Distraught and uncharacteristically distant, he travels to Cape May, New Jersey where he saves a woman from drowning and gets caught up in her nightmare. The follow-up episode is where the show takes an unexpected detour from the usual format and focuses solely on Red in his most fervent stages of grief. The spookily cheery “Blinking Lights” by Eels fades in as a shocked Red collapses by the police car, caught by Dembe. Then The Blacklist does one of what The Blacklist does best – stir up emotions with its eclectic soundtrack. He runs his lips across her fingers, kissing her palm, caressing her hair before finally kissing her eyelids and walking away.
When his sidekick, Dembe (Hisham Tawfiq), flings back the sliding door Spader is framed in a still moment, holding Liz’s hand against his cheek, eyes squeezed shut in agony. Putting aside the red herring (Red, get it? GET IT?), this scene is most remembered for Spader’s incredible performance. As we predicted, it’s a faked death, and is confirmed as such in the fast-paced finale, but this moment is much more than that. With Red by her side, she supposedly “dies”. Still under siege, she’s whisked away in an ambulance suffering from blood poisoning. Amidst the anarchy, Liz goes into labour, giving birth under very trying circumstances to a little girl, Agnes. When Solomon and his gun-toting goons hijack her wedding, Red calls in backup and a church gunfight ensues. Cut a long story short: she gets beaten, discovers she’s pregnant and things get ugly from there on. In the chaos and confusion, Liz finds herself drawn back to her ex-husband Tom Keen. Liz’s colleagues at the Post Office – Ressler, Samar, Cooper and nervy nerd Aram – band together to exonerate Liz in the aftermath of exposing the ruthless Cabal. Just as we settle into this new scenario – they’re on the run, everything’s a bit fun – Liz is recaptured and the tone shifts once again. The two are seen as equals – partners – in the first half of the season, lying low and learning the traps as well as cracking a few crimes while they’re at it. In short, Liz learns to love him for the first time and appreciate the lengths he goes to protect her. Bottle blonde and acting under her Russian name, Masha Rostova, Keen’s bond with Red shifts from a fractured one to a strong one. After shooting dead corrupt Attorney General Tom Connolly (a slimy and smirky Reed Birney), Keen goes on the run with Red. Season 3 kicks off with yet another dimension to our leads’ ambiguous relationship. (That and the fact that Spader owns every damn scene he’s in.
What keeps us coming back is the very fact that we have to read between the lines and make connections and assumptions in our head. Each week is an episodical glimpse into the mind of a new and dangerous villain, and every week another layer of Red’s dark and mysterious past peels away. But that’s fine, we signed up for just that. We know as loyal and longtime viewers that the real relationship between our manipulated heroine Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone) and her protector/cause of all evil Raymond Reddington is never going to be revealed until the very last minutes of the very last episode of the very last season. In season 3, Red goes through the motions, from fugitive and saviour, to troublemaker and eventually the walking wounded.
Sure the weekly villains are freakishly good, the cast solid and the story arc intriguing and ever evolving, but there’s no denying that Spader’s criminal king of charisma Raymond “Red” Reddington is why we tune in every week.