I had the idea to rewatch the Blacklist recently, and I have way too many obsessive and in-depth opinions to share on my main blog without drowning out everything else. So I thought I'd make a sideblog dedicated to my rewatch.
My experience with the show is that I began watching after a fan theory got super under my skin and piqued my interest. I had originally seen the run of episodes from the middle of season 1 with Alan Alda through to the aftermath of that episode, but this fan theory about the identity of Raymond Reddington really captivated me and got me to buy into the entire show.
I've seen all through seasons 1-8, and then I caught a couple episodes of season 9 before my interest petered out. When I get to that point, this will basically become a live reaction to the ending of the show.
A few qualities about myself in relation to the show:
I'm fiercely protective of Elizabeth Keen as a character. I think she's flawed, like most characters in this show (or otherwise), but I'm willing to accept her as the slightly blander audience surrogate character because I view that as an acceptable compromise whenever you're watching a primetime show.
I was raised on Boston Legal so I'm a bit of a James Spader-head, but past a certain point I think that you can't really whet a media diet on James Spader alone. This show is good - I enjoy it - and James Spader hard-carries this show a lot of the time, but I'll probably get more critical over time.
Pre-rewatch, I think season 4 is where the show peaked. There's an episode in season 7 or so where I think the show jumped the shark - so look forward to that I guess??
New posts go live twice a week - one on Tuesday, one on Saturday. Uploads might be a big early for American readers since I'm working on Australian time. I'm still getting into the swing of things so don't expect consistency, but Tuesday and Saturday are the current targets I'm trying to hit.
Explicit spoilers will be hidden behind a Read More cut, and spoilered posts will be tagged with "#raymond readmorington".
Synopsis: A notorious Russian hacker conducts an unprecedented cyber-attack on the US, killing a man and stealing a dangerous piece of electronic equipment. In the midst of all this, Reddington builds a contraption.
Thoughts: Honestly? Kind of a weak episode.
This is the point of the show where the Blacklister of the week begins to feel a bit superfluous in the broader plot of an episode. There'll still be great episodes with great Blacklisters past this point, and former Blacklisters haven't necessarily been the cream of the crop - but Ivan is a pretty notable dip in quality up to this point.
The plot of the episode is basically that this hacker can hack anything. There's a part where they trigger a car's airbag remotely, and another scene where they set off a fire alarm on what's basically a tablet computer. The car is kind of old, even for 2014 standards, and there's next to no way that the building with the fire alarm had an intranet system linked to the fire alarm.
It's some "suspend your disbelief"-level nitpicks, I know, but it's like... within the past couple of years, we've just cracked the code on smart homes and gotten to a point where our cars have integrated fuckin touchpad tablets smack-dab in the middle of the dash. In today's world, it's that little bit more reflective of the world we live in - for a show set in 2013-ish, it's a little bit absurd in hindsight. It's an "internet of stuff" plotline from the infancy of the real-world "internet of stuff", and it feels a little bit quaint is all.
I don't think the show was trying to be prescient, but it was a bit jarring to see this hacker character controlling lights and setting off alarms and thinking to myself "oh, like a google home setup : )". Which is fine, but then I think of an episode like the Good Samaritan, and the trappings of this episode just don't compare to the weird shit that earlier episodes were doing.
I say that because - and I swear this is as negative as I'm gonna get - the plotline around this Hackers-ass premise is pretty bog-standard. The stakes are low, the villain is a cliche, the emotional heart of the Blacklister's story is treading water at best. The whole "dangerous hacker on the loose who can hack anything" premise doesn't do much to paint over the cracks. It's a real eye-roller.
Reddington's role in this episode is basically to tinker with this device. It's like he's building a clock from scratch, and as Liz checks in with him over the episode, the contraption is steadily becoming more assembled. There is a part where he gets to go to Belarus and conduct a sneaky little mission, which I actually liked a lot now that I think about it - but for the rest of the time, he's out here toying with some clockwork and dropping some exposition.
Speaking of exposition - this is the episode where Reddington first tells Liz that he doesn't lie to her. I kept that in mind for the rest of the show the last time I watched it, and I think it's a line that holds a lot of weight for a lot of the show's run. The only way that Reddington has lied to Liz so far is by omission, to the point where if she throws a question at Red that he doesn't want to answer, he explicitly changes the subject without acknowledging the original question. He usually turns it back on the asker with the intention of manipulating their emotions, but in the most technical sense, Reddington is telling the truth. He does not lie to Elizabeth.
But one thing I forgot was Elizabeth's response to this assertion:
"How would I even know?"
Which, imo, is SUPER VALID. Reddington never gives her the whole truth, he manipulates her through her work and through this seemingly intentional destabilization of her life, and the crumbs of truth that he offers are deliberately vague. How is she meant to take him at his word when he can't open up to her, the same way that he expects her to open up to him?
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I'm going to give you a warning. There is an ongoing plotline involving one of the show's characters that plays heavily into the myth arc of the season and turns their prior characterisation on its head. The show is currently playing this plotline for dramatic irony, and other characters in the show have no idea about this character's true intentions.
I'm currently spoiler-tagging this plotline out of courtesy, but sooner or later the cat is gonna be let out of the bag. This is a season one plotline in a show that lasts for ten seasons; I cannot hide this forever.
Here's what I'm gonna do: when the other shoe drops, when the reveal happens for the other character/s in the setting, I will stop hiding it behind a readmore tag. Past a certain point, you cannot hide a plot development like this any more.
None of the other characters know yet, so I'll still be discussing their storyline underneath the Read More cut below. But it's coming up fast.
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That character, of course, is Tom Keen.
Last episode, he killed the substitute teacher character who was actually an agent sent by his handler to re-establish contact, as well as a PI who was tailing the pair on behalf of Reddington. This episode starts with Reddington finding the bodies - courtesy of Mr. Kaplan, of course - and ringing in a missing persons tip.
This gets Liz involved, because as a colleague of the missing woman, Tom is a suspect in her disappearance. Liz begins to do her own investigation, at which point a triangulated phone signal leads her right to Tom's safehouse - while he's inside.
This is an outstanding scene where he's frantically scrambling to pull down all his evidence and burn it before Liz sees any of it, then he deftly evades capture while she walks around. Eventually he's cornered thanks to a creaky door, at which point he's able to knock Liz over and punch her in the head WITHOUT HER SEEING HIS FACE. This motherfucker GETS AWAY WITH IT, and THEN he has the gall to revert to his Nice Guy Husband persona and fawn over her when she tells him she got hurt later. It's absolutely mental.
Ryan Eggold is absolutely killing it in this double role, and the whole season has been leading up to this. There's enough plausible deniability that he could really go either way, but when they commit to making Tom a part of the conspiracy around Liz, they REALLY commit.
Even though the Ivan plot wasn't very good, the Tom and Liz plotline brought the heat. This plotline was the heart of the episode.
Speaking of Ivan - the whole "stalker with a crush"/teen angst aspect of the character was super formulaic. I thought him stealing a cyberwarfare prototype as a romantic gesture was kind of a ridiculous escalation of this sort of plotline, and then he's on a speeding train with Elizabeth and he's too angsty to stop the train with the magic tablet because he just wants to die now, and it's so overplayed.
It's a mixed episode. The titular Blacklister is pretty mediocre, but the Tom/Liz storyline is juicy as fuck and it's gonna come to a head as the season continues.
Synopsis: A ruthless yakuza has broken out of Abashiri prison in Hokkaido, Japan. The man, named Mako Tanida, is soon able to track down one of the men who imprisoned him - a man named Sam Raimo. It's revealed that Tanida was arrested in the wake of an FBI operation against Raymond Reddington, and in his quest for revenge, Tanida offers Raimo a choice: he can take a ceremonial dagger and disembowel himself, or he can be murdered by Tanida who'll then go on to kill Raimo's family.
Cut to a few days later, where Donald Ressler is attending a wake in D.C. for a colleague of his - Sam Raimo. They were on the same taskforce together in search of Raymond Reddington, and it's speculated that a mountain of debt in the years since the taskforce's dissolution caused Raimo to kill himself.
Ressler knows better, so he goes to Reddington to get some information. After relaying the information about Mako Tanida's escape, Reddington clues Ressler into the fact that nobody is acknowledging the escape due to the prison being regarded as being inescapable - sending Ressler down a dark road of vengeance as his former teammates are picked off one at a time.
Tom comes home from the teacher's conference!
Thoughts: Just to get this out of the way - this is the first episode of the show I've seen in a while. I recently bought a PS4 and I've been going crazy with the PSN sales, so the Blacklist has taken a backseat to these marathon gaming sessions. Been playing Path of Exile, Let It Die, Puyo Puyo Tetris and Minecraft, and I think I'm about to make a forever-save in Skyrim. Point being, my hands have been full.
I think this ended up being to the show's advantage, because episode 15 ended on a major paradigm shift for the narrative. The endgame for season one is rapidly approaching, and we're getting a lot of information flying at the screen hard and fast. That helped bring me right back into the narrative, because this is the first episode to deal with the aftershocks of this paradigm shift.
Going into the episode, though, I wasn't expecting to like it. The whole thing with Tanida approaching FBI agents and confronting them with ritual suicide felt very stereotypical - like yeah, the Japanese dude is obsessed with honor and makes dudes commit seppuku. Great writing, Blacklist team 😒
But for what it's worth, the episode gets significantly better in that regard. One thing this show does well are last-minute twists that shift the balance of power - one of the season's earliest episodes does the same thing. Tanida ends up being a pretty compelling character with a solid role in the narrative, even if it takes most of the episode to get him to where he needs to be.
That being said? This episode is schlock supreme. It's a Ressler-centric episode, and it's very much a rough-and-tumble cops-behaving-badly story. Ressler drives like a maniac and gets into a gunfight. Ressler shoots up an underground hospital for criminals. This Time, It's Personal. Ressler has represented the schlocky action-thriller trappings of the setting in prior episodes, and this episode is mostly just that, down to a T.
The question, then, is this: is the Ressler plotline good?
It's good the same way that junk food is good. And personally, I'm a big fan of junk food. There's a more substantive B-plot that plays more into the Blacklist's strengths, but that entire storyline is a spoiler that I'll talk about later. For now, let's just say that if you cheered like a knuckle-dragging moron whenever Ressler got into a punch-up in prior episodes (y'know, like I did), you'll probably like this episode a lot. It's pretty good.
