Why Blue Bloods Fans Are Rewatching A Season 4 Episode

Blue Bloods has long been the lifeblood of CBS Friday nights. The show may be on its eleventh season, which had to be reconfigured a bit in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it shows no signs of slowing down any time soon, especially considering star Tom Selleck thinks the show could last for a while. 

With the few episodes that have been released so far of season 11, we've seen the series tackle the concept of police brutality, making Blue Bloods more topical than ever before. This new focus also provides a glimpse into how the show can remain relevant in the years to come, and one thing is abundantly clear: the Reagan family isn't going to stop cleaning up the streets of New York any time soon. 

While most fans have their eyes set toward the future of the police procedural, though, others are looking toward the past, and picking up on details they might've missed the first time around. One such detail from season 4, episode 22, titled "Exiles," really has fans scratching their heads — and attempting to figure out what it is, exactly, that they are looking at. 

Recently, over on Reddit, user adityatrooper started a thread wondering what a strange vehicle in one of the shots (seen in the upper left corner above) was supposed to be. The large and boxy vehicle, which is located among all the police cruisers, does not serve any purpose to the episode's plot. During the episode, we don't see anyone enter or exit the vehicle, making it difficult to ascertain its function, or whether its inclusion in the episode is intentional. 

A couple of different ideas were brandied about in the thread, with user Northsidebill1 offering this perspective: "When I did security for the BBC at the Indy 500 races I worked, their mobile video editing vans looked a lot like that, very square and bulky with huge cooling units and storage spaces that looked like cooling units on top. Maybe this was an unplanned shot and one of their on-site video editing vans got caught." It certainly wouldn't be the oddest thing in the world if one of CBS's own editing vans ended up in a shot — or, perhaps, it could be an editing unit for a completely different project that happened to be filming nearby at the same time. 

Meanwhile, fellow Redditor petit_miner chimed in with a different theory, "Looks like a mobile AC Unit?" 

For now, it seems that no consensus has been reached on what the van could be, so fans remain in the dark. One thing we do know is that identifying a vehicle is nowhere near as bothersome to fans as wondering why Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg) is so chill with killing people at a moment's notice, but that's another topic entirely.