'Blindspot' Boss on Season 2 Reset: We're Hitting 'the Ground Running'

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NBC


Blindspot
is heading in a new-ish direction.

NBC’s breakout drama kicks off its sophomore season this week with a brand new mystery, new time slot, kickass new cast members and most importantly, questions answered -- a lot of them, including the true identity of Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander).


Blindspot
began with a simple premise: a mysterious tattooed woman without an identity appears in the middle of New York City, each tattoo a clue to an unsolved crime on the FBI watch list. Twenty-three episodes later, the show’s tangled web has become that much more complex.

EXCLUSIVE: Check Out the New Clue-Filled 'Blindspot' Season 2 Poster!

The one-hour drama was met with immediate success when it debuted in September 2015 -- its first episode was watched by nearly 17 million viewers in live-plus-7 ratings -- and its season-long mystery, “Who Is Jane Doe?,” provided a clear-cut direction. But with the world and characters now well-established (and a new 8 p.m. time period), Blindspot creator Martin Gero is approaching season two with added urgency.

“Season two doesn’t feel like episode 24, it feels like episode one of the new season,” Gero told ET in a recent sit-down. “When we’re talking about making adjustments to tone or adding new characters, we’re not talking about transformation, we’re talking about augmentation. What can we do to make the show that we all really like, better?”

One key difference will be Jane’s dynamic with FBI Agent Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton), with whom she’s had a stormy relationship. At the start of the new season, they’re on completely different ends of the spectrum, especially following the Taylor Shaw fallout.

“It definitely resets their dynamic,” Gero hinted. “Their dynamic is vastly different than it was from the first season. What they’re able to do and how they’re able to interact with each other feels completely new.”

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That’s not to say things are going to go back to the status quo -- far from it, in fact.

“Even though they’re both angry at each other at the beginning of season two, you can’t help but feel this electricity between them still,” Gero said of Jane and Weller’s connection. “It’s going to take a while. We are going to organically try to get to a place -- I don’t know if they’ll ever be where they were, but there are a couple of really beautiful scenes between them in the season premiere that really shows their connection still, even though they still have this anger and they both feel betrayed.”

“They have a connection that neither of them can deny and it’s both a strength and a weakness. Watching them navigate that is really beautiful,” he added. “Certainly, we’re leaning into that this year, and what’s fun is that they don’t have secrets from each other anymore. They know everything about each other. The cat’s out of the bag!”

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New faces joining the team include Archie Panjabi, who plays the head of a secret arm of the NSA; Luke Mitchell, who plays the enigmatic Roman, mentioned in the finale as one of Jane’s contacts; and Michelle Hurd, who plays an operative from her past. “We had an embarrassment of riches with Archie, who is this amazing seasoned vet -- truly one of the greatest on-set demeanors I’ve ever seen,” Gero said. “Michelle Hurd, I just can’t say enough.”

EXCLUSIVE: Jane Thinks About Removing Her Tattoos While Under Duress in Cut 'Blindspot' Scene

In Mitchell’s case, Gero admitted he had been eyeing the actor for a while, “years” in fact. It wasn’t until his character on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was killed off that things really started to get rolling.

“When they killed him off [Agents of] S.H.I.E.L.D., Ashley [Johnson], who plays Patterson, texted me and was like, ‘Luke Mitchell is available! He should play Roman!’ And I was like, ‘Oh man, that’d be crazy.’ He came in, read, and blew us out of the water,” Gero said. “What Jaimie was so freaked out about [over Luke] was, ‘We kind of move the same, we kind of look the same.’ They feel like a reunited team, so they really hit the ground running.”

That’s exactly what Gero is hoping viewers, new and old, will say about the new season.

“What’s going to blow you away is in the first two episodes,” Gero promised. “We answer almost all of the huge questions that season one had . The show reinvents what the new mystery is and I think it’s just as engaging as the ones we had last year. For our loyal viewers, it’ll feel like this has all paid off watching up to this point.”

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And yes, you will learn what Jane’s real name and identity is by the end of the premiere, and who she may actually have been working for this entire time. Spoiler alert: It’s a doozy.

“[It] complicates it more once you find out who she is,” Gero teased. “It allows us to tee up the theme for the second season, which I don’t want to [talk about] until the first episode’s aired.”


Blindspot
premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC, before debuting in its regular timeslot on Sept. 21 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.