Before I get into spoilers, I want to mention two things.
First of all, this episode briefly features a real prison in Hokkaido called Abashiri. I feel like it has this unique cultural reputation ala Alcatraz where it's seen as being excessively hard to escape from, and there have been shows, movies and video games that feature the prison.
One of these video games is Yakuza 5. Taiga Saejima's chapter of the game is set in Hokkaido, and I think he escapes from prison and dresses up as Santa to avoid detection. I never finished Yakuza 5, but I did finish Saejima's chapter; it's the reason I decided to look up the real prison and see if there was a connection.
Secondly, this episode is enhanced so much by the desolate snowy landscape. The episode opens on Mako Tanida's escape from Abashiri, where he hides in the snow fields outside of the prison. It's winter in America around the same time, so a lot of the outdoor shots are blanketed in thick mounds of powdery snow. Reddington has a few conversations with Ressler out in the snow, and the way they stand out in this bright, glaring snowscape is incredibly striking. And then Ressler spends the episode wearing a tight black skivvy, and he eventually gets this powdery snow all over him that looks very distinctive and feels very bold. Big thumbs up to whoever worked with the snow in this episode to make it look so good for TV, because it looks incredible.
So, for the spoilers:
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Tom Keen has revealed himself to be a rogue agent in service of a nebulous boss codenamed Berlin. Liz has no idea, and Reddington hasn't quite known where Tom's allegiance has sat for a while now - but he's got enough information to arrive at the answers he's looking for.
The end of the last episode has Tom giving up the ghost to an agent working with the same man, and this episode deals with the consequences of that. Tom has a warehouse with a little conspiracy board where he's been following the plot of the show - remember when he got taken into the Post Office to be interrogated about those passports and stuff? For a brief moment, he was on the inside of the FBI Reddington taskforce as an agent of this Berlin fellow. Everything about him - his job, his name, his personality and demeanor, his relationship with Liz - it's all been a lie.
The early show walks a fine line, where Liz finds his passports and money and tries to get to the bottom of things. Tom has plausible deniability, especially since Reddington's cases almost seem manufactured to disrupt Liz's pre-existing worldview - if he's manipulating Liz with all these pertinent cases that are making her question reality, why wouldn't he frame her husband as an international criminal?
This culminates in the episode where she brings him into the Post Office and he proves his supposed innocence. But now we know that the gun, the passports and the money all belonged to Tom. The scene where Tom and Reddington have a conversation at the hospital where Liz's dad is dying? Tom and Red knew full well what the score was; the conversation was, indeed, highly repressed code between two underworld figures who are deeply tangled in Elizabeth Keen's life behind the scenes.
Tom's plot in this episode is great. He gets to have his cool spy storyline, even if it leads to the premature death of a Lance Reddick character (as is too often the case). He kills two people, he buries them, and Liz hops into the shower with him while he's scrubbing off the viscera. But despite all the blood in his fingernails and stuff, he manages to hide it from Liz - he even gets a smear of blood on the small of her back, and she's none the wiser.
THAT'S Tom Keen. And now we have that dramatic irony hanging over our heads as an audience, and we have to wait until that other shoe drops.
And with all that being said? Reddington was pretty good in this episode, too. Definitely more of an ancillary performance, but his plotline helps to deepen the season-long mystery of his family - his daughter, specifically - and it's very well acted, as always.
The worst thing I have to say about this episode is that it's retroactively ruined by later episodes. As-is, it's a good start of darkness for Ressler and the way the episode concludes has a very grim, Machiavellian tone to it all - very fitting, given the way that Raymond Reddington's actions are impacting the people around him. I was pleasantly surprised by this episode.
Synopsis: Twelve years ago, an Assistant US Attorney went missing in the wake of a court case - he had helped to put away a cartel kingpin, and his disappearance was chalked up to a retaliatory hit by the remaining cartel members.
Cut to the current day, where a bedraggled drifter wanders aimlessly on the side of the road. A helpful soul stops to help him - only to realise from his belongings that this man is the missing US Attorney.
The case immediately piques Reddington's interest, because it's eerily reminiscent of a prison-yard myth he knows: when a prisoner is unduly sentenced, they can plead their case before an underworld "Judge" who - if they side with the prisoner - will exact vengeance on the people who put the prisoner behind bars.
The Assistant US Attorney suppressed evidence that put an innocent man behind bars for twelve years. The Judge, in retaliation, took the accused attorney and held him in a homemade prison for twelve years. When the innocent prisoner was released, so was the attorney.
As the FBI task force looks into this myth, they stumble across a case file kept by an associate of The Judge. Alan Ray Rifkin is days away from execution, and he's written in to plead his case against the people who put him away - the US Assistant Attorney General, Tom Connolly, and the assistant director of the FBI Counterterrorism Division, Harold Cooper.
If Rifkin dies, Cooper will be taken by the Judge and executed in turn.
Thoughts: I liked this episode, but something about it kept distracting me. For the plot of the episode, the Blacklister of the week utilising a prisoner outreach program to conduct their business is a standard "magical realism" element of the Blacklist's setting. But in practice, it feels like that "copaganda" element rearing its ugly head - prisoner outreach programs being used to facilitate crime outside of the prison system sounds like a Fox News soundbite.
The people taken by the Judge are guilty of corrupt conduct, making this a more morally grey sort of tale. It's a decent enough episode; it's just that as much as I can take the episode at face value, I can't shake the feeling that there's some subtle messaging happening. And that's not even diving into the subplot where a fed admits to corrupt actions, and they don't get reported because "I think there's been enough judgement this week 🤪".
OTHER THAN THAT - it's not a bad episode of the show.
There's an ongoing plotline about Liz and Tom's disintegrating marriage. They've been dogged by this mystery box full of money and passports, Liz is flip-flopping on adopting a baby with Tom, they clearly love each other but this FBI job has just taken too much of a toll on the pair - right?
This is the episode where the other shoe drops on this storyline. That's all I'm gonna say.
This is also the first appearance of a character named Tom Connolly. Specifically, it's the first time that he and Elizabeth Keen have been in the same room; that'll mean something down the line, but for now it was kind of a funny experience seeing how the pair got along right from the jump.
This episode also has some great scenes with Reddington, including some stuff that has him confronting his past. I like the premise of the episode in that it's this urban legend that piques Red's curiosity.
It's like how I like Boston Legal a lot, but there are episodes - mostly in season three - that are so explicitly sleazy and slimy that I regret watching the show. There's an ongoing thing in that season where Alan Shore (James Spader's character) will creep up on women and sniff their hair, and in one episode he takes this deep, uncomfortable whiff of this woman's hair and is able to deduce that she's pregnant before she even knew it for sure. That's an incredibly unpleasant scene! I don't like it! I think Boston Legal is a great show otherwise - but yuck!!
This won't be the last episode to feature feds behaving badly and covering for each other. Future episodes are gonna have feds trampling on human rights and frowning upon people trying to evoke them because They Need A Name, Dammit - not even Reddington's deliciously decadent and snarky way of life can immunize a show like this against copaganda.
Synopsis: A begrieved woman is led down a spiral staircase by a man in a suit. He dances around the issue of authentication for a safety deposit box, before asking her for a key - with a momentary hitch, she produces it for the man. He sits her down at a table, and he offers his condolences:
"My apologies for your loss, Mrs. Reddington."
Minutes later, she's out on the street with $10 million of Raymond Reddington's assets. But she left something behind: instructions for the man, who's still very much alive.
The pair meet in a hotel bar, and they wax poetic about love, and Florence, and what they mean to each other. But of course, nothing's ever that simple with Raymond Reddington - and of course, nothing's ever that simple with this week's Blacklister, either.
Madeline Pratt is a career criminal who was jilted in Paris by Reddington. Their relationship is contentious; a slap here, a tickle there. But this meeting is strictly business.
Madeline Pratt is conducting a heist on the Syrian embassy. And she wants Reddington in on the job.
Thoughts: THANK FUCKING CHRIST.
That last episode about the Cyprus Agency was absolutely harrowing. Again, I can't go into the full scope of what that episode entails without posting trigger warnings. It hits way too close to home compared to some of the show's most out-of-pocket shit like the Courier.
This episode, in comparison, is a lot of fun! It's a heist episode. It's got large enough stakes to it all, but it's all dresses and tuxes and treasure. And this is the first episode since the mid-season finale that Ressler acts like a dickhead super-marine and gets to punch on with a perp. Madeline Pratt is an outstanding episode to wash the taste of the Cyprus Agency out of your mouth.
I don't know how often episodes like this crop up, but it reminds me of later seasons of the show where it throws the audience a bone and has a fun one-off "treasure hunt" episode. Raymond Reddington races a crazed coin collector to the last misprinted Lincoln penny in the world. Reddington reconnects with an old mentor and they go in for one last job. Plots like that.
In this episode, Reddington brings Liz along to steal an artifact known as "the Effigy of Ashtart". It's holed up in the Syrian embassy, and it supposedly contains the identity of six Russian spies from the Cold War. There's this great part where Red has to adopt this wildly sassy cover persona to pull one over on some guards - and between the outrageous story he concocts for himself and the earnest, solid slug he delivers once he's gotten to where he wants to be, it's easily one of my favorite character moments of the season. James Spader is really firing on all cylinders in this episode; he even gets his own monologue at one point.
One downside to the plot is that this effigy has a history of being repatriated by Western colonial forces, while efforts to bring it back to Syria are foiled by the American military who are basically just bagging it back from the Syrians after they got it back from the British museum - the show at least spotlights a character whose father was killed for what basically amounted to colonial plunder, but by the end of the episode it's still not in Syrian hands, even after anything to do with the associated intel is wrapped up. The plunder continues.
Otherwise, I like this episode. The Effigy of Ashtart is mishandled a little, but I think the show needed something a bit more cheerful after the previous episode. The subject matter of the Cyprus Agency is shocking, and it's important to sit with that discomfort and consider some of the actual real-world aspects of that plot - even if it has an extra-horrific, slightly elevated turn to it, some of the things depicted by that episode hit disturbingly close to home.
But when it's all said and done, you've gotta move on instead of getting hung up on the horror. This episode grants some much-needed reprieve after the experience of that prior episode, and I really appreciate that.
Chasing the Cyprus Agency with a more light-hearted caper episode like Madeline Pratt was a great move, and in my opinion this is the first hint of what the show would do later on with its "treasure hunt" episodes - which themselves are very entertaining. Good episode.
