But a flashback episode that brings all those prior episodes together, seamlessly interweaving former flashbacks, new flashbacks, and an entirely new lens through which to view the past, present, and maybe the future – that’s a once-in-a-series kind of affair.
And for a series that so often takes the most circuitous route possible to finally get to the point, this week The Blacklist invited us to start from the very beginning – a very fine place to start.
As Reddington tells it, this is all the result of the Sikorsky Archive: those 13 packets of intel given to him all those years ago, which he traded, leveraged, and sold in an effort to acquire “more information, more protection, more authority.” All of it comes together to power Reddington’s enterprise, to create the Blacklist, and to protect Elizabeth Keen.
Reddington says he didn’t kill Katarina Rostova, but Elizabeth saw him do it – so once again Red tells Liz she needs to forget everything she thinks she knows.
The workers freeze, the papers stop shuffling, Liz’s vision goes black-and-white, and standing just behind her: the image of her mother, played in flashback as always by Lotte Verbeek.
Presumably Reddington is telling her the story and she’s so swept up in it that she allows her imagination to take her to the past.
“The truth, Masha, is that you were conceived as part of a lie.” Katarina reflects on a childhood spent under constant surveillance and pressure by her father, Dom, to follow in his footsteps as a spy.
Though we’ve heard much of the lore behind the meeting of Katarina Rostova and Raymond Reddington, this is the first time we’ve seen young Raymond Reddington portrayed on screen – and he looks nothing like James Spader.
So she told Constantin the baby was his, she told Reddington that the baby was his, and she lost more and more of herself every day.
Katarina continued her relationship with Reddington, raising a child together when time, country, and their whole other families allowed them to.
Reddington allowed Katarina to steal from him so he could continue stealing from her, gathering enough information to prove the existence of a secret global conspiracy called the Cabal.
With that, Liz unlocks a memory: “We were looking for a Christmas tree – you came and took me to the beach house.” The night of the fire, Katarina arrived at the beach house where Reddington was hiding Masha, they got into a tussle as Katarina demanded that Reddington return the Fulcrum, and a knocked-over candle started the fire.
“The fighting, the gunshot, the death of your father, those flames – I was desperate to erase that night from your memory,” Katarina tells Liz.
“You abandoned me,” Liz levels at the memory of Katarina, but Katarina swears she was only trying to protect Liz by going into hiding.
But Liz doesn’t want to hear Ilya Koslov redux, because she heard it all before from Dom and it turned out to be a lie.
government – enough to keep Katarina hidden, and “enough for me to realize how valuable a new Reddington could be,” Katarina tells her daughter.
The woman formerly known as Katarina Rostova, played by Laila Robins, enters Liz’s memory circuit and tells her that she’s not her mother, but she never chose to impersonate Katarina – it was simply her job.
And Tatiana, who the world believed to be Katarina, went on the run until the day a man named Raymond Reddington heard about what Dom had done to her and swooped in to finance her life in hiding.
Until she found out from Liz’s own investigation that Reddington knew where the real Katarina Rostova was – and if Tatiana could get to Reddington and locate the real Katarina, then she could stop hiding from Neville Townsend.
That’s when Katarina tells Liz that from the moment she knew she couldn’t be there to protect her daughter, she created someone who could: Raymond Reddington.
So Katarina and Ilya constructed their version of Raymond Reddington: “Someone powerful and feared, someone who traded in the very secrets that could help him monitor the danger around you.” James Brown’s “This Is a Man’s World” starts playing as we see a young man in a fedora sporting about town, and ultimately going to Russia to collect the 13 packets of intel that would create the Blacklist…
Who is he? Who became Reddington? And where have you gone?” As Liz’s fury rises, as she demands the answers she’s so close to getting, the word around her starts moving again.
She gets to a gun and shoots Townsend, Dembe overtakes the rest, and the two of them and Reddington are able to make it down a hatch and into into a bunker-within-the-bunker.
Reddington lights up the bunker above the hatch where he’s sequestered with Liz – who looks well on her way to dying, but not before she gets the answers she’s long been willing to die for.