Wednesday's episode of Blindspot, titled “If Beth,” took a rather liberal bent with an environmental message laced throughout the hour.
The NBC drama began with a conversation between Jane (Jaimie Alexander) and her brother Roman (Luke Mitchell) at a lake where he attempts to justify the tactics of the terrorist group Sandstorm that he's trying to bring her back into. He explains to her to how a plant supposedly leaked chemicals for years causing many inhabitants around the lake to suffer various ailments, while elected officials did nothing to stop it.
Jane: What is this place? Why'd you bring me here?
Roman: 40 years ago you had to make a pretty decent living to afford a place on this lake. But then people started getting sick. Cancer, sterility, birth defects. Turns out a chemical plant up river had been leaking for years. They'd known about it the whole time, of course, but it was cheaper to up their campaign contributions than to repair the damage. So the people elected to protect us looked the other way as... thousands of families were destroyed.
Jane: I don't—
Roman: Lake Aurora should mean something. But betrayals like these are so common now, they don't even make the news. I brought you here because I need you to get angry again. I know our methods might seem barbaric, but this-- this is what we're fighting against. We're not attacking this country. We're defending it.
Jane: What, exactly, is Shepherd planning?
Roman: You're gonna make people very nervous with questions like that. We should get back.
Attacking corporations with claims of environmental sins is not a new topic by any means to the mainstream media.
Jane later has a meeting with her bosses Kurt (Sullivan Stapleton) and Nas (Archie Panjabi), explaining the truth behind the pollution at the lake. Nas refers to Roman’s intent on showing Jane the lake as "propaganda." Jane snaps back, blaming the government. What else is new…
Kurt: I don't buy it.
Nas: Buy what? Roman's motives seem pretty clear to me.
Kurt: What, he hauls Jane halfway to Canada because he wants her to get angry?
Nas: Yeah, why not? Visual propaganda is an extremely powerful tool.
Kurt: If he wants to show her a polluted lake, there's some a lot closer to Manhattan.
Nas: From Sandstorm's point of view, Jane's been brainwashed by her exposure to the FBI.
Jane: You guys know I'm standing in this room with you right now, right? I looked up what happened there. Roman was telling the truth. A poison lake that tore apart hundreds of families, while the government watched and did nothing, is not "visual propaganda." It's an outrage.
This episode is the typical environmentalist boilerplate: Evil, greedy corporations are anti-clean water, kill people for profit, and keep corrupt politicians in their back pockets to cover it all up. And somehow, this justifies Sandstorm's terrorism. After all, climate change is more threatening than terrorism.