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Under the Read More, I'll be talking about some negative fan reception stuff regarding Madeline Pratt that spoils the end of this episode. Which then spirals into more general fandom bellyaching for stuff I remember from the first time I was watching this show. It's long, self-serious, super entitled and annoying.
If you want to hear me rail against some stupid fandom bullshit I don't agree with - which will only become more prominent in time - feel free to continue. If not, I'll see you in the next post.
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There's an entry for Madeline Pratt on the TV Tropes "Your Mileage May Vary" page, under the trope "The Scrappy" - apparently the show hypes up her skills despite her whole showing being pretty unimpressive, and people are buttmad because this is the first Blacklister to - gasp! - escape unscathed at the end of the episode.
My rebuttal to that is that the storyline is cheesy as hell, but I don't care so much about that because Madeline's draw is whatever emotional past she has with Reddington. She facilitates the silly heist plot, she plays a part in your standard underworld intrigue thing with Reddington, and the way the episode ends plays into this pre-existing relationship they both have.
This episode is much more vibes-based than anything particularly serious, and after the MAJOR downer that the prior episode was, I'm honestly really happy just to leave it at that. Yeah, she's no Anslo Garrick - she's a gimmicky, complicated thief character whose main draw is this unresolved past she has with Reddington. Of course she gets away at the end; it allows her and Red to continue that cheeky chemistry they have and end the episode on an upbeat note.
It's like when people say that Elizabeth Keen hasn't earned any of the "badass" scenes the show gives to her, even as far into the show's run as season 7. Like yeah, Madeline Pratt is a side-character who appears in two episodes to spar with Reddington - it's not that deep. It might be a bit too early in the show's run to talk about the unholy bug that crawled up the Blacklist fandom's ass about Elizabeth Keen, but this kneejerk reaction to such a minor character in the first season reminds me of the sort of ridiculous, overblown rhetoric I started seeing about Liz the further I got into the show.
I'm tempted to call it misogyny, but it's probably just a whole lot of people who interact with the show like this:
Where Reddington/James Spader is the cuter lamb with the bowtie, and the other lamb is Elizabeth Keen trying to get to the bottom of her storyline involving Reddington and get some closure on why he had to come into her life and turn everything inside out. What all of the hardship she's been through - ostensibly because of her connection with Reddington - was even for in the first place.
And with that being said? I like Reddington, the same as any other fan! James Spader is undoubtedly the main draw of the show! But the way he became the ONLY THING that some of the Blacklist fanbase wanted to see, and how Elizabeth Keen became so disliked that people were calling for her to be killed off before her storyline concluded, is absolutely insane to me.
And while I'm absolutely reading too much into this, I just want to say that adding such a minor fuckin bit character to such a negative trope on the Blacklist TV Tropes page almost feels like a prelude to the sort of entitled fan dickheadery I would begin to see about Elizabeth Keen later on. Maybe it's a woman-hating thing, maybe it's your usual fandom mush-brain thing happening where the act of fandom supercedes the actual show (like with Sherlock or Voltron). But the signs of later issues are there, and it really gets under my skin.
Madeline Pratt catching some heat online isn't anywhere near as deep as I'm making it sound. It just really annoys me, and it reminds me of even stupider stuff that happens later into the show's run.
Apologies for the lack of posts. I've been at this unsustainable point of burnout for months where I'm basically just going to work, getting dinner, playing video games and going to bed. I haven't felt like watching anything with more formal structure to it than a YouTube video for ages.
Like, another show I have a lot of love for is Doctor Who. I've been watching the show since it was revived in 2005; I was ten at the time. I've been a lifelong fan of Doctor Who at this point - Steven Moffat is my least favorite showrunner, and I put the show off for YEARS until he left, but I watched his entire run in the lead-up to another showrunner's debut and to this day I can say I've seen every episode of the Doctor Who revival. I'm a really big fan of Doctor Who, and I've been especially happy with Russell T. Davies - the original showrunner for the revival series - coming back to the show.
An entire season of one of my favorite shows, headed by my favorite showrunner of that show, just aired. And I haven't touched a SINGLE EPISODE of it yet. Like the whole season has aired, finale and all. I've barely seen a second of footage from the entirety of this most recent season. I've been a bit of a dead fish about the whole thing.
So if that's the case with an ongoing property that I have a lot of love for and a lifelong history with, you can probably see how that sort of burnout is affecting my desire to watch more Blacklist.
blacklist-notary posts exist in the drafts, ready to be posted. I felt weird about posting anything until I got back into the habit of watching and reviewing episodes of the show, so I ended up putting them off. It's crazy because I only have three episodes left in the season to review, and I just totally shut down past a certain point because work has had such a foul effect on my mental health.
So, what's the solution?
Well, I'm on holiday right now. Not as in like, I'm over in the Bahamas with a cocktail in my hand and I'm going to sexy beach parties every night - I'm at home, sleeping in every single day, recouping some of the time I've lost to this job that's grinding me into the dirt.
And given that the most recent season of Doctor Who just finished up, I've decided to devote myself to watching it and reviewing it on my main blog - as I've been doing for years.
My rationale is this. If I've got the will and want to sit myself down and watch Doctor Who, I'm going to have the time and energy to get back to The Blacklist. I have another week and a half of holidays, I know for a fact I'm gonna get bored, and it'll give me an outlet for all the restless energy I'm gonna have as my holidays come to a close. And to that end, blacklist-notary posts will be resuming as of right now.
I've set kind of an unsustainable goal, too: I'm gonna try and watch/review as many episodes of season 2 as I can before I have to get back to work, which will hopefully be the whole season. But I don't think I'll actually have the time to do that - it's just a goal I'm setting a bit out of my reach for the time being.
The point of me saying all of this is basically to say that posts are forthcoming once again, and so I can apologize for going dark the way that I have. Hope you liked the most recent post, because more are on the way and I'm going to be writing new ones going forward.
Synopsis: Reddington gives Liz a case about an adoption agency that deals in trafficked children. Liz - who sees this assignment as being particularly on-the-nose, given that she's in the middle of adopting a child with Tom - calls Reddington out on his bullshit. This case is specifically targeted towards her to drive a wedge between her and her husband; she calls it, and she's not happy. But regardless, she takes the case - because again, children are being trafficked.
This ends up being one of the most squeamish episodes of the season due to its topics of abduction, sex trafficking and the violation of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. It's extremely unpleasant.
Thoughts: I wasn't 100% sure what this episode was about until I saw the cold open. As soon as I saw the first few seconds, it all came flooding back to me. The Cyprus Agency is such a fucked episode of the show because of the sort of sick topics it handles - there's *something* of an outlandish twist, but even that hits way too close to home to really be comfortable.
It's kind of funny how this episode reminds me of an episode of Boston Legal - I can't even divulge that show's relevant episode because it can give away the twist of this one, but at this point of the Boston Legal season, the show has had this run of episodes where some bastard of a character has a moment of vulnerability that shows where their bad behaviour came from - and in response to these sob stories, the show actively shines a sympathetic or morally grey light on their actions.
This episode of Boston Legal has a guy do something truly heinous, and he gives his little Freudian speech and implicitly asks for the sympathy of his lawyers - and they just tell him to get therapy and fuck off. It's a great moment, especially after prior episodes played into the intended cliche unironically.
This episode is like a darker take on what that guy does. It's just kinda sick, and you can't justify it away.
Let's put the TV shenanigans aside and get real: people, usually women, do get abducted. Human trafficking happens. You see posts pointing out stuff like fake job offers that can lead to people being abducted and trafficked - people go missing, people die. That's real. That happens out there.
This episode of the Blacklist, subsequently, plays on some of the darkest fears that a person can have about being abducted. There's so much pointed language that I want to use to really express the horror of this episode, but that's all I can muster without a trigger warning.
Considering that the concern around the Cyprus Agency regards kids being kidnapped from around the world and "sold" to unsuspecting adoptive parents in America, you can probably see how dark this episode is going to get. And you might think you know what I'm trying to imply in saying that - but maybe I'm burying the lead a little. Regardless of all that, though, what I can tell you is that this is easily one of the most uncomfortable episodes of the show to this point. It's fucked.
Reddington's plot in this episode - once again continuing his hunt for the mole who opened the Post Office up to a violent invasion - is in the background. His main role in this episode is mostly to sow doubt in Liz's mind about having kids with Tom. And let's not mince words here: it's explicitly an attempt by him to fuck with her homelife! She even sees right through it, and she tells him that to his face!
It helps to have Liz acknowledge how blatant it is, because there's always been this sort of plausible deniability around whether Reddington's actions are meant to be disrupting Elizabeth's home-life. I guess the cat is out of the bag ever since the end of episode 10, where Red outright tells her not to trust her husband - he clearly has a dog in this fight - but even then, this case is so blatantly manipulative and on the nose that the show just has to acknowledge it.
To finish off this recap, I want to talk a bit about Gordon Lightfoot. I know very little about him outside of some VERY specific information about a tiny sliver of his music, but I'm endlessly passionate about the little bit of knowledge I do have. As I edit this post, I just saw an outstanding pair of videos about Lightfoot from Rick Beato, and he really hammers in how good his music is.
I mostly know one of his songs, which is called If You Could Read My Mind. It was covered by a guy named Jonathan Coulton for an adult-contemporary cover album he made. Other songs from that album including Same Old Lang Syne by Dan Fogelbert, The Things We Do For Love by 10cc and Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty - it's a great listen, check out "Some Guys" by Johnathan Coulton if you're interested.
Gordon Lightfoot's music ends up being a bit of a recurring motif in the show. In this episode, it's the song "Sundowner". My understanding is that it's a song that Lightfoot wrote while his wife was out at a party, and he was incredibly jealous and seething about it; in his rage, he wrote this song addressing some hypothetical gentleman caller where if Gordon ever caught him, there would be some Trouble. You'd better watch out if you're creeping around here, because you'll get more than you ever bargained for.
It's not exactly surprising, then, that he would write a song like If You Could Read My Mind about a deteriorating marriage. There's a particularly nasty line in that latter song that states "if you read between the lines, you'll notice I'm just trying to understand the feelings that you lack"; he would actually change that line in the future after one of his kids spoke to him about it, saying that Lightfoot wasn't exactly a saint when the divorce was all said and done. The line ultimately became "I'm just trying to understand the feelings that we lack".
