‘The Blacklist’ Finale Ends Up In a Grey Area
Warning: Contains spoilers about the final episodes of The Blacklist.
Since we don’t have many communal television viewing experiences in today’s fragmented video universe, it wasn’t like a huge crowd gathered last week to watch the finale of NBC’s The Blacklist, which signed off after 10 seasons and 218 episodes, including a few that were partly animated.
But it had millions of viewers in the U.S. and many more millions worldwide, so it’s worth making a note that while parts of the finale were well done, others were disappointing.
This may just underscore how difficult it is to stick the landing on any TV series. But The Blacklist wasn’t just any series. Few dramas except case-of-the-week procedurals can stay fresh for five seasons, never mind 10, and while The Blacklist wasn’t without some filler and drifting along the way, it mostly kept itself engaging, thanks in part to a well-drawn cast and in even larger part to James Spader, who played the lead character Raymond “Red” Reddington and whose absence from all major TV acting awards during the past decade is unfortunate.
Red was a former Naval Intelligence officer who built the world’s largest criminal network. He turned himself in to the FBI and cut an immunity deal in return for helping a secret FBI task force bust A-list criminals they would not even know about if it weren’t for Red.
So yes, he was helping the government lock up his competition, and in its early years the show did not refrain from acknowledging Red’s self-interest and ruthlessness. It was really only in the last two years that he became a more benign criminal mastermind and doting Grandpa, which may or may not have added to the confusion for viewers who kind of liked the guy — he was a classic hail-fellow-well-met when he wasn’t shooting people — but also knew who he was.
The first seasons gave us a case of the week (a new “Blacklister”) alongside ongoing glimpses of a mysterious tie between Red and Liz Keen (Megan Boone), a young FBI profiler Red insisted had to be on the task force. Her life was tied to his in ways he never fully explained to her, which drove her nuts right up until, at the end of Season 8, an enemy of Red’s shot her.
Meanwhile, we got to know the task force and dozens of characters tied to other lives, mostly Red’s. They didn’t all survive, but those who did are a main reason the finale felt frustrating. With the exception of Dembe Zuma (Hisham Tawfiq), Red’s long-time bodyguard and closest associate who somehow became an FBI agent himself, those characters got virtually no sendoff.
Red’s death ended the task force, just not its story, since they were facing federal and law enforcement inquiries. While the feds presumably wouldn’t push for any public trials or hearings that would expose the task force’s shadowy work with Red, we could have used a few clues about what the other members might do or not do next. We knew these characters and it felt like we hardly got to say goodbye.
In a way, this is the same question famously raised by the Sopranos finale: how much a show’s creators should expect viewers to extrapolate for themselves.
That’s fair — to a point. But the reason I hated the Sopranos finale was not that I couldn’t think of any scenario for what happened next. It was because David Chase and his team had created those characters and taken them to places we would never have imagined for many seasons. So I wanted to know what Chase and his team thought would happen. It seemed lazy to shrug and say, “You figure it out.”
I had the same problem with The Blacklist. What will happen to Harold Cooper (Harry Lennix), who ran the task force? To Donald Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff), the only other guy on the task force for its full run and the one who had the toughest demons? The task force got two new members in its last year, Siya Malik (Anya Banerjee) and Herbie Hambright (Alex Brightman), both of whom we liked. Where do they go next? Herbie was a great creation, the tech guy who succeeded the intense, brilliant Aram Mojtabai (Amir Arison). In different ways they provided the show’s essential and clever comic relief.
The finale also didn’t acknowledge Red’s real relationship to Liz and thus possibly his real identity, despite that mystery was a central thread for eight seasons. Red wrote a letter in season 8 that he said explained it all. He gave it to Dembe, saying give it Liz when I die. Since Liz died first, that didn’t work out. Presumably Liz didn’t care any more, but maybe we viewers who followed that thread for almost 200 episodes still might have.
All that said, the finale did okay with its focus: the end of Red. The fatal act itself, committed by a bull in an open pasture, felt like the denouement in some mythological fable, which weirdly worked because Red was always portrayed as someone who dwelt in a stratum beyond the rest of us.
Red had a satisfying final talk with Dembe, the person to whom he was closest. He had shed Weecha, his bodyguard briefly turned girlfriend, and also said goodbye, cryptically, to Liz’s daughter Agnes, the only teenager in the history of the world who never said a snippy word about anything.
It’s okay that we didn’t see the beginning of what will be an worldwide epic battle to divvy up the criminal spoils that Red’s demise will leave behind. Marvel might want to jump on that one.
What does remain intriguing is the real-life question of whether this is the ending envisioned by Jon Bokenkamp, who created the show and was showrunner for the first eight seasons with his partner, executive producer John Eisendrath. Bokenkamp left abruptly at the end of season 8, saying the usual things about new creative challenges. But several years earlier he had suggested he knew how the show would end and it might be after seven or eight seasons.
After Season 8, however, The Blacklist remained popular and lucrative, because even though its live U.S. TV viewership had fallen by close to 60% over the years, it was a big international moneymaker. From South Korean to Romania, they loved this American tale.
So the show went on, with Eisendrath taking over as showrunner. A lot changed, including the show’s basic approach. For the last two seasons, procedural elements were downplayed, with greater focus on how Red and the task force would move toward their conclusions. Spader’s Red ensured it still felt like The Blacklist, but music, used brilliantly in early years, almost disappeared. Some Blacklisters, instead of being loathsome psychopaths, often became good people who did bad things for admirable reasons.
Maybe this is what Bokenkamp envisioned. Maybe it was an add-on. Maybe someday we will be told.
In any case, happily, the finale is only one part of any show’s legacy. The Blacklist had its share of moments that made fans roll their eyes, but it kept a good premise interesting with first-rate lead and supporting characters who gradually developed into people about whose stories we cared.
It just would have been nice to have a few more last sentences to those stories.
