NBC’s Blindspot doesn’t start its second season quite as strikingly as it started its first.
No shame there. It isn’t every year that you see Jaimie Alexander snaking her way out of a canvas bag in Times Square, wearing only tattoos.
In its own way, though, the new season that kicks off Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET is laying down just as promising a dramatic premise.
Alexander’s character, affectionately known as Jane Doe since no one in the first season ever quite figured out who she really was, rejoins the FBI team led by Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton, below, left).
They’re the ones who spent Season One contemplating Jane’s tattoos and the clues they provided to various crimes, targets of crimes and perpetrators of crimes. In the process, Jane and Kurt also developed sort of a, you know, attraction.
But then Jane spent her summer vacation in the company of those old colleagues, and while they didn’t give her great stuff for her memory book, she’s also not sure the FBI has her back, either.
With her return, the FBI seems to have a reasonably clear mission for this season: to stop those former colleagues before they can unleash some of the most lethal terrorism ever.
Things aren’t quite as simple, however, as your basic cat-and-mouse game between good guys and bad guys.
Specifically, Jane and the FBI team aren’t all warm and cuddly. Some of Jane’s experiences last season, then her summer interlude, only reinforced her ambivalence about this life and where she really belongs.
Having someone erase your memory and leave you adrift without an identity, a past, or a story, apparently can do that to you.
So we can likely expect a season with a lot of unspoken double meanings, no big surprise in a world where the law is sometimes regarded as simply a suggestion by both sides.
From the premiere episode, it looks like there will continue to be a prominent role for computer whiz Tasha Zapata (Audrey Esparza). That’s good news because she emerged in the first season as the most interesting of the supporting players.
Equally encouraging, we get a new prominent supporting character: Nas Kamal from the National Security Agency, which has also been trying to monitor and thwart these terror people for quite a while.
Nas is played by Archie Panjabi (left), best known as Kalinda on The Good Wife. While she’s a stand out, she also slides nicely into the ensemble.
As time passes, a show like Blindspot gets a little harder to walk in on, because the relationships and the backstories get complicated. But for those who didn’t check out the first season, it’s still possible to climb on the train now.
If the second season matches the first, it should be a good ride.
[Note: Starting Sept. 21, Blindspot will air Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET. It’s getting an early premiere this week in hopes that America’s Got Talent fans may stick around and check it out.]