The point being - a lot of the negative traits I've just described about Gordon Lightfoot's music can be applied to the character of Raymond Reddington. He's paranoid, he's angry, he's violent. If you cross him, he will retaliate violently. He's romantic and poetic, but he's undeniably bitter inside. And it's for this exact reason that Sundowner - a song about taking a dishonest person and making a violent example of them - scores the scene in which Reddington concludes his mole hunt.
And so, in some pockets of the fanbase, Red is associated with Gordon Lightfoot.
I have another theory that I'll cover in my next SpoilerBomb post. But for now, I just wanted to emphasise this particular needle drop. When you hear a song by Gordon Lightfoot on the Blacklist, the scene is going to be extremely significant. It is in this episode, and if Gordon Lightfoot appears again, you can bet on the possibility that it's going to be closely tied to Raymond Reddington.
So yeah. Sorry for the infodump, but this episode is extremely harrowing and this incredibly niche music topic is the one other thing that I can elaborate on. It's a good episode, but I think you need kind of a strong stomach to handle this one. Viewer beware - it is a truly fucked episode of television.
Synopsis: Reddington gives Elizabeth a lead on the next Blacklister, a character known as the Alchemist. He's capable of manipulating people's DNA and dental records to such a degree that he can ostensibly change one person into another one - or at the very least, he can make one corpse seem like it belongs to an entirely different person.
Of course, you can't just put a dead body on a crashing plane and expect the autopsy to overlook the discrepancy between the impact of the plane and the time of death; the people he transforms are still alive when he works on them, and they may even be conscious when they end up dying in place of the Alchemist's clients. He uses this system to sell entirely new identities and lives to the criminal underworld at the expense of the innocent people who die in their place.
The Tom/Liz storyline gets picked back up with this episode - specifically, the topic of adoption comes back up. Their mutual friend is due in six weeks, and she wants to give Tom and Liz her baby for them to raise as their own. Of course, Liz is married to the job and Tom is trying to come to terms with her current work/life balance, which comes up later when one of Tom's colleagues throws the pair a baby shower.
And Reddington is still pursuing the mole who allowed Anslo Garrick into the Post Office. This time, he has a data guy with a room full of shredded documents - second-rate information at best, and almost impossible to reconstruct. But Reddington, as the guy who's bankrolling this whole operation, decides that he wants everybody to drop what they're doing and piece those documents back together - one strip at a time.
Thoughts: The Tom/Liz plot falls a bit flat. Keeping with my personal theory that Season 1 of the Blacklist was split into two filming blocks - with the Anslo Garrick two-parter marking the end of the first filming block in case the show got cancelled - this episode helps to reboot that initial plotline and bring Liz and Tom's home life back into the forefront just in time for the second half of the season.
And the reality is that they had life goals and responsibilities they were pursuing before Reddington complicated things - and with Liz's work taking up all of her time now, Tom feels like she's neglecting the life they've been trying to build. Tom's role in this episode is to serve as an anchor for his and Liz's pre-FBI life, and that puts Liz between a rock and a hard place; she loves Tom and wants to start a family with him, but at the FBI, she spends this episode hunting down a dude who can CHANGE A PERSON'S FUCKING DNA.
On a character level, this sort of work/life imbalance conflict is understandable through both Liz's and Tom's eyes.
In practice, it's kinda maudlin character drama.
I'm in two minds about this aspect - but I'll put a pin in that. Taken wholly at face value, though, I will say this plotline is kind of angsty and cliche, and I don't like it.
Reddington is in decent form, though this episode is fairly light on his usual presence. His appearance in the episode's cold open is literally just to give Liz the Alchemist; the scene opens with them in the same room and Reddington just... tells her about the Alchemist.
There's no biting remark or remarkably bitchy comment - I remember a line in an early episode where Liz and the task force are waiting for people to call into an FBI tip line, and Reddington calls in a tip for Liz: "dress in darker blues, you're more of a Winter than an Autumn".
That leads into Liz walking in on Red to hear what he has to say about the perp of the week - whereas in this episode, there's no "foreplay" (for lack of a better term) to the way this scene is written.
I don't dislike this episode, if only because I thought that the Blacklister of the week was a cool concept and a fun character. If I was being more critical, I would say he's a bit of a rehash of Frederick Barnes - but still, I like the character and I like the whole Alchemist angle where he kidnaps people, implants them with DNA and modifies their teeth enough to fool any forensics teams who find their bodies. The scene they use to demonstrate the concept at the start of the episode is absolutely horrifying.
Weaker than usual episode imo, but I do think that the shredded document storyline is a much-needed breath of fresh air that the episode needed.
Synopsis: In the wake of the previous two episodes, Reddington has decided to get to the bottom of things - without the FBI's help. Reddington's absence causes a great deal of consternation and panic, leading to a series of interrogations against the FBI task force.
In the midst of this, Elizabeth Keen receives a message about a serial killer she's been working on capturing for years: the Good Samaritan. The FBI hasn't been able to determine a motive or a pattern to his crimes, but he always leaves the victim alive and he always rings an ambulance to give them a shot at saving the lives of his victims.
Considering the scale on which the previous Blacklister enacted chaos and destruction, and given that the effects of those actions were enough to get Reddington to walk away, the FBI are hesitant to send Elizabeth Keen out on a case; after all, the only reason Reddington was co-operating with the FBI was because he specifically asked for this rookie profiler. If they're colluding with each other and they let Liz slip, heads are going to roll.
Harold Cooper, on the other hand, wants Keen out in the field. If she was enough to get Reddington in the door in the first place, then maybe he'll become interested in her case and reach out. Elizabeth Keen is bait, and the FBI are looking to reel in #4 on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
Thoughts: This is a great episode of the show. It's a good aftermath episode that plays with the status quo - after the Anslo Garrick ordeal, the FBI team can't trust each other. There's evidence of a mole in the FBI, and Reddington is seeking this mole out on his own terms while the feds have their own investigation.
So, like Frederick Barnes - the episode where the FBI task force foil a chemical bomber who's infecting people with an accelerated version of Kurz disease - the episode has a hard split between the FBI subplot and the Reddington subplot. And both plots are incredibly strong.
First, the Good Samaritan is a great Blacklister. He has a great gimmick, and he fits into Liz's backstory as an up-and-coming criminal profiler - one of his first victims died in her arms, and it's cases like his where she began to cut her teeth on her profiling work. He's menacing, he's somewhat sympathetic, and he's a dark antagonist who fits perfectly well into the setting of this show.
Meanwhile, on Reddington's side of the episode - something like half a dozen people die. Red is very upset about the carnage that was unleashed in the prior two episodes, and a lot of notable faces from those episodes end up on the receiving end of his wrath. There's a great kill where he tips pure Russian vodka over a man and places a lit cigar in his mouth - when enough of the cigar burns to ash, the embers will land on the man and set him on fire. The camera focuses on the cigar, then on the man, then on Red, then on the RED HOT CIGAR EMBERS, then the MAN, then REDDINGTON - and when the appropriate amount of drama has been milked from the situation, Red gets sick of it and shoots the guy in the heart.
It's a great show of his comedic sociopathy, because he's equally affable and dangerous the entire runtime of the episode. I won't describe any more specific scenes, but you have dangerous moments like how he is in the Stewmaker, and you have affable moments like when he's speaking to Liz for the first time in the pilot. Episodes like this are why Reddington continues to have such a devoted fanbase, even when his later season appearances mostly rely on overly long monologues than any actual action.
There's a great scene between Reddington and Aram, which is what provides the cover image for this recap. So far, everyone Reddington has confronted has ended up dead - and he has reason to assume that Aram was the mole who helped co-ordinate Garrick's attack. And hey, he did just naturally slip into the background over the course of a few episodes - he's a notable face who's gone from zero to hero, so his character development up until now could have been him placing himself in a position to compromise the task force.
And so Reddington gives him a test. If Aram passes, he proves his innocence and gets to live. If he fails, Reddington empties a mag into his face. It's a great scene.
This episode has it all. It has a wildly unpredictable Raymond Reddington at his most violent. It has a notable Blacklister who easily stands on his own as a villain of the week. Nobody trusts each other, and people are hiding secrets and you don't know who's saying or doing any of it - the only two constants are that Reddington is exceptionally well-versed in the criminal underworld, and there's a really solid Blacklister giving the FBI task force something to do. After Anslo Garrick turned the entire show upside down - to spectacular effect - this episode is a pretty good return to the pre-existing Blacklist episode formula; there's even a whisper of a plot between Liz and Tom at the start and end of the episode.
Like my intro post says, I've watched eight whole seasons of this show in the past. I'm having a great time following the story from the beginning, but sometimes after a show has a particularly intense moment or resolves a particularly heavy arc, I might want to talk about that within the context of the entire show - including future episodes.
So when I feel like hashing some shit out, I'm going to be making these SpoilerBomb posts.
Keep in mind - SpoilerBomb posts contain spoilers for the ENTIRE SHOW. Not "every episode that's been covered on this blog", but "every episode of this show that has ever been produced and aired over the span of this show's ten year run". At the very least, it covers the first eight seasons of the show. So if you haven't seen the entire show, treat the following Read More VERY CAUTIOUSLY - I will be talking about MAJOR spoilers for later seasons of the show.
This SpoilerBomb post will be going into the fan theory that got me to begin watching this show, as well as some general thoughts about where the show goes from here.
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Okay, so let's start with the juicy stuff.
What's this fan theory I keep talking about?
I began watching the show because I heard that the prevailing theory was that Raymond Reddington was actually someone impersonating the real Raymond Reddington, and the impersonator is actually Katarina Rostova - Elizabeth Keen's mother. Katarina got a sex change and a litany of surgeries to pass herself off as the real Raymond Reddington.
There are a lot of clues to this, and a lot more open-ended statements in these early episodes that conveniently tie back in with this theory. In episode 2, Liz asks Reddington who she is to him. Red's answer is that there's no way that Liz could begin to comprehend how difficult that question was to answer - under this theory, he's right. At the end of episode 10, Liz asks if Reddington is her father - and the question takes him aback, and he says "no". But in a later season, Liz gets a blood test that confirms that she's related to Reddington - before finding out that the real Raymond Reddington is dead.
And then there's the matter of how Reddington escapes Alexander Kirk, and there's a shot at the end of this season that holds up beautifully in regards to this theory - where we see Reddington's back, and it's covered in scar tissue from the fire that he and Liz were caught in.
