Who is Red, the man who has been posing as Raymond Reddington? Part 5: Anslo Garrick to Madeline Pratt
By 1.09 we have quite a bit of information on Red. 1.09 presents a rare occasion to see Ressler pull a fast one on Red. Without any glitch he plays on Red’s worry about Liz, by telling him she was detained and instead of answering his questions, Ressler fuels his anxiety. Well done Donald.
What the hell do you want?
Keen needs you.
Then why isn’t she here?
You mean why didn’t she fly to Munich on 10 minutes’ notice?
You made the trip.
She’s been detained.
By whom?
The situation’s above my security clearance. I was just given the job of locating you.
No, you said she’s been detained. Is she in danger?
There’s a jet on the tarmac at Munich International.
My plane’s faster.
Red does not call Liz directly, proving that like with the wedding, he IS subject to emotions in his blind spot: Liz.
Now I want to draw attention to who is used to provide the false intel: Meera Malik. It is CIA intel, and while we did not know at the time about Peter, he was there. Anslo is the other time he shot an associate in the head and missed. Red sometimes does not learn from his mistakes. He thinks Anslo survived because of some different ammunition, but the reality might be different.
Red tells Ressler quite a bit about him:
Allies today, enemies tomorrow. The world is a complex place, further complicated by man’s fickle nature. Years ago, I saved a man’s life under a beautiful old cedar tree in Lebanon. A month later, he tried to kill me in a hotel in Damascus. I understood. Allegiances shift. A month later I broke his neck with a shower caddy. It’s this job today, another one tomorrow. That needle in your arm becomes the one in your neck. It’s just that fast.
leaving out the poetics lines, he tells Ressler actual information:
It’s the core of your business Information. Misinformation. I don’t know how you did it, Reddington. Forsaking the flag, abandoning your country.
We become who we are. We can’t judge a book by its cover. But you can by its first few chapters and, most certainly, by its last.
So, what’s it all about, then, the blacklist? Revenge?
Oh, revenge is too easy and over so quickly. I would hope for more than that.
he tells him: We become who we are. We can’t judge a book by its cover. But you can by its first few chapters and, most certainly, by its last.
We can’t judge a book by its cover. is a saying, but now, knowing that Red is not RR, does it not take a different meaning? Do not judge a person by his/her “cover” identity? So not just take it at face value, but in the case of an undercover, the face value might not even be who he/she really is.
Judge him by its first few chapters, would that be his Naval career or some other part and we will have to wait to the last.
And he talks about wanting more than revenge. So he is not saying that he is not after a revenge, he is saying that is not all, and what is more than revenge? Justice, and eliminating something that is wrong. He will retake the revenge issue by citing Confucious to the Debt Collector, and in the words to Tom in the deleted scene when he tell Tom that it is not possible to go on a scorched earth revenge mission and come back and be a father.
He hangs Luther Braxton by a tie in Peter’s house, as Braxton had hung an associate of his years back.
This revenge business and the justice by his own hand, introduces a theme for Red. The religious imagery and the theme of the devil and the saint, which culminates in the Endling: [I believe] That a sinner can also be a saint.
We have had several images of Red as an avenging angel, dressed in black, down to the beanie, with Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” as the song, in a scorched earth mission, killing all the participants in the Anslo Garrick incursion. We have had him taking cover in Sinagogues and Churches, using them as Sanctuaries, and we have had many references to him being the devil:
I don’t know how you do it the duplicity. How does the devil in you contend with the angel? I would have kicked her out years ago.
Speak of the devil, It’s the devil
Manny, as always, you look like hell.
Says the devil himself
You’re squatting in a church.
I usually have a devil of a time getting to sleep, but here I sleep like a babe in the manger.
when the envelope came back, I was scared it would confirm the devil was my father. I didn’t look at it. Threw it away
I’m the devil on one shoulder, and you’re the angel on her other. She’s in troubled waters, Harold. Please help her to navigate them.
God doesn’t want me, and the devil isn’t finished.
and Liz references it to the physchologist, accepting that he is good and bad:
Some of what he’s done is unimaginably bad. But some of what he’s done for me is unimaginably good.
and we have the question and answer that sparks controversy even now, over 4 years after the fact:
One question, please. It’s about my father. Growing up, Sam, he raised me like his own. He was my whole world. But he wasn’t my father.
What is the question, Lizzy?
