SPOILERS!
The Blacklist ran from 2013 to 2023, an NBC thriller centering around Raymond Reddington, one of America’s most wanted criminals who turns himself in to the FBI. He offers to work with Liz Keen, a relative rookie profiler in The Agency, to bring down heinous villains across 10 seasons. I loved this show, especially Red, who was an enigmatic concierge of crime, often relying on his charisma to get things done rather than violence. However, he wasn’t opposed to it, and his unpredictability, along with his relationship with Liz and the FBI, were the reasons why the show worked so well.
Over its full run, The Blacklist went through a few different incarnations, culminating with the death of its (sort of) protagonist, James Spader’s Reddington. But maybe it’s the endings of other pivotal characters in the show that added a few dinks to the show’s quality over the years. Whether it was a failed spin-off, a narrative decision, or simply an actor wanting to pursue something different, these were major turning points for the show that took a bit of getting used to. Or, maybe, their exits really damaged the story the showrunners were trying to tell.
Who is to say? Well, let’s discuss, and we can work it out together.
Sometimes protagonist, sometimes antagonist, Tom Keen (Ryan Eggold) was killed off in Season 5 of the show, leading to his wife, Liz, going off the rails. Her quest to avenge her husband’s death at the hands of Ian Garvey, a former U.S. Marshal who became embroiled in the Reddington affair as part of a powerful drug cartel called the Nash Syndicate, was the first time we could sense the darkness inside her.
Tom’s death is the first step that Liz takes towards the path of crime, with her actions becoming more and more morally grey after this point. She offloads her daughter on Tom’s mother and sets course on killing Garvey. But, even after that, she becomes increasingly reckless and hides things from her FBI team. It’s a big turning point for her character.
So, why did this happen, and was it part of the story all along? I would say that this is highly doubtful. Tom Keen starred in his own spinoff called The Blacklist: Redemption, where he teamed up with a private security firm spearheaded by his mother, taking down villains of the week while trying to track down his estranged father. That series was cancelled after one limp season, which meant Tom was able to return to The Blacklist far sooner than he would have if the spinoff had been successful.
I’m not saying that I didn’t like the direction of Liz’s character, but the way it happened was surely planned in a different way.
Although Megan Boone gave the showrunners plenty of notice for her intention to leave the show in order to pursue other opportunities, there is no doubt in my mind that this caused a major re-write for its endgame. Liz Keen was the second lead of the series, and the mystery of her relationship with Red and why he was looking out for her was central to the plot. That connection was never officially revealed, and you’ve got to figure that it was part of the plan to have a truly cathartic moment between the two before it ended.
Keen’s death threw the narrative into turmoil. No longer a show about the mysterious relationship between a most-wanted criminal kingpin and an FBI agent, it seemed pretty lost in Seasons 9 and 10. Almost retconning that Red was terminally ill in Season 8, and, rather than concentrating on the Reddington that was carefree and unpredictable, we got an utterly depressed mess of a man with barely any motivation past finding who was responsible for Liz’s death and then dismantling his own operations.
After Season 8’s finale, nothing was quite the same ever again.
You’ve already heard my arguments about why I thought that the ending of The Blacklist was insulting to both fans of the show and to Raymond Reddington himself. On the record, I think that Red being trampled by a random bull in a random field was BULL-F*CKING-SH*T, and it didn’t make a jot of sense for someone that was so in control for 10 seasons to be taken out like that. But that was in the series finale. So why am I talking about the impact on the rest of the show?
Here you are assuming I’m talking about THAT Raymond Reddington.
James Spader’s Raymond Reddington is a fiction, a ruse created by Katarina Rostova (Liz Keen’s mother) and her Russian handler to cover up the real Raymond Reddington’s death. Now, I don’t think this was a story arc that was forced upon the writing team like that of Megan Boone’s departure or a failed spin-off, but it had wide-reaching implications. Elizabeth Keen was the daughter of THAT Reddington and Katarina, originally named Masha. As a child, she shot her father in the midst of a fire engulfing her childhood home, something that Liz buried deep down in her psyche.
The decision to make Red an imposter threw everything we thought we knew about the story into the air, and had us rethink all of the clues up until that point. At the time, I thought it was a cheap trick to prolong the mystery in this successful series for many more seasons. And, while I still believe that was partly the case, I enjoyed the swerve.
What I didn’t appreciate was never being explicitly told who the f*ck he was! We know a handful of people who he definitely was not, but we don’t know for sure who he was. The leading theory was that Red was a transitioned Katarina, meaning he was Liz Keen’s mother, but for all that would be narratively satisfying, there are too many plot holes for me to be confident of that.
So there we have it! Three major character endings that affected the quality of the show greatly and contributed to its unsatisfactory ending.
What did you think of these deaths? Would you have treated them any differently? How would you have ended The Blacklist? Let us know in the comments!