As the show goes on, everyone who was in that burning house is eventually accounted for. Even Katarina Rostova is accounted for in the flesh, before it's stated that she was a paid asset who spent almost thirty years impersonating Rostova on the world stage - by the time season 8 rolls around, Reddington being Katarina Rostova is the only explanation that makes sense.
And I think that to some degree, this twist was planned from season one. Reddington's obvious attachment to Liz. The scar tissue on his back. The awkward roundabout way he has to dodge questions about his connection to Liz, outright stating that there's no simple answer to what seems like such a simple question on the surface. The degree of care and tenderness he holds for Sam, even after suffocating him - the scene after he smothers Sam is probably one of Red's most emotional moments up to that point. Reddington gave his own daughter over to Sam for him to raise, and putting him out of his misery is clearly an emotional ordeal for him after what Sam did for him and Liz.
So the obvious answer is that Red is Liz's father, but the real-life Reddington has been dead the whole time. Considering the DNA evidence, and how Reddington managed to escape from Alexander Kirk - which is just flat-out beyond impossible without a hail mary like Reddington being Kirk's lost love Katarina Rostova - and the burn scars on his back? I think it's a safe bet to say that Katarina Rostova became Raymond Reddington.
Reddington has tender moments with close male friends like Sam. Reddington has tumultuous, passionate physical relationships with beautiful women. He lives his life openly and freely, living in the margins of danger and darkness. And while he's tethered to Elizabeth Keen, and he wants her to be okay - transitioning to become Raymond Reddington gave Rostova some much-needed freedom from his roots as a Soviet spy.
There's so much internal richness to Raymond Reddington's character that this theory ascribes to him. It's extremely out of left field, and ultimately as a transgender character, Reddington is depicted very well - fulfilled, self-satisfied and always the most charming and comfortable person in the room. Reddington constantly steals the show.
Of course, being a dark, violent TV show about the criminal underworld, Reddington is also depicted as a master criminal and a murderer. But his reasons for working with the FBI, as tight-lipped as he may be about his ulterior motives, and his connection to Elizabeth Keen give him a lot of depth and complexity. He also exists in the same universe as The Stewmaker, Wujing, The Judge etc. etc. - chemical bombers and serial killers and child-marrying backwater cults; he's certainly done bad things to an untold amount of people, but he's certainly got more altruistic motives than - say - Hector Larcos, who had over a hundred people melted into goop to cover his tracks, subsequently denying all of his victim's families any closure over the deaths of their loved ones.
The fact that it was a VERY REAL POSSIBILITY that Raymond Reddington was a canonically transgender character exemplifying such an incredible twist in the story of Elizabeth Keen? That's why I began watching the show. And this fan theory - which I think the show ends up confirming? - is still a reason why I regard the show so fondly.
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On a different note, there's a part in one of my prior posts where I talk about Ruddiger joining Reddington's roster of revolving side characters. I list off Dembe, Luli and Grey as other close contemporaries that this new character is joining, and I say how great Reddington's side of the character roster is.
Of course, I knew that Luli and Grey were going to die in quick succession. It was just kinda funny to be like "wow look at all these strong supporting characters under Raymond Reddington, they make up such a team and I love them so much!" - then one of them gets their head exploded and the other one gets suffocated to death. I'm still sad to see Luli go, I really appreciated the characterisation she got in these early episodes even if she never quite got the spotlight she could have gotten - characters who are comfortable in Red's life are few and far between after Luli is killed, even if Reddington's bond with the task force continues to solidify.
Now that Mr. Kaplan has been introduced, the character I'm most looking forward to reappearing is Brimley. Marvin Gerard, too - god knows I'm gonna get a kick out of season 9.
Synopsis: A young soldier wants to get out of the Korean war, and Hawkeye proposes diagnosing him with appendicitis and performing an appendectomy on him to get him a ticket home. This is a plot that he's pulled off with "Trapper" John in the past, but B.J. Hunnicut is offended by the idea. The soldier's appendix is fine, and performing that sort of surgery on a healthy organ would be mutilation. Even so, the procedure could be the difference between life and death for the young soldier - and for the first time, Pierce and Hunnicut find themselves ideologically opposed.
Thoughts:
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You might be able to tell by the synopsis, but my favorite part of this episode is seeing Alan Alda.
I grew up watching MASH, and I still like the show a lot. So seeing Alan Alda in the Blacklist, way back when I first caught this run of episodes on TV - it was probably one of the biggest casting surprises I'd seen in a TV show up to that point.
Years later, I was watching this show called The Big C, where Laura Linney kicks her dickhead husband out on the street and begins living more selfishly after a lifetime of giving up her own happiness for others, and it's because she got diagnosed with terminal cancer - from season two onwards, she begins seeing a doctor who's also played by Alan Alda. The Big C isn't a good show - it has a good first season and a decent last season, with season 3 being a total wash imo - but Laura Linney is infectiously charming and I love seeing Alan Alda whenever he pops up. Alan Alda is the fucking best.
I'll get into some of the actual plot synopsis: after Luli gets her brains vaporised all over the plexiglass cube jail cell wall, Anslo drags Dembe to the same wall and starts counting down. Reddington is frantic, trying to wake up the unconscious Ressler for the jail access code - Ressler is still passed out after Reddington cut into his leg with a knife and cauterized a wound with flammable powder - but Dembe tells him it's okay. They've forged a friendship that transcends lifetimes, and they'll find each other again in the next life.
So Reddington kneels with Dembe, separated by a THICK pane of plexiglass, and they begin to pray. Later seasons will fully establish that Dembe is a Muslim, and in this episode I think he and Reddington pray in Arabic.
Last episode cut to black with a gunshot, with the implication that Dembe got killed. In this episode, it turns out that Aram stumbles across the guy who's taken Elizabeth Keen hostage, and that gunshot was Aram shooting him to free himself and Liz. Regardless, they get captured, and Reddington has to poke around in Ressler's obliterated leg to wake him up and give him the access code to the jail cell. Red and Liz are kidnapped, then they're taken through some tunnels to an ambulance, and Anslo's team work to remove the tracking chip in Reddington's neck.
Liz escapes and flags down a car to pursue the ambulance, but the chip gets removed and Reddington is lost on the wind.
After being tortured, Reddington is sat down with Alan Alda - his name in the show is Alan Fitch, though the show has not revealed this yet. Fitch makes it abundantly clear that this entire time that Reddington has been working with the feds, he could have snatched him. The morning before the Post Office siege, he could have had Reddington captured and executed without a fuss. He, and the people he speaks for, could have intervened at any time in the past twenty years and put an end to Reddington - but they haven't, because they believe that he has a dead man's switch that will reveal the information he has on them if he dies.
And the reason why they made a big show of besieging the Post Office and dragging Reddington out of a secure FBI black site is to show Reddington that there isn't a stinking, godforsaken hole on Earth that Reddington could crawl into to escape them. They can get to him anywhere. They can kill his associates like Luli ANYWHERE. It was a SCARE TACTIC.
So, despite the unpleasant jolt that was Anslo Garrick's siege of the Post Office, Fitch and his people let Reddington live. But there's a cost. Both parties remain critically aware of each other, and both parties agree to back the fuck off in exchange for their relative freedom to conduct their business. And with that, Fitch leaves.
After Liz gets home, she's alerted to some information that Aram found - she's working behind Cooper's back with Aram to get to the bottom of Reddington's disappearance. He says that a series of proxy calls from burner phones went through as Reddington was brought into the Post Office, and the number that all those phones contacted has been traced. The address is for a house that - to Liz's horror - resides just across the street from her home.
So she breaks in, and she finds a computer screen with dozens of video feeds - and the feeds are ALL FROM INSIDE LIZ AND TOM'S LOFT.
That man with the apple, the guy who appeared back in episode three? He had a comprehensive surveillance system, cameras and all, set up in Liz and Tom's loft. There have been cutaways between episode 3 and now where the guys are watching Liz and Tom, even joking around about watching the make-up sex they're gonna have after a particularly brutal argument. And not only has Liz stumbled across this set-up, but the people surveilling her are directly attached to the siege on the Post Office.
Liz is caught by one of the people monitoring the feeds, but she's able to sink a couple bullets into him. And as she goes to call the FBI in to let them know about this outpost - she stops.
Back in the ambulance, Reddington gave her a business name and the name of an associate - Mr. Kaplan. She's tried to get in contact, but she wasn't able to get through. But before she broke into this surveillance outpost, Mr. Kaplan texted her back asking her to call him - so with a dead body and a series of lurid camera feeds attached directly to her home, Liz contacts Mr. Kaplan.
Mr. Kaplan is a short, elderly woman.
Mr. Kaplan is also a consummate professional at disposing of dead bodies, removing incriminating evidence from said corpses, removing incriminating evidence PERIOD - and, at least given the circumstances of this episode, she commands a small private militia of highly trained paramilitary soldiers who fight on behalf of Reddington.
Mr. Kaplan is easily a Top 3 Characters contender for The Blacklist. It's a toss-up between Reddington, Dembe, Mr. Kaplan and Aram for me. I can't wait to talk more about her character traits in later episodes.
Mr. Kaplan is able to locate a telecommunications outpost in an industrial sector of Washington D.C., and Reddington's army storms the place. This is where Liz calls in the feds, and with what little information they're able to recover, they're able to make a case for the continued existence of the task force.
Remember back in episode 2, where Cooper was getting stonewalled at a meeting with some of the highest ranking officials in the FBI? Specifically, how a woman named Diane Fowler refused to cut a deal with Reddington until his work locating the Freelancer led to her begrudgingly inking a deal with Cooper's task force? After Anslo Garrick's assault on the Post Office leads to Reddington being taken, she IMMEDIATELY dissolves the task force. It's all a matter of tracking down Reddington as the criminal that he is - as #4 on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
The information that the task force are able to recover from this damaged telecommunications outpost shows that the same people who were monitoring Reddington were also monitoring Diane Fowler. Meaning, in theory, that the same people who just committed a massive, bloody massacre on an underground FBI black site to snatch and torture Reddington could be planning to do the same thing to Fowler.
And so, the task force is reinstated with the singular goal of finding Raymond Reddington.
The episode ends with a conversation between Elizabeth Keen and Raymond Reddington. He calls her to let her know he's okay, and that he'll be back if she's ever in danger. Before he hangs up, she asks him one question - Sam was her world growing up, having raised her as a single parent, but he wasn't really her "dad". So at this critical juncture, she asks Reddington: "are you my father?"
Reddington goes quiet for a moment.
"No."
His lip quivers, and he's left agape as he tries to form the words he needs to say next.
"Don't trust your husband."
And then he hangs up.
He pulls a beanie down over himself.
And he disappears into a crowd of people on the street, making his way off to god-knows-where - free, anonymous and angry.
In total? The Anslo Garrick two-parter is an absolute game-changer for The Blacklist. The background story isn't just about Red any more, it's about an enemy that's positioned well above him. Liz has taken her first step towards the dark side, in that she trusted Mr. Kaplan - a person she's never even met, who's explicitly working on the side of Raymond Reddington - before she trusted Harold Cooper and the rest of the FBI task force. Luli is dead, Raymond is free, a lot of FBI staffers have been killed and the Post Office is not as safe as it first appeared to be.
This two-parter is a 10/10 episode of the Blacklist. The threat was incredibly formidable, and they were only a pawn for a larger threat. After establishing the basic Blacklist episode formula, this episode throws it in the toilet with a tour-de-force performance by Ritchie Coster as Anslo Garrick. It's tense, it's shocking, and it's unbelievably entertaining on all fronts - Anslo Garrick is the show's first masterpiece episode.
I haven't been keeping up with this blog because I got a new game console, and I've been playing TONS of stuff. Path of Exile rips. I've been streaming myself flattening a Minecraft world down to sea level one block at a time. I'm about to get into the Injustice fighting games for the first time in years.
I have a fairly sizable backlog of posts that I'll continue to post on a weekly basis, but right now I'm kind of flailing around in video game purgatory and I'm finding it hard to get around to watching more of The Blacklist. I'm gonna try and get all the achievements for Puyo Puyo Tetris - fuckin PUYO PUYO TETRIS.
I'll try and get through the rest of season one this weekend. Either way, posts will continue to go live once a week until the backlog runs out; if I get hooked on The Blacklist again, we'll go back to two posts a week.
Synopsis: Ressler pulls Reddington out of a function in Germany by telling him that Elizabeth has been detained back in the US. Zipping home, Red is surprised by a pair of cuffs being slapped on himself and Dembe - Ressler lied, and he has to take Reddington in.
This is against Reddington's agreement with the FBI, but it's soon clarified that there's been a development: someone has put a price on Raymond Reddington's head. The FBI are bringing him back to the Post Office - a highly secure black site - to protect him.
Reddington is not amused.
He already has a price on his head - a running price, at that. And as the feds give him more and more info, Reddington dispels the veracity of their concerns until they finally come to a name.
The person who's out to kill Reddington is a man named Anslo Garrick.
Anslo Garrick, Reddington reveals, made his name off of knocking over some of the most secure locations in the world. He has burned and pillaged his way across the world, training a stateless militia to execute his grand designs, and he has manipulated the FBI into bringing Reddington into one singular, inescapable place so that he and his army can close in and wipe him out once and for all. And for Garrick, this hit is personal - Reddington shot him point-blank in the head five years ago.
He will murder, torture and destroy everything in his path to get Raymond Reddington's head on a platter. And seconds after the gravity of the situation is revealed - the lights go down.
Garrick has breached the Post Office, and he's making a direct beeline for Reddington.
Nobody in the Post Office is safe.
Thoughts: First of all - this might be the first episode where a character who isn't Aram says his name. This episode, which makes up the first half of the mid-season finale, is where that FBI tech whiz from episode three graduates into the fold as an official FBI task force member. He's made a couple appearances since, but this is where Aram truly comes into play as a character.
Secondly - there's a saying that goes like "you have to master the rules before you can break them". Picasso was a savant when it came to art, drawing incredibly lifelike portraits before he even turned 10 years old, and it's only as he got older that he began to deconstruct the building blocks of realism and develop his famous cubist art style. He was a master of his craft at a young age, and it's only through the mastery of his artform that he was able to successfully subvert the conventions associated with that artform and create something unique and revolutionary.
The Blacklist isn't at all comparable to Pablo Picasso. The way it turns its formula on its head is not as grand or profound as what I've just described with Picasso. But the way this show builds up to Anslo Garrick is within the same spirit of that phrase, "you have to master the rules before you break them".
The show has been following a solid formula so far - every episode has a villain of the week, Elizabeth Keen advances her own personal storyline with her husband Tom, and Reddington weaves within the narrative and does some cryptic stuff that makes him compelling. Ressler's a dickhead and punches some guys, Malik plays backup. It's a solid formula.
This episode is a major shock to the system. What it does to the pre-existing Blacklist formula is comparable to having your knee obliterated with a shotgun. This episode has a lot of outstanding Reddington moments, but the story isn't really separated into an A, B and/or C-plot. The Blacklister's plot in this episode plays directly into Reddington's storyline. The formulaic structure of the show has been compromised. We're all-in on Anslo Garrick's plot of the week; there's no room for anything else.
Remember how I was talking about how the Blacklist numbers are a form of power-scaling, and how Blacklister #178 would be getting up to some heinous stuff, but Blacklister #16 would be doing some scorched earth shit that would be affecting the show for seasons to come?
ANSLO GARRICK IS #16. Like quite literally, that's his position on the Blacklist. I was specifically talking about this guy.
And you know how I've been talking about how I've been recognising some of the character actors on this show?
Anslo Garrick is played by a guy named Ritchie Coster.
You might know him from three things. He was in a movie called Pete Smalls is Dead, starring Peter Dinklage, Tim Roth and a guy from Sons of Anarchy - there's a scene where he gets out of a hot tub full of therapeutic mud, and the censor bar obscuring his junk is MASSIVE. Not a great movie, but again - Ritchie Coster mud penis censor bar.
The second thing you might recognise him from? The Dark Knight. He was the Chechan, the guy who works with the Joker in the first half of the movie. He's there during the money scene. And he's also in Creed as a trainer with connections to Rocky's past. REALLY good actor - we went from Prison Break to The Dark Knight.
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My favorite part of this episode is the Ressler/Reddington dynamic. While Ressler is transporting Reddington to a secure location, they're ambushed by Garrick's men and Ressler gets a chunk of his leg minced by a shotgun blast. Reddington manages to get out of his handcuffs, procure some firepower and drive back Garrick's men - and when he's secured a path forward, he picks up a heavily wounded Ressler by the scruff of the neck and drags him into...
THE EXPENSIVE PLEXIGLASS CUBE JAIL CELL PROP FROM THE PILOT!!!
The thing about this plexiglass jail cell is that it's initially used to keep Reddington in. He starts the series off as the #4 most wanted man on the FBI's Most Wanted list; they want to keep this motherfucker IN. It lends kind of a Hannibal Lecter vibe to Red and Liz's first few episodes.
Now, Reddington is seeking shelter in that jail cell with a heavily wounded Ressler. Reddington can't get out, but Anslo Garrick can't get in. Hence the attached image: Garrick has to find out which strings to pull to get Reddington to open the cube, or find someone else who can open it for him.
One way that this episode is an inversion of how the show has been set up is that Ressler gets EXTREMELY fucked up. Remember how he did all that hand to hand combat in Wujing and got covered in blood, only to walk it off by the end of the episode? In this episode, he's bleeding buckets out of his leg and he's a ghostly shade of white, and Reddington has to OPERATE ON HIM to keep him alive. Dude fuckin cauterizes the wound with flammable powder, and Ressler doesn't feel a thing because he passed out when Red cut further into his leg with a knife. It's a GNARLY FUCKING EPISODE.
But there's a touching part of the episode where Ressler thinks he's gonna die, and Reddington assures him that they were both gonna get out alive. And the reason why is simple: there's too much living left for Reddington to do before he even begins to consider ceding himself to Garrick. It's a rousing, emotional speech that speaks to the power of hedonism, to just wanting one more bite of the apple, one more bottle of wine, one more perfect night of passion.
That's what keeps Red going. He wants it all - more and more, circumstances be damned. So he's going to get out of this whole thing alive. He's going back to Paris. He's taking that serene cruise out in the middle of the ocean. And when he walks out of the Post Office and gets to keep on living, he's going to bring Ressler with him - because everyone should be given the opportunity to just go out and live. He wants Ressler to love life as much as he does, to have a reason to keep on living through the ordeal they're suffering through.
The scene is especially poignant given what Ressler reveals about himself in relation to Reddington. Ressler was assigned the Reddington casefile by the FBI, and he spent five years chasing him to the ends of the Earth. He was engaged, but he was married to the job - his single-minded devotion to capturing Reddington and securing his legacy led his fiancee to call off the engagement.
And then one day, Reddington just fucking. walks into the FBI building and lets himself be detained. Five years of shit, and the guy SURRENDERS - completely independently of those five years of work.
So yeah, Ressler has been a massive asshole. But the history he has with Reddington kind of ruined his life - even if being a stuck-up crew-cut fed is what destroyed his relationship, not Reddington specifically - and to rub salt in the wound, he gets assigned to the Reddington task force and gets to watch him operate in and out of the criminal underworld. That's why he's been such a fuckface.
So this is already a 10/10 plotline. Ressler finally gets an extended storyline to himself, and it's about his unconventional relationship with Reddington - who's currently doing everything he can to save Ressler's life, up to and including impromptu surgery with a combat knife and some flammable powder.
The most notable thing this episode does is killing off Luli.
I like her a lot in the earlier episodes. Her death truly shocks Raymond to the bone - she was warm, kind, inviting to him. When she minced her words about Reddington's rash real-estate decision, she takes her snark back and earnestly tells him that it's a nice house. Later episodes show that there aren't a lot of places in the world where Reddington is truly at ease, and the amount of people he could say the same for is even lower than that; Luli meant a great deal to him, and her brains get splattered over the outside of the plexiglass jail cell for shock value. I knew it was coming - this isn't my first rodeo - but it was such a bummer.
Liz is caught in all this too, and her whole thing in this episode is kind of like a mediocre pastiche of Die Hard. It's alright. Aram is pretty competent, though he hasn't fired at a soft target yet - his role is cut short by the episode's cliffhanger, but he gets his moment to shine in the next episode.
Anslo Garrick is probably in my top 3 favorite episodes - specifically the Anslo Garrick two-parter, but this episode alone is an outstanding turn that the show makes right as it's settled into a comfortable formula. "Subverting the viewer's expectations" became something of a meme after Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out, but I just want to say that Anslo Garrick is an example of a show subverting expectations exceptionally well. It builds you up just to knock you down again. It's a very well-executed pivot.
Synopsis: This episode is kind of hard to describe from my perspective. The Blacklister of the week is General Ludd, a weird mish-mash amalgamation of Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street, who begin carrying out anti-capitalist terrorist attacks amidst the ongoing civil unrest of the Occupy movement. Occupy is never explicitly named, but a sign displaying the movement's name is shown on screen for long enough that a viewer can catch it.
This episode also features Elizabeth Keen's father, a man named Sam. He calls early in the episode to tell Liz he's getting some tests done, but he's in worse shape than he lets on. Liz is caught up in the General Ludd case and can't leave until they catch the mastermind, so Tom goes ahead of her to visit him in hospital - and he might not be the only person making a visit.
Thoughts: Oh brother, do I have some thoughts.
The storyline with Liz's dad keeps this episode relevant for anyone who's interested in watching The Blacklist. The General Ludd storyline, however, has aged pretty gracelessly. And I'm gonna get into politics for this one, so my apologies, but with this episode I'm gonna get into copaganda and the conservative bent that shows about law enforcement often have.
The Blacklist is basically two different shows smooshed together. You have the cop procedural side of things, where Elizabeth, Ressler and Malik skid up to an action setpiece in a black SUV and run around with their pistols - Ressler gets to punch a guy or break down a door, Liz shows her hardening resolve as she becomes acclimated to the hardball tactics she needs to use as an FBI field agent, and Malik uses any and all tactics available to squeeze info out of her perp. Then you have the criminal side, where Raymond Reddington resides along with the villain of the week. Reddington is very much a man behaving badly, crossing lines the FBI won't cross, and his criminal enterprises are often freely flaunted for flair, humor and drama.
As much as Reddington will undermine the FBI and get his hands dirty for his own nebulous ends, and for as delicious as the resulting drama is to watch, the "cop" part of this show - or the "fed" part, more accurately - hems close to some of the more defining hallmarks of copaganda. Malik tortures her perps for info because she's with the CIA, and her actions are framed as just because of how high the stakes are - civil liberties are as valuable as dogshit when the feds Need A Name. Stuff like that.
A show about feds who act above the law because the ends justify the means, making an episode about Anonymous/Occupy anti-capitalist terrorists, feels off. The real-life Occupy movement was quashed violently through police raids and the forcible dismantling of encampments, and I feel like the narrative of this episode - alongside other topical depictions of the Occupy movement in other contemporary TV shows and the way that the movement was spun by the news media - was a means of manufacturing consent from the public to shut that movement down before it became more "radical", like the group in this episode is.
And like I like this show a lot, and I love the characters - including Ressler eventually, who's probably the most insufferable fed of them all up to this point - but as a show that subscribes heavily at times to the "would you hit a Christian baby for a World Series-winning home run if the pitcher threw one at you" school of exaggerating harm to weasel the most optimal agreement out of a captive audience, I don't think this episode's premise of "AnonymOccupy terrorists bomb planes and burn money with the goal of bankrupting America" is made in good faith.
In total, I think the plotline has aged like dogshit in the sun, and I'm critical of this episode's intentions despite enjoying the show itself.
And look, one more quick dig before I get into the actual meat of the episode - but there's one thing that Reddington says that was a serious eye-roller. His thing about liking capitalism is whatever - of course he likes money. It's consistent with his character. He makes scores of the stuff through his criminal enterprises and one of his most defining characteristics is how much he enjoys the finer things in life.
The thing that gets me is his quip about how an actual Luddite wouldn't be taking a plane to escape, they'd dismantle the plane instead.
It's just like - the whole thing about Ludd is that he led a group of workers in dismantling and destroying a series of factory machines that automated the jobs of those workers, so that the fatcats who ran the factories - who were already taking a lion's share of the profit from the work being done - wouldn't be able to hoard even more money while leaving the redundant workers destitute. My understanding of the Luddite movement, at least what it started as, was a worker's movement against automation.
Airplanes don't automate a job that a human can do. People can't fly. Maybe it's a quip at the expense of how General Ludd starts the episode by bombing planes, but this particular line felt like kind of a lame platitude being dressed up as pointed critique by virtue of having the snappiest character with the most well-versed sense of conversation and vocabulary throw it back in the face of this week's disposable perp.
So with that out of the way - let me talk about the heart of the episode: the plotline with Liz's dad, Sam. The rest of this post will be talking about spoilers from prior episodes, as well as the most salacious details of this episode's fed-less storyline. And for the sake of disclosure, I'll be bending my policy on future episode details too - though I'll be careful not to give too much away.
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I was originally going to use my first Read More break on the Anslo Garrick post, but this post is already pretty long and this aspect of the episode is very juicy.
For starters, we learn that Liz was adopted - first from Reddington, who is STRONGLY IMPLIED to have been involved in Liz's adoption by Sam, and then from Tom as he speaks to Reddington. Then we learn that Sam and Reddington know each other very well; on top of last episode's house-bombing, this episode is some of James Spader's most emotional acting.
This is just rampant nerd speculation, but I feel like the reason we're getting more of a glimpse into Reddington's emotional state is because we're nearing the end of this filming block for season one. I know absolute donkey dick about filming blocks for any TV shows, let alone The Blacklist, and I haven't done any research - but here's my theory about Red's storyline in these last couple of episodes.
I think The Blacklist had a short run of episodes to see if it could pull ratings. The pilot was good, so they commissioned a season comprised of one filming block - if the resulting episodes were good, and if they were well-received, season one would receive a second filming block where they could film another eleven or twelve episodes of the show to round out the season.
I think that by this episode, the show had been picked up for that second filming block. There's a shot late in this episode that screams "reshoot", and given that we're ramping up to the mid-season finale - which, had the show not done well, might have been written as a series finale considering how violent and threatening it is - it makes sense to give Spader a bit more emotional weight to chew on.
He's had a lot to chew on given his contentious relationship with Elizabeth Keen, but we're seeing him touch on the past he had before defecting from the US in the prior episode, and we're seeing him have one of his more emotional outbursts in the midst of suffocating Liz's adoptive father - a dear friend of his. So with the show hanging on the line, give James Spader something a bit more vulnerable than the unknowable enigma he's been so far. If the show gets cancelled, it's some great character work for the viewers to enjoy before the show disappears forever. If the show gets renewed, then we're building something complex behind the Reddington character.
There's such a tenderness to the way that Red treats Sam, even after he's suffocated him. There's a deep sadness, and a well of gratitude for the man's devotion to raising Elizabeth. Reddington suffocating Sam is partially due to the dying man's desire to come clean to Liz about her parentage and the circumstances of her adoption, but I think they hash out an agreement with Sam's last phone call to Liz, and I think Reddington killing Sam is just as much a mercy kill as it is a way to protect his secrets.
And with Tom's conversation with Reddington, I like how deep you can read into their conversation based on whether you think Tom is a fraud or not. They work hard to make the dialogue sound equally free-flowing as a conversation between two strangers, and laden with context between two deeply repressed, entrenched individuals if you want to read into it that deeply. After all, despite Liz bringing Tom in to be interrogated - the money, passports and gun still existed, and you can't say for sure where they came from. It's pretty tense all things considered.
The funeral scene they have at the end is really good, and the scene with Red and Liz on the swings was very touching. He's obfuscating what he knows about the $100 bill schematic, and he's actively keeping his connection with Sam hidden from Elizabeth, but Liz telling Red stories about her adoptive father is helping Reddington grieve the loss of his friend as much as it's helping Liz mourn the loss of her father. It's a very solid scene.
Synopsis: The episode begins with a man getting on a train. Sitting his suitcase down, he's drawn into a short conversation with a friendly young woman who compliments his hat - she's able to name where he got it from, because she walks by that store every morning on the way to work and she's been saving up to buy the same hat for her dad. The man smiles and makes small-talk, but at the very next stop he gets up and walks off the train.
The woman notices that he forgot his suitcase, so she picks it up and scrambles to get it back to him before the doors close. She doesn't make it to the door in time, and she makes eye contact with him as the train carries her off with his suitcase in her hands.
The man pulls out a small remote control, and he presses a button.
The suitcase, still in the woman's hands, emits a fine gas.
Seconds later, she begins coughing. The blood vessels on her face bulge and turn purple, and the people around her begin to panic and scream - only to begin coughing themselves, the same vessels bulging and hardening around their face and neck.
In the span of a couple of minutes, everyone on that train carriage is dead.
Elizabeth Keen arrives on the scene where Ressler and Aram have been going over the attack. Aram has managed not only to pinpoint who the attacker was, but he's figured out that the briefcase he was carrying was the method of distribution - the weapon distributed a pathogen for an illness called Kurz disease that hardens the blood vessels of its victims and kills them over the course of a decade or so.
The main snafu in all of this is that the people on that train carriage were killed in a matter of minutes.
Reddington is able to identify the culprit - a man named Frederick Barnes who went dark years ago to manufacture chemical weapons and weaponised diseases for the highest bidder. His weapons exhibit trace amounts of a highly controlled substance, which is where Red's expertise kicks in - sending him off to meet his supplier while Liz and the taskforce hold down the fort and hunt for Barnes at home.
Thoughts: I'm trying to keep spoilers to a minimum through the pictures I attach to my posts. Sometimes I'll post who the Blacklister of the week is, like with the Stewmaker, and sometimes I'll go for a more innocent or visually interesting shot from the episode. If an episode is particularly explosive, I'll risk an impactful image - but even then, it won't be anywhere near the realm of the biggest twist of the episode.
For this post in particular, I decided to post a picture of Aram instead of posting a picture of this episode's villain.
There are two reasons for this.
The first reason is because despite having minimal interaction with the main cast yet, Aram has appeared in a couple episodes now and he's becoming a bigger presence over time. The main dynamic has been Ressler, Liz and Reddington, with Meera Malik being more of a kinetic action-oriented character and with Cooper overseeing the operation from the Post Office (the taskforce's base of operations - a decommissioned post office building that houses an FBI black site). Aram has started being their tech guy at the Post Office, but this episode has him out in the field with Ressler, AND it has him identifying the attacker right out of the gate.
