Kyle’s Review

By focusing on a secondary character and hashing out some of last week’s issues, “Evil Handmade Instrument” started off like a filler episode, even though it was Blindspot’s fall finale, and then everything got turned upside down in the episode’s finale fifteen minutes. (Some spoilers are ahead; you’ve been warned.) In fact, the change was so drastic I did a double take when Jane got kidnapped. I had another one when the corrupt NSA big wig gets shot. And that’s before Jane finds out she’s the one who ordered her own mind wipe.

The above events would’ve been a lot for a full forty minutes but all this happened in the final fifteen minutes. To say “Evil Handmade Instrument” was uneven is an understatement because the prior twenty-five minutes or so dragged. Don’t get me wrong. I like the Patterson character but her backstory felt forced and I can see it as a means of approximating Jane’s past with Patterson’s, even though the two characters couldn’t be any more different. Then, you add the week’s villains, sleeper spies, and their tough luck backstories and you were forced to draw comparisons between Jane and the sleeper spies. These obvious plot devices are where “Evil Handmade Instrument” fell short. I could see the devices Blindspot were using and I wanted them to make like Monty Python and get on with it. Fortunately, they did in the final fifteen minutes.

I had the benefit of Hulu, so I could rewind. I could only imagine how lost someone would’ve been watching “Evil Handmade Instrument” in real time. Tons of live tweeters echoed “What!” at three or four instances, and those moments make Blindspot’s three month hiatus a break of beautiful speculation.