7 Harsh Realities Of Rewatching The Crime Thriller Series

The Blacklist is undoubtedly a contender for the best crime thriller series of the past decade. The 10-season NBC show starring James Spader revolves around a criminal informer who becomes an FBI informant in exchange for immunity from prosecution for his crimes. As great as The Blacklist is, though, it’s impossible to ignore certain harsh realities upon rewatching the series.

In its finest moments, the show is right up there with the likes of Better Call Saul and Peaky Blinders as one of the outstanding crime dramas of the last 10 years. The Blacklist’s best episodes are masterpieces of suspense, in which the show’s labyrinthine plot is tightly coiled, and Spader’s central performance truly earns his character’s iconic status.

Raymond “Red” Reddington’s best quotes in the series read like timeless philosophical epigrams, helping to characterize one contemporary television’s greatest enigmas by striking a sharp contrast with his prosaic approach to taking human lives. But The Blacklist doesn’t always appear to have full command of its characters and their stories.

The show increasingly veers into fanciful territory during the second half of its run, while riding roughshod over character arcs that it’s spent several seasons building. On the other hand, there are home truths about its story that repeat viewing inevitably draw our attention to.

The Blacklist Falls Off After Season 6

When it comes to ranking The Blacklist’s seasons, the show’s final four years are its worst by some distance. The crime thriller entangles itself in more and more outlandish expositional tangents about the personal history of Raymond Reddington and Katarina Rostova, jeopardizing the FBI task force Red works with to locate wanted fugitives on the list of the title.

Meanwhile, Raymond’s would-be daughter, FBI profiler Liz Keen, becomes borderline unbearable, as her character arc takes a downward turn in an unnecessarily dark direction. She isn’t the only sympathetic character in the show who transforms into someone we don’t enjoy watching, either.

Overall, the later seasons of The Blacklist seem to lose all sense of focus, as the mystery-box element of Red’s identity relegates the show’s initial premise to the level of a secondary concern. Many of those who particularly enjoy the early seasons will barely recognize the series by its finale, a problem that only becomes more pronounced with multiple viewings.

Tatiana Petrova Is A Terrible Choice To Babysit Agnes

One of The Blacklist’s best villains, Tatiana Petrova excels in pulling the wool over Liz Keen’s eyes as to her real identity, successfully posing first as a kindly neighbor, then as Liz’s mother, Katarina Rostova. Knowing what we already know about Tatiana upon rewatching the series, the scenes in which she babysits Liz’s daughter, Agnes, make for especially difficult viewing.

Liz hires her as a babysitter while she’s pretending to be her neighbor Madeline Tolliver, and she bonds with Agnes after giving her some books. Having ostensibly never met her mother before Tatiana appears on the scene, Liz has no clue who Madeline really is. Still, Tatiana’s forwardness with Agnes ought to have raised at least some alarm bells.

With hindsight, it’s easy to join the dots between Tatiana’s suspicious behavior when Liz first invites her in for a cup of coffee in the third episode of season 7, and her murder of an armed agent while babysitting Agnes four episodes later. Once Liz believes Tatiana to be Katarina, she apparently no longer feels safe leaving Agnes in her care.

By then, however, Agnes has already drawn a picture of the man she saw lying in a pool of blood after Tatiana fatally broke his neck. Liz’s choice of babysitter has surely scarred her daughter for life.

There Are Too Many Filler Episodes

A show with 218 episodes spread across 10 years of television is bound to have some filler episodes. But the number of Blacklist episodes you can skip without missing any worthwhile action or losing your grasp of the overarching plot is surprisingly high for such a suspenseful thriller.

In fact, there are some installments of the show which it would be off without. Episodes such as season 5’s “Lawrence Dane Devlin” and season 9’s “The Bear Mask” are self-contained exercises in fruitless distraction. At the other extreme, the likes of “Misère”, “Between Sleep and Awake”, and even season 2’s “The Major” are essentially glorified clip shows.

Liz Keen’s Death Is Part Of A Larger Problem

Fans of The Blacklist tend to fall into two camps. There are those who feel that Liz’s death at the end of season 8 ruined the show, whereas others were delighted to see the back of the character.

Yet, The Blacklist killing Liz off when it did is neither the fundamental problem with her character arc, nor a solution to what the series was already turning into when she died. Liz was an essential component of what made the series so great during its first few seasons, but was widely disliked by fans by the time she died.

The reason for this change in viewers’ sentiments is that the show repeats storylines in which Liz needs to be rescued to the point that it becomes tiresome to watch. In addition, she becomes increasingly antagonistic towards Red, despite him seemingly making it his imperative to protect her from harm.

More than anything else, though, it’s Liz’s understandable obsession with finding out the truth about Red’s real identity that makes her increasingly unlikable during the course of the series. The more this plot point takes priority in The Blacklist, the less of a crime thriller the series becomes.

The Last 2 Seasons Ruin Dembe As A Character

Dembe Zuma is Raymond “Red” Reddington’s right arm, a loyal and dependable bodyguard who answers to Red before any agency. So, when Dembe is unexpectedly recruited by the FBI at the start of season 9, it flies in the face of everything we know about him.

This nonsensical plot development combines with the increasing hostility we see between Red and Dembe from season 8 onwards. The Blacklist’s final two seasons completely ruin Dembe as a character, by arbitrarily breaking the unconditional allegiance he has to Reddington that had apparently been fostered for decades prior to the events of the series.

Not Everyone On Raymond Reddington’s Blacklist Is Revealed

Many of The Blacklist’s characters are actually numbers on the list of the title, which Red uses to help the FBI and U.S. Navy SEALs track down wanted criminals. The numbers even extend to Red himself and Liz Keen, who are the first two names on the list.

In an innovative spin on case-of-the-week style crime dramas, early episodes of the show tend to focus on one member of Red’s blacklist per week. One of the main issues of The Blacklist’s later seasons is that it moves away from this format to focus almost entirely on Red’s personal story.

As a result, we never get to know the identities of all 200 people on the titular list, despite there being more than enough episodes to cover each of them. Only 176 out of the 200 are revealed in some form during the course of the series, while some of the most prominent members, including Number 2, remain a mystery.

Red’s Identity Is Never Resolved

To make matters worse, The Blacklist never resolves who Raymond Reddington is in explicit terms. The predominant fan theory that Red was formerly Katarina Rostova before a gender transition is implied to be the case, particularly at several key moments during season 8.

But Red dies without his true identity ever being revealed to any characters in the show. Only Liz Keen appears to realize Red’s true identity, in the moments before she breathes her last breath. But even she doesn’t reveal the secret.

As a consequence, the central thread of The Blacklist’s plot throughout its last five seasons is never actually resolved. Whether fans have solved the mystery for themselves or not, this open-ended outcome hardly makes for a satisfying conclusion to the series.

Release Date

2013 – 2023

Showrunner

Jon Bokenkamp

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  Diego Klattenhoff

  Donald Ressler