Blindspot Review: Careless Whisper (Season 4 Episode 11)
Sometimes an episode makes you step back and say, “Well, that was different.” Blindspot Season 4 Episode 12, “Careless Whisper,” is not so much about the characters we know and love, but fictional versions of them.
The episode opens with the death of author Winston Pear who has made a career out of writing about fictional detectives solving real crimes. His latest book, the one that got him killed uses Jane Doe as his central character to work out a theory about a serial killer.
Blindspot is playing with alternative storytelling forms this season, and “Careless Whisper,” gives the writers and cast a lot of room to play around with the show’s form while still using the same sets and props.
This isn’t a new trope. There have been characters writing about versions of other people in their lives before. Some instances that come to mind are Timothy McGee in NCIS and Temperance Brennan in Bones.
The difference here is how the story is woven into the case resulting in an episode that is both entertaining to watch and satisfying as a viewer.
The audience gets to see some of the overly dramatic scenes that Winston Pear wrote, as the team comes to the conclusion that they have a mole. It’s an example of a seamless blending of storylines into a cohesive whole that won’t work if you separate one from the other.
The off-brand versions of our favorite characters are a little silly, but also very interesting to watch. It’s kind of like getting a friend’s impression of you. You don’t always agree with it, but sometimes there’s a nugget of hard truth that you have to accept. It’s even more interesting when you see Kurt and Rich acting like fanboys while Patterson rolls her eyes at her overly sexualized fictional self.
The biggest issue with this episode is the way it gets to the conclusion. The reveal of the killer is done in such a way that feels slightly lazy with Rich and Jane driving out to Long Island to retrieve typewriter tape.
It’s easy to buy that maybe Rich Dotcom would be entrusted with this task, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone would let Jane go along with her ZIP poisoning worsening. She’s experiencing migraines throughout the entire episode, and although she continues to push through, everyone knows how the ZIP poisoning is going to progress.
Add to that the fact that the killer has a complete roster of everyone involved with the manuscript (and remember, Jane, is the central character in the book) it definitely feels a little too convenient. The onset of her blindness also feels awkwardly timed to add another degree of danger for the characters.
Yet the performances in this episode are really terrific. The chance for the cast to play different versions of themselves is a rare treat and it’s not one that any member of the cast missing the chance to indulge in. This is especially true of Jane and Patterson.
Patterson talks about the author’s body of work being sexist towards women and the way he writes them. It’s easy to see it in the scenes the Blindspot writers choose to bring to life from the manuscript. Both Ashley Johnson and Jaimie Alexander play up that aspect of their characters with Johnson strutting
One stand out scene is the way Peterson walks in dressed in six-inch heels and throws her coat at another agent, to which Patterson reacts “Who does science in six-inch heels?” (She’s not wrong.)
The real case, to say the one Jane and Team Weller are actually solving, also confronts the author’s bias in his work. He was working on a theory about the Long Island Ripper and assumed it would be a man because female serial killers are so rare.
Subverting the expectations and giving us final twist where the real killer wasn’t just a woman but someone closely connected to the male suspect is a smart move.
How the killer is characterized is also interesting. When Gerri was the killer he mutilated animals, but when it came to his stepsister she was making art. It’s a very underhanded way to commentate on this inherent societal bias, and interestingly timed given the amount of Ted Bundy news.
The last thing about this episode that is worth noting is the observations that the author makes regarding Zapata. When Reade asks why Zapata wasn’t in the book, Briana says that Zapata was “too combustible” and that he wanted to give the cops in his story a happy ended, but couldn’t find one for Zapata or anyone around her.
This doesn’t sound promising for Zapata’s storyline this season and has put Zapata’s fate on my personal watchlist for the rest of the year.
What did you think of this episode of Blindspot? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Blindspot airs Fridays at 8/7c on NBC.
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Lauren Busser
Lauren Busser is an Associate Editor at Tell-Tale TV. She is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in Bitch Media, Popshot Quarterly, Brain Mill Press Voices, and The Hartford Courant.