Too many shows begin with a woman’s body in a bag. The pretty girl; the good girl; whom everyone loves; raped, murdered and chopped to bits; shoved in a bag.
Welcome to the show! Now, let’s watch all these fellas figure out what happened to her. Hello, Twin Peaks. Hello, True Detective. Hello, Top of the Lake. Hello, The Killing. The dead girl TV trope might be as old as the crime drama genre itself.
Don’t get me wrong, the shows listed above are some of my favorites. They’re all well-written, smartly shot and gripping in their drama. But aren’t we all a little sick of young, beautiful women being used as pegs on which story lines are hung, mysteries to solve, McGuffins to chase in someone else’s story?
Top of the Lake ranks in my top five favorite shows of all time, perhaps because its first season does something different: The dead (or in this case, missing) girl’s plight is a vehicle for another woman’s story — a woman whose investigation into the disappearance of one young girl turns into an unveiling of a culture of rampant sexual violence in a small town in New Zealand.
But what if the dead girl could stand up and take control of her own story?
I did not expect to like NBC’s Blindspot, and in the pilot’s first act, it met all of my worst expectations. A frightened damsel, Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander), is discovered naked in Times Square and taken in by a team of FBI agents, who quickly drop everything to figure out what has happened to her. They discover that she was injected with a mind-erasing drug, and has no idea who she is. Her entire body was recently tattooed with cryptic symbols and images; the wounds are still fresh. On her back, a name is tattooed: Kurt Weller, FBI. Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) is called in. Does he know this woman? No … Maybe … No. But he will do everything to figure out who did this to her and why.
In order to begin deciphering her tattoos — and so a team of scientists and code breakers don’t need to stare at her naked all day — Jane is placed in a futuristic scanner — naked, of course — and mapped from head to toe. She looks like something between Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and a Barbie in a display case. The image is recycled throughout the episode, because who doesn’t love science and erotica mixed together? Sigh.