To me, it seems like the FBI taskforce is getting into the swing of things. The first few episodes had Reddington dangling a nasty crook in front of them to get the FBI to go chase them - in this episode, the Blacklister of the week strikes and the FBI characters are able to narrow it down themselves. Red still offers some invaluable details that the team aren't able to glean, but they're getting better about it, and that's partially due to Aram's presence in the field.
Secondly - my post about the Courier mentioned that he was the first Blacklister who I recognised from another show. The Courier was played by a guy who was a major character on Prison Break - I don't particularly like that show, but I've seen enough of it to recognise Robert Knepper in this show. This episode's Blacklister, Frederick Barnes, is the second guy I recognise from another TV show: he's played by the guy who plays Wilson in House M.D.
I talked a lot about how the FBI taskforce feels a lot more capable now, and that's reflected in how split this episode's plot is. Reddington helps the taskforce with their case, but a lot of the detective work and boots-on-ground action happens between Liz, Ressler and Malik in DC while Red schmoozes around in Cuba and inquires about a house that's recently gone on the market.
And a part of that is because a major wedge has been driven between Liz and Reddington, but another part is because the FBI taskforce is becoming more of a team. They've got a long way to go, but as more and more puzzle pieces begin to fit together - in the form of new characters who offer their own unique characteristics and skillsets to the team - the taskforce becomes a tighter, more cohesive unit.
And in establishing this growing competency on the FBI's end, this episode is able to give Reddington a lot of screentime with Luli and Dembe. I really like Luli - she's a very fun, cheeky character. This episode gives her a fun little moment where she's disparaging this dingy little house that Red paid out the nose for, only to be met with a comment that's about as sentimental as it is blunt. To which she replies "...It's nice." Not in a pouty or snobby way either; her voice and demeanor noticeably softens. And the MUSIC that plays in this scene, my GOD.
She's been shown as a friendly, familiar and supportive person in Reddington's life, and it's always nice to see her get a little bit of a spotlight. And of course, it's always a pleasure to see Dembe make an appearance - he drives Reddington around in Havana, and he's the guy who Reddington entrusts the house to. It's a good episode to spotlight a particularly eventful day in Raymond Reddington's life - there's some crossover with the FBI storyline of course, but a lot of this episode is dedicated to Red, Dembe and Luli taking care of things on their end. I really appreciate that.
By this episode, the show is growing into itself nicely. Characters are reappearing and getting a little more refined, and everyone seems to be working a bit more like clockwork now that they've had a few weeks together in the field. And I almost forgot, there's a recurring character in the show who first appears in this episode - she's a doctor in Washington DC, and she has an Irish accent.
Every new episode feels like there's some brand new building block that forms the foundation of this show, and later seasons benefit a lot from that foundation; this doctor lady with the accent is a relatively small aspect of the entire show, but she's a familiar piece of the show's ensemble and it's just so nice to see her y'know. It's the little things. And of course, you have the deepening story of Reddington's past, which is a huge part of this show's overarching plot - but God knows you're not getting a serious taste of that for a long time yet.
So yeah, good episode. Liz, Ressler and the gang are on the rise, and Reddington has a lot of cryptic personal scenes to feed into his character's mythos. And once again, the Blacklister of the episode is a very compelling individual to watch.
Synopsis: The other shoe finally drops for Liz and Tom. There's a crate full of money, an unregistered firearm that's attached to an unsolved homicide in Boston, and dozens of passports with Tom's face on them. Tom is perplexed and furious, confronting Liz with the contents of the box and asking what it is, and Liz fires back with the research she's been doing on the firearm which lines up with a trip they took the previous year. As the fight escalates, Liz calls up a contact at the FBI to bring Tom in for questioning - and at the insistence that he has nothing to hide, Tom agrees that this would be the only surefire way to prove his innocence.
Meanwhile, Reddington comes to the taskforce with the next entry on the Blacklist: Gina Zanetakos. She's a corporate terrorist, intentionally damaging the reputation of her client's corporate rivals by sabotaging them. After tracking her down, they discover that she's been in talks with a German bombmaker to create a bomb that's been contaminated with cobalt-60.
But Reddington's Blacklister comes with an additional layer of intrigue for Elizabeth - because according to Red, Gina Zanetakos is Tom Keen's lover.
Thoughts: This episode spells out the thesis for Elizabeth Keen's character going forward. I've said before that Liz's life has been going pretty smoothly before Reddington's appearance turned everything upside down, and this is the episode where Liz brings this matter to the forefront. She's been at the agency for just shy of two months, and everything she thought she knew has been disrupted - now her husband is being questioned at an FBI black site while she hunts down a woman who may or may not be his secret assassin girlfriend.
Again, schlock. But it matters to the characters, and it's yet another escalation of the growing issues between Tom and Liz in their domestic plotline.
This episode is notable for two things. It's the first episode since Wujing that Aram has made an appearance in the show, and from here he'll only continue to become more prominent. The second thing is that this episode introduces Maxwell Ruddiger, a German bombmaker who'll appear on and off for the rest of the show's run. Alongside Dembe, Grey and Luli, Ruddiger is a close ally of Red's who forms one of many links in Reddington's chain of allies - I love this guy.
With the escalation of this plotline about Tom Keen potentially living a double life, the B-plot of this season is beginning to get absorbed into the series-spanning C-plot about Reddington. It seems to Liz that Reddington is actively fucking with her life, and she doesn't understand why he would say and do all of these things to destabilize her. Whether Reddington is being truthful about Tom or not, it's true that Reddington's sudden emergence has thrown Liz's life into total disarray, and I think this is where a lot of people get hung up on Elizabeth Keen as a character.
I'll talk about that way down the line, but I want to plant the seeds now. Elizabeth Keen has had her troubles, but she's married and she's been accepted into the FBI as a profiler, and she's about to adopt a baby with her husband. Seven weeks later, she's dragging her husband into an FBI black site to be interrogated, and it's seemingly all for naught. She's desperately confused and nothing makes sense to her any more, and all she can do is go with the flow and try to pick up the pieces as she goes along.
This is why I'm deeply sympathetic to the character of Elizabeth Keen. There's a lot more story to go, so there'll be numerous ups and downs to talk about, but I think Liz has earned the right to be a bit upset after everything she's been building towards in her life has begun to be systematically torn down right in front of her eyes by a dubious figure forcing their way into her life, bringing a murky worldview that she never asked for.
Synopsis: In the midst of her problems at home, Liz is called in to see Reddington about a prolific underworld courier. Acting as a middleman, the courier acts as an impartial broker of deals where he receives an item from one party, hides it, then receives payment from the second party in exchange for the item's location. If the courier feels that he has been compromised, he kills both parties and the item at stake is lost.
The courier is currently brokering a deal between two parties for $20 million. It could be a bioweapon, like a virus, or it could be a weapon of mass destruction - the sky's the limit for the courier. But the FBI taskforce soon discover what the cargo actually is: a 26 year old data analyst who's being sold to an Iranian spy.
The analyst has about twenty hours of air before he suffocates, so the taskforce have to mobilise fast and catch someone - anyone - who can lead them to the captured data analyst. But when the sale is burned by the courier, and the FBI aren't able to squeeze anyone for the information to save the captured analyst, the team is on a race against the clock to save their asset from suffocating.
Thoughts: I love that The Blacklist has two gonzo episodes in a row. The last episode was about a guy who used motel bathtubs to dissolve dead bodies into gunk, and this episode is about a courier with a very unusual talent.
I'm not going to spoil the courier's gimmick, but this episode is absolutely NOT for the squeamish. There are parts of this episode that are absolutely sick. The courier himself is kind of like a more vulnerable Terminator, and he's incredibly resourceful in a way that no other Blacklister has been before - but in saying that, we're only five episodes in, so that metric doesn't mean a whole lot. It's still a very creative episode with a very creative criminal at the centre of things.
After four episodes of Reddington turning Elizabeth Keen's life upside down, this episode feels like a significant bonding moment between them. I said in the Freelancer post (#145) that one way that the plexiglass cube prison is used in the show is to highlight how Reddington and the FBI taskforce don't trust each other yet - it's a physical prison, but it's also a visual metaphor for the team's lack of connection. As the show goes on, this plexiglass prison appears less and less - sure enough, it wasn't in the Stewmaker episode at all, and its absence continues in the Courier.
And this is the first time that I've recognised an episodic character from something else. I already knew James Spader from Boston Legal of course, but the titular Courier from this episode is played by an actor named Robert Knepper - he played a character named T-Bag in the cult TV show Prison Break alongside Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell. I only know Prison Break through a former friend of mine, so any connection I might have to Prison Break is pretty sour, but Robert Knepper makes for a very compelling bastard of a character in that TV show and he cuts a very distinct silhouette. He's a great fit for this type of character.
I've mentioned a couple of times that I'm really enjoying the early run of The Blacklist, and that's because this season is where the actual Blacklist component - here's a list of extremely high-level crooks that are so good the FBI doesn't know about them, let's go and fuck 'em up - is at its most prominent. Later seasons lean more into the myth arc, and eventually Reddington's insistence on Elizabeth Keen folds her into that series-spanning C-plot while other interpersonal plotlines begin to fill the B-plot that's currently occupied by Liz's home life with her husband Tom.
As time goes on, the focus shifts more towards that long-running myth arc and away from these episodic villains of the week, and eventually the myth arc is a bit too forcibly obfuscated and the villains of the week are fodder at best who barely matter any more. And one of my favorite things about this show is how strong its episodic component is! It's built into the structure of the show! Every episode focuses on a new bad guy, and their placement on the Blacklist - from the high 200s all the way up to #1 on the list - is broadcast alongside their name. Blacklister #178 is up to some heinous stuff without a doubt, but Blacklister #16? That guy is gonna inflict some scorched earth shit. The ramifications of #16 are gonna be felt for seasons to come. It's basically a form of power-scaling to signal just how important the episode's villain is going to be.
I'm of the opinion that this aspect of the show, the episode-to-episode villain plots, ends up deteriorating past a certain point to help prop up the myth arc. Past a certain point, I miss these episodic villains that fire on all cylinders. The Courier is mostly notable for being another sickening, schlocky gonzo horror-show directly after The Stewmaker, but by the time you hit season seven, these are the characters you REALLY begin to miss. So it's a pleasure and a delight to see this character and this plotline with a set of fresh eyes.
So yeah, overall this is a very entertaining episode of the show. Not for the faint-hearted, but it's very creative and a lot of fun.
