YMMV / Blindspot

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: 'Zip' is actually a real drug with similar (though not identical) effects to those depicted. Here's a 2012 article about research into it.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: This seems to be the case and the advertising as well as early shots of the show didn't help. It seems very focused on Jaimie Alexander's considerable charms and her tattoos. (She was Naked on Arrival in the first episode, and the advertising never lets you forget. A later ad does cut from just her arm coming out of the bag to a fully clothed and standing shot of her that shows off the tattoos well enough. You get the feeling someone complained.)
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The bizarre and pointless shot zooming up a blatantly-CGI spiral staircase in the pilot.
• Complete Monster:
  • Season 5: Ivy Sands is an icy, sadistic Dabbur Zhan terrorist leader who stands out as the only main antagonist to lack any sympathetic traits. Forming an alliance with Madeline Burke, Ivy agrees to capture the team in exchange for Madeline providing her with chemical weapons in particular weaponized ZIP, which can cause death in high amounts, and even in low amounts causes complete memory loss and eventual death by mental degradation. Hunting the team throughout Europe, Ivy kidnaps, tortures, and murders multiple people in her relentless pursuit. Breaking her best soldiers out of prison, Ivy attempts to gas bomb ten European capital cities hoping to throw the whole continent into chaos. Capturing Kurt Weller, Ivy brutally tortures him with a specially designed cocktail of drugs and psychotics to break him. Following Madeline's defeat, Ivy carries on, attempting to set off the ZIP Bombs throughout America, using a local bomb maker to drastically increasing their fallout range and murdering the man who gave her information to them. Left with no more men, Ivy personally attempts to set off her remaining bomb in Times Square to kill millions of people.
  • "Rules in Defiance": Maxwell Tate is a rich and powerful man, who for at least seven years ran a forced prostitution ring. He has his agents in immigration select young women who are being deported back to Mexico then has his thugs abduct them. Taking them to a building he owns Tate throws elaborate parties for the rich and powerful where the women are repeatedly raped and abused for the guest's pleasure. When one woman, Paloma Diaz, was killed by a guest, Tate forced her friend Camila to dispose of the body, then had a false case built to frame Paloma's boyfriend Ronnie Vargas for abusing, raping and murdering her, guaranteeing Vargas would be executed. When Vargas tried to prove his innocence, Tate had Vargas's sister's home burned to the ground as a warning, almost killing her and her three children. When Tate discovers Tasha Zapata has infiltrated his organization, to cover up what he has been doing he simply has all the women, including Tasha, rounded into the basement where he kept them, then sets the building on fire, dismissing it as "I can't risk leaving any evidence".
  • "Draw O Caesar, Erase A Coward": Marjory Ellis is an auction house manager, who secretly set up, along with Mark Gelman, and masterminds a Human Trafficking operation. Supported and supplied by the Estevez Cartel, they smuggled dozens of kidnapped Mexican citizens into America. Upon arrival the Mexicans are imprisoned in a warehouse, chained to camp beds. The ones who prove to be matches have their organs harvested for Doctor Katz's Black Market transplants to his rich patients, with Marjory selling the rest to the Ukrainian Mafia. She manipulated Gelman into believing she loved him so he would stay loyal, then abandoned him following his arrest. Learning that the FBI have starting to investigate, Marjory tried to tie up all her loose ends, personally murdering Doctor Katz, then taking her last batch of a dozen victims, plus Kurt Weller and Roman Bridger who she kidnapped, to the Ukrainians for one final sale, before escaping. The worst member of the operation, Marjory possessed no regrets and was driven solely by the pursuit of wealth.
  • "Careless Whisper": Iris Bikelmyer is an auxiliary police officer who, after becoming unsatisfied making models out of dead rats, moonlights as a Serial Killer, dubbed "The New York Ripper". Over several years, she murdered 35 people in Long Island, becoming the deadliest serial killer in the state's history, with her MO ranging from slit wrists and drowning to torture and ritualistic killing. After each death she would carefully pose the bodies, make a strategic cut with a scalpel and set up the crime scene so CSU would find nothing out of place; for years no one connected the deaths. Realizing that true crime author Winston Pear was onto her, Iris broke into his home and bludgeoned him to death with his typewriter. Then from his notebook she tracked down his editor Frankie, slowly killing her while sewing her lips shut. Believing Jane Doe was the last persons he needed to eliminate; Iris kidnapped her planning to torture her to death. Sadistic and arrogant, when called out for crimes Iris claimed that her "subjects" should be honored that she chose to immortalize them.
