few years, while others go even ten years without losing their appeal, especially if the writing staff stays intact and fresh.  In one case, the topic of this short piece, it took far less than a year.

You may have watched the TV drama "Blindspot", which debuted in 2016, and is now in its second season on one of the major networks (I tape most everything I watch, so I mostly don't notice or care what station they're on or what network delivers them).

"Blindspot" has a pretty odd premise to start with.  A young lady is found naked on the streets of New York in the pilot, covered completely in tattoos with all manner of symbolism that is not intuitively obvious to the casual observer.  One of them explicitly references the name of an agent with the FBI, so she is turned over to the agency, where it is also confirmed that she has no memory of anything at all, of course.

It does turn out that, although she can't recall why or how, she speaks a few dozen languages fluently, and has splendid martial-arts skills and facility with firearms.  Who knew?

Naturally, she quickly becomes some kind of consultant to the FBI New York office, which is apparently just staffed by heroic, get-shot-only-in-the-hand types.  The FBI office has a hotshot female tech whiz, who starts assessing the images of all the tattoos as if they are, as you would assume, all manner of message to the FBI.

Now, you might think that someone with that kind of skill would never be allowed outside the facility, let alone on actual armed, tactical investigative missions and arrest, but you would be wrong.  This is, after all, TV.  She goes out armed with the team a whole lot.

So it started to hit me that this show might have jumped the shark within the first four episodes of its debut season.  I was starting to have trouble following the plots, because we were discovering two disparate developments.

First, it was starting to come out that there was this shadowy organization that the tattooed lady (I keep wanting to call her "Lydia" for just that reason, though they called her "Jane Doe") had belonged to before being dumped on the street.  They seemed to be intent on overthrowing the U.S. government, but we couldn't quite tell why.

However, that plot line seemed to be running independently of the week-to-week tattoo plots.

You see, the tattoos were made up of ... well, I struggle to describe it right, but they seemed each to be a key leading to a criminal activity that was going to happen.  There was often no connection whatsoever to any of the previous criminal activities; sometime it was a drug issue, sometimes it was a plot to blow up a city, sometimes it was an assassination.  They never seemed connected, except for the fact that their plot was encoded in a tattoo somehow.

The shark ... ah, the shark.  It took just a few weeks before I started asking my best girl, with whom I was watching the show weekly, the same questions.  "OK", I asked, "the girl was dumped on a street with all these tattoos that led to criminal plots to be pulled off on a certain day.  But every week, the wonder-girl tech whiz solves a tattoo, then the FBI team takes Jane and goes out and prevents it literally at the last minute, even though there is no logic to how the tech whiz happens to solve a tattoo on the very day that particular plot is supposed to happen."

The missus would tell me that I shouldn't worry about that stuff, and I would set it aside.  Then the next week, Wonder-Girl Tech Whiz would solve yet another tattoo clue, and the FBI team would go out and, sure enough, that very day the shipment of nerve gas was supposed to arrive, or the assassination plot was supposed to take place.

So think with me.  The people who put the tattoos on her knew about all those unrelated criminal plots, even though they were not connected.  They didn't do anything themselves to stop them, but instead of, you know, sending a letter to the FBI, they shoot Jane full of memory-erasing drugs, tattoo obscure clues to all of those plots on her body, and dump her in front of the FBI.

What did they exactly want?  Did they want the FBI to solve the crimes?  If so, why did they make it so hard to decipher the clues?  If they didn't want them solved, why did they bother doing any of that stuff?  If they wanted the FBI to discover the clues very slowly, like maybe one a week on Wednesday nights, then how, pray tell, did they make it possible for the clues to just happen to be deciphered on the very day the crime was to take place?  After all, tech whiz lady had no particular sequence in which they were to be solved.

And I'll bet the FBI wishes it had some of that amazing tattoo-deciphering software that tech whiz lady uses, but I suppose I digress just a bit.  At any rate, you can probably imagine that even the biggest crime-story drama fan would start getting a bit curious about the way this show was evolving in its first month or so.

We continued to watch it for the whole first season, even though my best girl got tired of my saying "How could he possibly have known that?"  But one episode into this current season, this past September, after the writers had married the FBI team lead off with Jane, and they had ended up in the Himalayas somewhere (don't ask, I can't answer it), we both agreed that we were never going to be able to understand it, and Blindspot was deleted from our recording list.

For some reason, I have never gone online to try to see if people generally react to the show the same way that we did, with the same questions.  I've never discussed the show with anyone else, so I don't know if there actually are answers to all that, or if most people just let it go ... or have intentionally not thought about any of that.

Either way, the show was a really early shark-jumper, pretty much by the time we couldn't figure out all the coincidences that we had to ignore in order to follow it.  We shall see if it survives to a third season; I've no idea even what other logically-flawed notions they tried to get us to accept in its second.

Enjoy the weekend!

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton