BLINDSPOT

NBC fall schedule includes a Big Mystery show with a dangerous premise.

Blindspot is billed as a vast international plot explodes when a beautiful Jane Doe, completely covered in mysterious, intricate tattoos, is discovered naked in Times Square with no memory of who she is or how she got there. The FBI quickly realize that each mark on her body is a crime to solve, leading them closer to the truth about her identity and the mysteries to be revealed.

Now, one would think that this is a unique and intriguing premise to a television series. A lead actress who does not know about her past must unravel the clues while dangerous people are chasing her. It sounds a little like Orphan Black.

But it really sounds more like East of Eden, a Japanese anime series. In East of Eden, ten missiles strike Japan, but cause no casualties. This apparent terrorist act is referred to as "Careless Monday" and is eventually forgotten by the populace. The series begins three months later when a young student named Saki visits the White House in Washington DC as part of her graduation trip. When she gets into trouble, a mysterious young Japanese man appears completely naked except for a gun and a cell phone, and rescues her. The man has lost his memory, but learns that he has a bunch of fake passports at his apartment; he chooses the Japanese one which names him Akira. While he and Saki return to Japan, they learn that a new missile has hit.

Akira discovers that his phone carries 8.2 billion yen  in digital money, and that he is part of a game, where twelve individuals are given 10 billion yen to "save" Japan in some way.

Whether Blindspot is going to run the course of mystery-terrorism drama to weird amnesia game show is unknown. But here is why a show creator needs to have a detailed, fixed story line to drop a huge mystery as the beginning point to a series: it has to be believable and have answers be the story engine to move the plot to a satisfactory conclusion.

In LOST, the big premise, the mysterious island, was the hook to get viewers into the show, but despite what was promised in Season One, the creators did not have a set story fleshed out to the conclusion. That is why a shotgun approach to adding new mysteries and twists and turns to tangential science fiction issues to fill each weekly hour did not hit a home run the fans expected from LOST.