I Watch TV: The Blacklist

The Blacklist

Is this show not over? Did they not intend to finish it last year when it got interrupted by covid? Was this not supposed to be the end*?

Apparently not. The Blacklist is a show in which amoral arch-criminal Raymond Reddington (James Spader) offers up a “blacklist” of even worse criminals to the FBI, insisting that he work with profiler Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone). So we get a smorgasbord of crime and criminals every week, sometimes basically Bond villains, sometimes the contractors who do the work so that Bond villains can do their weird plots, sometimes criminals who are actually terrible, awful monsters, and occasionally stuff based on real crimes that is so outrageous no one would believe it.

These are often good. Maybe that’s one of the reasons the show keeps going. Another is the characters, starting with Reddington himself, who jovially enjoys himself murdering and conning and setting people up, and also recruiting and helping and fixing things. Glenn, who works in the Motor Vehicle Department and who Reddington uses to track people down, and also indulges slightly more than he wants to, dies in this latest season (the actor died). He had a characteristically ludicrous explanation for the money Reddington paid him; that he was pop-star Huey Lewis’s muse. His last wish is for Reddington to get Lewis to speak at the funeral (actually there are several last wishes but this is the most interesting one). It’s a fine bit of TV as we feel the absence of Glenn in this extremely Glenn-plot.

So yes, crime of the week and a fistful of characters we might be convinced to care about or at least be entertained by their antics. But the over-arching plot, which boils down to why Red turned himself in and insists on working with Keen has got tangled into a nonsensical knot. They took half an episode to explain it all again and it immediately floated out of my head with the credits and it wasn’t finally resolved anyway.

They mixed things up a bit by having Keen go on the run to try to prove Red was Russian agent N-13, and teaming up with Townsend, another very rich criminal whose family was killed by the actions of N-13. Of course they all intend to betray each other, trying to subvert each other’s allies, and Red and the FBI agents are doing the same. But all the secrets and bluffs and double-crossings just go in circles. The answers lead to another layer of the onion, and the onion is always the same.

There’s a rather surprising death at the end of the season but people have died and it’s been fake before. In fact this very character. So despite their best efforts it feels weightless.

Watch This: There are a lot of interesting and occasionally clever, gruesome and/or fun crimes
Don’t Watch This: They will never explain what is going on and if they do it will disappoint

* Did I put off writing it up because I thought it would be over this year?