I Watch TV: The Blacklist Season 10

 

The Blacklist

The Blacklist started, ten seasons ago, with notorious criminal Raymond Reddington (an affable, murderous James Spader) turning himself in. He insisted on only talking to FBI analyst Elizabeth Keen*; when he spoke to her he gave up, one by one, a “blacklist” of even worse criminals. A secret FBI taskforce took down these criminals.

At the end of Season 8 Keen was killed; Season 9 explained who did it and why (Martin Gerard, Red’s lawyer, who kept the criminal empire running throughout the various shenanigans and was jealous when Red was going to hand it over to Keen). Gerard had one last dead man’s revenge left over. He got Wujin, a Chinese assassin from Season 1 we’d all forgotten about, out of prison. Wujin spends the first half of this Season trying to attack Red and the Taskforce, his greatest weapon being turning Red’s allies with the information that Red is working for the FBI.

Red defeats him with a conceptually cool method that turns on the logistics of the secrecy of the Taskforce’s base (The Post Office), only to then turn it around in a rather silly twist. Yet it’s an important one as at one point Red and his hacker are in the base unsupervised and delete Red’s existence from the case files.

This leads into the final sequence of episodes. Red has occasionally been making good on promises and this steps into high gear, bringing together many valuable artefacts and selling them on the cheap to particular people, or giving them to those he’s worked with. Meanwhile a congressman, eager to look into fraud and waste, discovers that a secret taskforce in the FBI has spent hundreds of millions of dollars but does not seem to have any information available to audit. Despite the best efforts of Red and the Taskforce to dissuade him, he won’t stop.

This is the final season. We’ve given up on the twisty, turny, tricky secrets underlying the show, but there are some logistical secrets left. How does Red know things? How can he facilitate the movement of people, cargoes and money that have people owing him so many favours? When he puts the team onto some strange smuggling they track down a vast conspiracy that will inevitably end up unravelling Red’s own organisation, just after all his loyal employees are paid off and vanish.

Because the congressman won’t give up on his investigation, the final stage, wrapping up the Taskforce with it’s secrets intact, doesn’t go off without a hitch. In order to avoid them being charged themselves the Taskforce must fulfill one last task, their original one. Arrest Raymond Reddington.

After ten seasons, several cast changes (including introducing Red’s forensics guy this season then bringing him onto the team for the last dozen or so episodes) and giving up one large part for the last two seasons, what is to be made of The Blacklist? In the end it stands and falls on the villain of the week, and that was generally good. If sometimes the crime or the criminal were cliched, flat, cartoonish or just stupid, that says more about the nature of crime than anything else. That they had one or two tricks left even after ten years was impressive. And every time James Spader, affably explaining exactly how much trouble someone was in via a convoluted anecdote, cold-eyed pulls up into the depravity of what’s going on – usually the crimes based on real events – that’s what sold it. And then he would turn again to smooth, almost bland threats.

But here’s the thing. There’s over 200 episodes. And a big villain for each of the ten seasons (sometimes more). And endless convoluted fragments of the relationship between Red and Liz, and thus Red’s motives, first in becoming a criminal, then in coming back. And how much of it do I recall? Not that much. So when Agent Ressler has his final confrontation with Red, and says the last words of the series, “Thank God,” I felt it as relief more than satisfaction. It could not live up to what it promised at the start, it could only be a TV show with elaborate crimes and policing, with debts and favours and duties, and especially with temptation. Do people get what they deserve? No they don’t, but sometimes they do get an ending.

Watch This: Wicked criminals getting their comeuppance and some good character work
Don’t Watch This: The show was very concerned with a mystery, threw it away and then gently progressed to an end

* Keen was either his daughter, or the daughter of the real Raymond Reddington, frankly that stuff was all a bit too complicated and spread out over eight years. Plus, as this review will go on to explain, it’s no longer relevant.