Blindspot 1.1: Good to See - Or, Coronet Blue meets The Illustrated Man

Good to see Blindspot begin on NBC last night - in fact, it was excellent.  Coronet Blue, the 1960s CBS summer replacement series fragment starring Frank Converse about a guy who washes up in New York with no memory and saying the words "coronet blue" was always one of my favorites, as is Ray Bradbury's 1951 anthology The Illustrated Man, about a vagrant whose tattoos each tell a magical, science fictional story.

Blindspot has elements of both, as well as Sullivan Stapleton (from Strike Back), an Australian with a great American accent, who plays Kurt, the lead FBI guy, whose name is tattooed on Jane Doe's the amnesiac's back.  She's played by Jaimie Alexander, who does well in her role, too.   The debut was fast-moving, and revealed enough important information to give hope for a compelling series.

Not enough information, being kept too much in the dark, is a pitfall with these kinds of shows, which Blindspot avoided.   We now know that Jane was/is some kind of Navy Seal - even though the Seals don't officially - yet - take women, though as FBI leader Bethany aptly remarks, maybe that's just their public stance.  And there's an evil guy with a beard afoot - who's apparently behind Jane's condition - though who knows for sure if he's entirely evil (and here Blindspot connects a little with NBC's other strange crime hit that begins with a B, Blacklist).

Back to The Illustrated Man, it looks as if given episodes of Blindspot might well be devoted to clues contained in the tattoos, which will be deciphered in series as the series progresses.  That's a good way of keep the stories fresh, as the underlying plot unfolds.

So I'm up for watching Blindspot.  I gotta say, though, that I liked Blacklist much better at the beginning than as the series went on, and I'm hoping Blindspot can avoid this kind of running out of tension and steam.

 
no tattoos, but pretty strange

Black Sails 1.4: The Masts of Wall Street

If you think of most of the action dramas on cable television these days - whether taking place in the present, like Banshee and Strike Back, or in the past like Da Vinci's Demons and Vikings - the story moves along pretty quickly, sometimes at blinding speed (in the case of Strike Back), with every episode whipping the narrative forward around sharp and dangerous curves.   In contrast, Black Sails is dangerous, all right, but it's story almost seems to stand still at times.   And that's a change of pace for television that I very much like.

In episode 1.4, much of the action centers around a ship in the sand, and the pirates' attempt to make it more suitable to their needs.   The ship stands there, like a majestic skeleton to a nearly forgotten past, except in Black Sails it's very much happening.   The ship, of course, as would be any massive sailing ship, is an emblem and enabling technology to the life and pursuits of the pirates.   In a world before planes, the sailing ship was the only way to move across great distances.   But in Black Sails, this distance is as much political and economic as physical.

Richard Guthrie provides us with some important back story, including the way Flint and Miranda got together and its social context, but also his take and opposition to Flint's vision of a utopian pirate island untrodden by the monarchies of the day.  We already knew that Flint and Miranda are cultured people, and that money is the lubricant of this whole on-the-margin society, but in 1.4 we get a taste of the economic sophistication of many of the major players.   The pirate leaders and their colleagues, male and female, are in many ways more akin to The Wolf of Wall Street than any show now or ever on television, and that makes Black Sails worthy of note as well.  Or, looked at in other way, we could say that the pirates represent the 99% in the Occupy Wall Street of that day.   The ship in the sand stands at the fulcrum of those two forces.

Any way you look at it, Black Sails is as much a feast for the intellect as it is for the eyes, and a pleasure to see on television.

See also Black Sails: Literate and Raunchy Piracy ... Black Sails 1.3: John Milton and Marcus Aurelius

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