During its brief on air tenure, NBC’s Blindspot has already accused the Navy SEALs of churning out professional criminals, painted veterans as ticking time bombs wreaking havoc on their country, and blamed American indifference abroad for terrorism at home. Last night’s episode, “Split the Law,” continued the show’s ignoble trend, this time setting its sights on the CIA.
The episode starts with a high-stakes hostage crisis that quickly goes wrong, with the hostage-takers shooting the hostages in the middle of negotiations. After the FBI storms the building in the wake of the attack, leads Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) and Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) stumble upon a CIA “black site” in the basement, said to be operating illegally within U.S. borders.
WARNING: GRAPHIC
Weller: I'm starting to understand why this place is tattooed on your body.
Jane: What happened here?
Weller: Shotgun, close range. Not much to identify. Uhh! Ah! Jane! Hey!
Carter: In the interest of national security, I'm gonna have to ask you to leave.
Weller: I'm gonna have to ask you to identify yourself. Who are you? What is this place?
Carter: Tom Carter, Deputy Director of the CIA. And this place, this place doesn't exist.
Weller: If we weren't on U.S. Soil, I'd say this place was a CIA black site.
Jane: What is that?
Weller: The CIA have secret prisons all over the world where they do things they're not allowed to do inside the U.S. Detain people, torture them. They're known as black sites.
Carter: Yeah, I'm not familiar with the term.
Weller: But if they were operating one within the U.S., that sort of thing would bring down administrations.
Carter: Well, good thing there aren't any.
The hostage situation is revealed to be a cover for a terrorist group storming the site to rescue one of their own, a bomb maker named Dodi, from the CIA. Dodi is actually a former CIA informant who went rogue after the agency left him for dead. Weller snidely quips, “Turning friends into enemies; seems to be a CIA specialty.”
The distain with which the CIA is talked about makes it clear how the show wants Americans to view the agency, even as they fight very real threats. Not only is the CIA blamed for this latest terror plot (if they’d extracted their asset when he got made, he wouldn’t have turned against the U.S.) and said to be operating illegally, but CIA Deputy Director Carter’s smug, aloof approach to fighting terror by any means necessary is also meant to turn us off to the CIA’s practices. Our hero Heller’s righteous indignation is a signal that we, too, should be aghast at this abuse of terrorists’ civil liberties.
Personally, if a little electrical incentive is what it takes to get a known terrorist to reveal the location of a bomb that threatens to shower America’s most populous city in nuclear waste, I’m okay with that. But the audience is supposed to be appalled that the CIA may have—gasp—tortured a man who was planning to detonate a dirty bomb in the middle of New York City.
Just more false equivalency and liberal propaganda that the CIA, an agency meant to protect us from foreign evils, is evil itself.