• Designated Hero: Mayfair. Sure, she was trying to stay on the straight and narrow. However, she was also hiding her part in Operation Daylight, just like Carter, and she was very unwilling to admit to it. Even when her life and her career were on the line, she kept quiet about it. Yet, she blamed Jane before she died for her being framed, when it was really the fault of her ex. Still, her team still act as though she was a purely good person who died unfairly, and it was all Jane's fault.
• Fandom Rivalry: Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe grew increasingly unhappy with the show keeping Jamie Alexander from returning to her role as Sif, especially given her status as one of the few film characters to cross over to the TV shows. This got especially heated when the Thor: Ragnarok crew was forced to drop all their plans for her and simply have her be absent without explanation. (However, it did spare her from the grisly fate of Asgard's defenders in that film, causing some to consider it a blessing in disguise — at this point, she is the only named Asgardian other than Thor or Loki whose return was possible and it happened in Thor: Love and Thunder.)
• Friendly Fandoms: Viewers of Critical Role have a bittersweet love of Blindspot, because Ashley Johnson's obligations to this series have lead to her vanishing from the show for extended periods due to filming conflicts.
• Genius Bonus: In "Ca-Ca-Candidate for Cri-Cri-Crime", Rich makes an offhand comment about the role of FBI Director being a bit "Defense Against the Dark Arts", and it passes by without explanation. He's referring to the excessive turnover, but to make the connection, a viewer would need to be familiar with Harry Potter media and know that the Dark Arts job never had any single teacher for longer than one year during Harry's school years.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Chinese viewers liked Blindspot because of Jane Doe's fluency with Wenzhounese, a very difficult Chinese dialect to speak.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Martin Gero has described the whole crew having a Mass "Oh, Crap!" when a certain event on The 100 launched a major public backlash against any case of Bury Your Gays, long after it was too late to alter their own use of it. It's generally been acknowledged to be one of the more understandable gay character deaths of the time, occurring in a way that genuinely serves the story and would be hard to proceed without, but the extremely unfortunate timing still got the show in some trouble.
  • What has helped the show avoid any long term backlash is having a laundry list of characters with entirely incidental sexualities. Villains and heroic characters alike are revealed to have spouses or lovers of their own gender without anyone batting an eyelid. Even Rich Dotcom is never displayed badly because of his interests.
• He's Just Hiding: After Season 5's first episode showed that Edgar Reade died in the drone attack sent by Madeline, some speculated that he is actually alive.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the previous season before the show began, Jamie Alexander's Marvel Cinematic Universe character Lady Sif became an Amnesiac Hero in an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. In fact, she'd already been cast on Blindspot when the episode was made.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Carter waterboarding Jane in "Evil Handmade Instrument".
  • Shepherd initially comes across as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, a caring mother and possessing a solid Freudian Excuse. However it all goes out the window in “Why Let Cooler Pasture Deform” when she’s outright gleeful while blowing up the compound and killing a dozen FBI agents, all the while making Jane watch. If that’s not enough, moments later she tries to force Roman to execute his sister as a display of loyalty.
  • Madeline gets one of her own by executing Brianna in "Existential Ennui".
• Les Yay: In "Cede Your Soul", Jane asks teenaged hacker Ana Montes if she'd like to go see a movie or hang out with her sometime, to which Ana says she'll think about it. Though the real reason Jane asked is because she feels lonely due to her amnesia, it can come off like she's asking the younger girl out on a date. It helps that they connected pretty well in an earlier interrogation scene.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some fans weren't happy that "Persecute Envoys" uses police brutality against unarmed black people as nothing more than window dressing to a far less challenging plot, rather than taking any kind of stand on a very topical issue. Possibly subverted in that the climax revealed that a white police chief was blackmailing a black athlete in a way that managed to avoid being Anvilicious.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In Season 2, the team was hit harshly with this due to their poor treatment of Jane (only after finding out about her involvement with Sandstorm), even blaming her for Mayfair's death, which was the doing of Oscar and she was actually being manipulated due to her memory loss. They even keep seeing Mayfair as a martyr despite the crimes she comitted before. Out of the entire members, Zapata is the worst as she bluntly makes it clear she doesn't want to see, talk or even work with Jane, whom she treats like a traitor and openly distrusts her for supposedly being involved in the deaths of at least twelve FBI agents who were led into a trap. This behavior is very hyprocritical on her part when you take into account that she's done pretty treacherous things for Keaton, the director of the CIA. Reade was also dismissive to Jane after saving his life at one point.