The Blacklist is a show I have watched since around the time the first season ended. For some reason I was drawn to watch an episode on Netflix and I was hooked. It has fantastic acting, writing, coherent world logic, characters, etc… and I can’t believe that for how much I heard about Breaking Bad, I hear almost zero mention of The Blacklist That comparative analysis is for another time however. What I want to talk about are my thoughts on where Season 5 ended and where the show is going in Season 6.

I wasn’t sure how Season 5 would turn out after the end of 4 and I have to say I was surprised and happy with the tone and feel of the first part of Season 5. It offers something new to the show and elevates it with levity, heists, interesting characters… a total gas! Once we hit Ian Garvey however, it starts to stutter. For how many great things this season had, it also had the most background, questionable, sub-conscious logic. There were small things happening that weren’t rubbing the right way here and there.

A standard season of The Blacklist is sort of divided between two story arcs, where something from the end of the previous season is resolved halfway through the following, then a new arc starts that climax’s at the end of that season, resolving or having the falling action in the beginning of the next. Season 5 did not adhere to this pattern and it this instance, it was not a good thing. Within the pattern, the writers of the show had establish a clear and confident control of tone and pacing within the show. Season 5 has a few episodes of falling action but with a new feel and interesting ideas, then almost immediately returns to complete focus on the ‘MacGuffin’ from the end of Season 4; the bones in the suitcase/duffelbag.

A lot of people are upset about the reveal that the bones are the “real” Raymond Reddington but I thought that was the only logical explanation from the start (or it was Katarina–but the best episode in the show provides the logic that this couldn’t be) and I don’t think that is the real issue. The core problem I have with Season 5 was that the pacing and plotting of the characters did not facilitate this reveal in a meaningful and logical manner. Our other main character, Elizabeth Keen, hit brick wall and the writers, who made her interesting at the outset of Season 5, dragged her back down to vacillating between trust and distrust with regards to Reddington, as we had already seen in the past. In the process she becomes completely unlikable, especially at the very end of the final episode, Sutton Ross where she regresses to blaming Red for killing Tom (whom he actually had a great final moment of peace with, tried to save, AND whom he explicitly warned not to proceed with the bones for his and Liz’s own safety) and others, acting like a brainless child. Liz’s logic doesn’t make any sense. Season 4 was literally about someone else’s (Mr. Kaplan) misplaced crusade against their own warped interpretation of Red’s integrity. It killed Kaplan and Tom did the same thing and got killed. Why is she now questioning Red’s integrity and going on a crusade?

Going back to the overall pacing, the season gets hung up on Ian Garvey for far too long. We are introduced to another investigator, who was looking into Tom Keen’s death, who the show, accidentally I think, ambiguously paints as in on the murder. We end up getting confirmation that he wants to help Keen and take down the murder, who they now know is a cop. Turns out this officer works on Garvey’s task force. Instead of having the investigator develop and last for several more episodes, he is killed almost immediately (byEEE!). The show goes on with the hunt for Garvey but the stakes seem odd and Garvey himself doesn’t seem to be as big or bad an antagonist as we had seen in the past (one of the subconscious things you start to question–why can’t Reddington nab this guy right away?). Eventually Garvey simply gets cornered and killed, no real revelations about the things he says to Red or where he was generally coming from. Another awkward tag-along is Reddington’s other daughter, Jennifer. It is not until the final minutes of the episode that the audience gets confirmation of whose bones are in the bag, the real Raymond Reddington. Again we have more logic breaking with Liz. She immediately assumes that Red is therefore not her father and sets out to destroy him, past experiences be damned.

One last note about Season 5, creator Jon Bokenkamp claims that this reveal was something they have had in mind since the shows inception. I do not disagree with him (more on that later), but this season contained some hack job editing and recontextualization of past scenes that I do think was disingenuous and was done to support the reveal, because the writing and pacing couldn’t the way it was set up. Bokenkamp claims that these lines of dialogue were intended and show “proof of concept”, that they weren’t pulling the Red isn’t Red plot-line out their ass, but he isn’t being entirely truthful and he makes it sound like they did in fact pull this out of their ass. These past scenes had their own context. People saying “he isn’t who you think he is” for instance, were relevant because he was Liz’s father. In trying to cover up the poor structure and writing for Season 5, Bokenkamp incriminates himself as a hack.

Season 6 – The Prestige Solution



Unless the writers go off the rails and destroy the internal logic of the show, again one of its defining aspects, with some Chris Carter nonsense (the Raymond is Katarina theory falls squarely into this area), The Blacklist is the Prestige. Raymond Reddington may not be Reddington, but he is an (unknown to most, specifically family records–lest this not make sense either) identical twin of the person who was Reddington. That person is the one who was shot in the struggle and house fire years ago. Our Raymond is Liz’s father and Katarina’s lover. The real Reddington was the father of Jennifer and husband of Naomi. This, just like in the Prestige, explains why Reddington would spend all his life’s efforts to protect Liz and not at all focus on… his other daughter, why when he had the WITSEC list he didn’t use it to find her, why he wasn’t looking for Naomi in the first place.

I have, at least since Season 2, consistently noticed a dissonance between the running history of Reddington’s disappearance. There seemed to be two (or several) different series of events describing the origin of Red’s disappearance that never fit together:

He was a naval intelligence officer returning home early Christmas morning with a gift of presents for his kids. His car was found abandoned.

He returned to find his house aflame and rescued his daughter from it.

He was already at the house before the fire occurred. Liz shot her father then Red saved Liz from the fire.

There maybe some more floating variations I am not thinking of, but it has always been clear that there was this swirling ambiguity as to actually what happened and how it happened, with two distinct groups of facts. Then we find out Red has a wife, not Katarina, and the still another daughter. Then there is the episode where he buys the house, looks around, finds children’s height measurements tucked away, stares out of body into the backyard, then blows the house up. These incongruities have always been present.

If the show follows its own creative logic, unbeknownst to anyone, Raymond was two people, both existing in tandem until one of them got involved with the Russian double agent they were assigned to, which caused the forces of both the U.S. Government and KGB to come after them, ruining the seamless duality they shared. It is clear that Oleander, Katarina’s father, understands Raymond in a way that no one else (except perhaps Dembe) does at this point. This Prestige solution logically answers all of the incongruities placed into the show at this point, from the dissonant origin, to the fact that we know Raymond has been seen by several main characters over the years and they don’t recognize him as anyone other than himself. Any deviation from this course will break the show’s coherent and careful logic and world building and will signal its collapse. The only other solution is to walk back what happened by saying the bones were fakes or something like that.

Having said all this, I think Season 5’s reveal is logical, just very poorly executed. The show didn’t set up the right time for it to happen and combined with the questionable writing of Liz’s character, it put everything on very shaky ground. This makes it seem like some hoaky television nonsense when it doesn’t really seem to be that at all. I suspect that Liz’s writing is another unfortunate result of the bad pacing. The reason she stupidly assumes that, since the bones are the real Reddington, Red is not her father is to facilitate more of a mask of ambiguity to keep the audience guessing. It doesn’t work and isn’t worth the damage it does to the logic. The show has repeatedly taught us that Reddington’s goals and morality, his integrity, is not to be questioned. They are singular in their conclusion.

Season 6 had a delayed renewal and thus is scheduled to air sometime in 2019. I anticipate this will be the final season. My hypothesis is that it will involve a crazed Liz crossing moral boundaries in order to destroy Red, even though he exists for her and at the same time is trying to save her from herself. In the end he will die and she will be forced to confront reality.