‘Blindspot’ episode 9 reaction: Show boss on early death

Remember the old days, when you could watch a show and feel at least reasonably confident that the majority of your favorite characters were going to make it through alive? Well, that was a long time ago. Now, it is almost more common for a show to have a significant casualty within the first or second season, and that is what NBC’s “Blindspot” did on Monday night courtesy of (spoiler alert) the decision to kill off David. He had gotten it into his head that if he took on the role of master sleuth, he could be able to get his former love Patterson back when her time was not so monopolized.

So what happened instead? We’d describe it mostly as him underestimating precisely the sort of stuff that he had dived into courtesy of Jane Doe. While this death may be fairly hard to swallow as far as losing a character on a new show goes, executive producer Martin Gero had the following to say about it to Entertainment Weekly:

“Well, in a show like this, people have to die. You can’t have mortal jeopardy every week and not have people occasionally fall and perish. It seemed like a really good way to do our first casualty, as it’s somebody that we’re close to, but isn’t a part of the team. What’s great about it is the whole way David gets into it is the fun aspect. Both he and Patterson lost sight that these tattoos are extraordinarily dangerous. It’s not a Sunday crossword. It has some really great emotional repercussions for the rest of the season for the entire team. It was really tough, because I love that character a great deal. Joe Dinicol, who plays him, is obviously a friend, but from the beginning, this was probably going to be our first death.”

In some ways, losing someone like David is firmly within the realm of what many shows do at this point in the run. It’s a little early to lose a huge character, but you do want to at least put that threat out there. Without it, there are less stakes, and Gero is right: A show like this needs them.