Strange that in season 2 of both Dynasty and Smallville someone is blinded by some traumatic event only to have their sight return but keeps it secret and continues pretending to be blind to see the true intentions of those around them. Both Lionel Luther and Blake Carrington fake their blindness.

I’m not saying that the trope of a using a blind person for literary/storyline purposes is strange… going way back to Oedipus, for example, the “blind” Oedipus often “sees” (in a metaphysical sense) the truth of a situation better than the sighted people around him.

What is interesting, I think, is that in both of these shows I love and am watching/recently watched, a person who loses their sight continues to pretend to be blind in order to “see” the world around him better. Lionel is able to see the truth behind various plans that Lex develops and Blake is able to figure out what exactly is going on in the Krystle-Nick Toscanni-Falon love triangle.

Basically what I’m trying to get at is that this is an interesting technique since it basically gives the characters get the advantages that frequently come with blindness in literature (i.e. “seeing” better/more in-depth) as well as a sort of double-vision where they see people’s true nature since those people assume the character is blind.