Are you my father?
No.
now let me put what Red tells Sam:
You will always be her father, Sam. I can only hope to love her and protect her as you would have.
so here it is Liz, saying that good as Sam was, even describing him as her whole world, he was not her father, while Red had told Sam that Sam would always be her father. Red’s views on paternity are clear:
It doesn’t matter. She lived at at your house as your daughter on and off for four years. Sometimes you were there, sometimes you weren’t. What difference does it make?
Are you her father?
Sam Milhoan raised her after that.
Are you her father?
It doesn’t matter.
biology should not matter to the child, it should not matter to the parent. It should not matter to Kirk, because he believed she was his daughter for 4 years, and after that Sam raised her. If Red is her biological father or not should not matter.
So when Liz is sayng that Sam was not her father, she is denying all that Sam did. Red had promised Sam that he would not take his place. How can he now say yes. Even if Lis is not his biological child, he has been protecting her as her father would.
But Liz’s quest is about her origins, and that involves her biological parents.
Red and the Beef Stroganoff is one of the best illustrations of how Red finds pleasure in the little things. Just because he was there for information does not mean he was not anticipating the meal, or enjoyed the smell and the company. The theme will be repeated many times in the show, Cynthia and the cucumber dip, Mads Eriksson and the cookies and milk, the beef in his storage units, the bellinis, etc. etc.
Red has a zest for enjoying life, a trait he shares with Katarina. But then I imagine that when so much of your life is risk, undercover, pretending, the only way to survive and be good is to enjoy the little moments.
in the Alchemist we see Red telling us he loves puzzles and we see him assembling one: who was the mole in the post office: he had discarded Aram, the fist mole, and Meera knows he will come for her, because she signed the documents, so she knows she was a patsy too.
The next case is one of the most interesting in the show, not in itself, but in the themes and how Red describes it:
There’s nothing more profound and of lasting consequence than the decision to have a child. The exploitation and perversion of that decision is the stock and trade of a truly evil organization
moving stolen children is difficult. There’s copious amounts of paperwork.
I always felt he is talking about something else. In that time we had no idea of the story, but now we have 2 children stolen: Liz herself, by the father, because the Cold War was too hard on him, and Tom, by people unknown for reasons unknown, and we have had Agnes stolen by a man who believed himself he was the grandfather.
Red is talking about paperwork to move a stolen child and because Liz was smuggled or brought from Canada, so unless she was not moved through a border and they took back roads, chances are she was moved with forged paperwork to the US.
But also I am intrigued by the first phrase: There’s nothing more profound and of lasting consequence than the decision to have a child. The exploitation and perversion of that decision is the stock and trade of a truly evil [X]. Could he be talking about Katarina?
When your mother was pregnant with you, it was terribly inconvenient. The Cold War was ending. Her country was falling apart. Everything she had ever known. She dreaded having a child. Almost aborted it. Not one day of her pregnancy did she ever think of you as anything but a curse. And then, from the second you were born there was never a day when she thought you were anything but a blessing
Katarina deciding to have the child, then exploiting that by making Rostov believe it was his? Did Carla do the same to Red with Jennifer?
Is that his shame? That he allowed Katarina to use Liz as bait for Rostov, and was Katarina, the one who was teaching, protecting and nourishing Liz:
if I nourished and protected and taught the child, she would be safe and happy.
@niteshade925 directed my attention to the 1oth clue that Red gives us, joining apples, hair, names, rabbits, dogs, Christmas, eyes, puzzles and the indication to look at all the clues together. and this clue is how to look at DNA, not just as an exact match, but looking at the relatives, which is how they find the mothers of the children, the abducted women.
So I think it is saying look how to find people through DNA, and an exact match is not always needed, look at the relatives. How were the bones identified in season 5, when we are told that Reddington DNA is not on file in 3.11? Look at the relatives: Garvey had Jennifer, the alleged daughter of RR, except we know that Red is not Jennifer’s father (”I’m never going to tell you where my daughter is.”), even if there is doubt that Red was the man she thought of as being her father.
While 3.12 introduces another DNA use: create a false trail by making someone appear to be dead while they are alive. It could be a way to think of the bones, that DNA was extracted from a tooth, and the tooth could have been planted. Yet there are ways to tell if a tooth has been modified, and the skeleton had a set of intact teeth, so that would have required a much simpler ID process, a teeth match, there was no DNA needed for ID.
Red also kills Diane, even after she offers him to tell him:
I know the truth, Red about that night about what happened to your family. Do you want to know the truth?
More than anything in the world.
This does not sound like Red. Nothing stopped him from taking Diane, patching her up, torture the hell out of her, get the information, then kill her. There was no need to leave a mess there, and not get the information. He always has, even if it involves such a threat as burying a body in a cement box to a Native American scared not of death or pain, but of eternity in a box.
And to me the answer is that he already knows what happened to his family, which at the time we did not know. But if Carla and Jennifer were in Protective custody to be hidden from the cabal, and the cabal was running surveillance on Diane too, then the worst that could happen is that Diane blabs that they are in protective custody.
He shoots her when she makes a threat:
If you come after me, if you so much as lay a finger on me–
shooting her again when she offers to tell him about his family.
Madeline Pratt offers us a lot of information, starting with the safe deposit box in Istanbul.
I didn’t know anything about the safe deposit box until I saw the will. I’ve had all the necessary paperwork certified– the trust and the death certificate.
The paperwork is in order. But to access your husband’s box, you will need the key.
Madeline gets to is by claiming she is Reddington’s widow and by stealing the key, to prove she could open it, with the trust and the death certificate.
Reddington had a box that when a woman went with the right papers, a trust and a death certificate, and said she was the widow, she could get in, provided she had the key. That means that in the paperwork of that box there was a Mrs. Reddington, a trust for her, if she had a key.
Remember Red giving Carla something, unseen by Liz and Frank? I bet because his previous safety net for her was gone with Madeline.
then we have the bloody Christmas house story. But again remember the campy performance of the gay minder, or his offering Madeline to go to Tegucigalpa, and finally when Madeline double crosses him by using him as a distraction he engineers a performance where he pretends they are kidnaped and he is taken for torture, arriving back bloody, sweaty and unable to even stand. But notice how padded he is in the street before they are “tased”.
I do believe the story has truths: Part 1 is a lovely recollection of a Christmas eve story, I think possibly the idea where this came from,
I ran out of gas. I was so excited to get home, I didn’t even bother to look. My head was just I ran out of gas. It was Christmas Eve. I pulled off to the side of the road. Seemed like it’d been snowing for days. No traffic. No cars to come help. Just me and a car full of gifts. It was more than 20 years ago. I must have walked four miles five, maybe. It was so still. Just cold and white. The whole time, all I could think about was them in our house. The warm light in the windows, the smoke from the chimney. The sound of my daughter at the piano. The smell of the tree and the fire, oyster stew on the stove. I was so upset to think that I’d ruined Christmas for them, being late, leaving the gifts in the car. But the closer I got, the more I realized how funny the whole thing was, how much they’d love the story, daddy running out of gas, how every Christmas they’d get such joy from telling that story at my expense. And then, finally I got there. I walked I walked through the door.
the second part is suspiciously similar to Liz’s description of Zamani’s attack
And there was just blood. All I saw was blood. All there was was blood.
Uh, there was blood. There was blood everywhere.
while the third part is a memory of a young daughter.
I can I can still s-smell the nape of her neck feel her little fingers on my cheek her whisper in my ear. That’s why I didn’t show up in Florence. It’s why I haven’t shown up in a lot of places over the years.
Since only a true monster would use a tragedy of that caliber to extract information, in the midst of a fake kidnapping and torture session. But he cared enough to also give her an explanation.
The story of the effigy and the father who “died” the day the soldiers came is interesting.
All I remember is opening a door and seeing him holding the statue. He slipped something inside it, a piece of paper…. But he placed the effigy in my arms and told me to run and protect it.I was 7. When the Americans found me, they took the statue as a trophy. They let me go, but my father
What happened to your father?
I never saw him again. For me, that was the day he died.
But the father is not dead, the father became someone tied to an extremist group
Homeland has a person of interest tied to that mosque– a cleric named Firas Ashear.
And he’s connected how?
We’re not sure. But the biggest red flag is his family’s connection to The People’s Liberation Alliance. Extremist organization out of Aleppo. Apparently, the father is a local warlord - with financial ties to the group.
An interesting parallel to Liz and the fire. And Red, who I think at the fire ceased to be who he was to become a criminal.
And I somehow think something more about the Kungur6, infiltrated in the 1970, because the age fits with Dom’s.
